We believe that any software should support fundamental digital freedoms. With the rise of cryptography and computer systems, it is now possible to guarantee these freedoms in the world of bits: privacy of thoughts, freedom of speech, right to authorship, and autonomy from software providers. These rights can be encoded into the code, which when open, can be freely verified by anyone. This way, trust among users and developers can be established.
This is our way. By opening our source code, we ensure that our users have complete autonomy and independence from the Any Association. They retain the ability to analyze, compile, and run each software component on their personal machines without relying on external parties. This guarantees uninterrupted access to the tools and data they generate and store, shielding them from any potential restrictions.
We see our products as an open ecosystem where the community can contribute in various ways, not only by committing to the core source code. Contributors can develop integrations, design themes, create use cases for the in-app library, or provide documentation and translations.
I’ve been using it for a week, and I’ve also been using Obsidian for a couple of months.
It’s quite different from Obsidian.
Obsidian:
- is great in writing notes / markdown, very text heavy
- there are dataview that could tie relations between notes, but it’s not user friendly to set it up. Also table creation is still not user friendly.
- has great community plugin support
- very keyboard friendly
Anytype:
- is great in creating relations between objects, you define objects and relations all the time, e.g. Movie object has a Director relation that ties to a Director object, etc.
- it’s good for drag & drop / mouse heavy interactions, the keyboard navigation is still clunky (hard to select some sections just by using keyboard)
- no community plugins
I use Obsidian to write my language grammar notes, it’s very fast, and I could do most stuff on keyboard without switching to mouse.
I use Anytype to setup kanban boards, information of my video games backlog, I use it for planning tasks that I wanna do later, set the status to in-progress, and watch it show up on the dashboard. It’s very linkage heavy.
Anytype is probably more of a replacement of Notion, instead of Obsidian, albeit it’s still in alpha, thus it doesn’t have enough features to go against Notion yet. But I am enjoying it thoroughly, the UI is clean and not bloated, although it requires you to define Objects and Relations if you want to fully utilize it.
Very nice write-up. Was it fast for you to use? Notion has gotten quite slow for me on mobile
I still do not understand how their sync work, based on their description:
synced in your local p2p network
Can someone please explain this to me?
Their FAQ is pretty good , but it still does not answer that question
“synced in your local p2p network” would mean, to me, to set it up yourself, not that they have a syncing solution.
@forgotaboutlaye No, it’s a proprietary license: https://github.com/anyproto/anytype-ts/blob/main/LICENSE.md
It is a custom license that forbids commercial usage. The terms are actually very limited and I think their license is flawed. I wouldn’t use their software at all.
If you want something that’s really open source, consider Joplin (AGPL-3.0, https://github.com/laurent22/joplin/) or CherryTree (GPL3, https://github.com/giuspen/cherrytree).
Logseq is another one under AGPL-3.0
Just trowing here other two open-source alternatives: https://silverbullet.md/ (Obsidian-like) and https://appflowy.io/ (Notion-like)
Both these projects look really good - are there any android alternatives to obsidian or notion?
Ignore my comment - I meant to ask if there were android versions of the previous two packages. It’s been a hectic day!
Sorry! I did not see the notification. So appflowy I think is desktop only for now, but afaik there is work in progress to bring it on mobile https://github.com/AppFlowy-IO/appflowy-editor/issues/68
As for silverbullet, the app is basically a PWA so if you have a server you can theoretically run it there and access it anywhere. I never tried but I heard people even collaborating, so. I had access to testflight beta for iOS, but I believe at one point the developer decided to focus more on stability and less on multi-platform releases, but I’m not sure. They have a discord channel where they are very active though.
Thanks for the reply - saved the github and discord links so will check them out soon.
What does it do that Logseq doesn’t?
Encryption
The sync is actually amazingly good - I have no clue how they do it.
They also have a richer system of templates and I find the equivalent of queries much easier to use.
How does it compare to Obsidian.md?
For further reference: https://anytype.io/ is the actual project page.
I liked the initiative, the ideals and so on. But even a simple information I couldn’t find: does it supports markdown?
It supports some markdown syntaxes, e.g.
#for heading,*for bullets, etc.
Thank you!
The image posted above is NOT markdown.
Headings for ex h3 are
### textnot# # # text> textis a blockquote not “a toggle list” whatever that meansHighlighting should be
==text==There is no such thing as a “dots divider”
The todo list I think is also incorrect.
Why the devs are calling this markdown who knows. I guess they do not read things, dngaf. If you dont want to support markdown then dont support markdown. For some reason this really irks me. It will confuse new MD users.
After trying this out on my Anytype, this appears to be a UI bug. Trying to do
# # #will actually result in H1.###is an H3. A “dots divider” appears to be an horizontal line with different UI.There’s some weird stuff for sure but it’s also worth mentioning there’s many flavours of markdown out there.
Idk who in the world would change
>from being blockquote to some kind of list. It is a standard used since long before markdown ever existed. A list and a quote are totally dissimilar parts of document and switching to render one as the other would be terribly confusing.The point of md is simple interoperability and portability.
For anyone who is interested: markdown basic syntax. I do not think the above constututes a flavour of md.
There is no Markdown standard. That said, people generally agree on using
>for blockquotes when talking about Markdown. Markdown was also not created for interoperability and portability though many people try to use it as such.
Nice, I will try it out. As others have said, seems more a Notion-like than an Obsidian alternative, but still a nice tool. Since using obsidian for more than a year I am used to having my markdown notes visible in my folders and access them also outside the application itself, but I saw I can export them from anytipe in markdown. I’ll give it a try and see how it goes.
Damnit, i just got into obsidian.
Can you share notes/collab yet?
No, that’s not a feature yet.