rich-markdown-editor VS AppFlowy

Compare rich-markdown-editor vs AppFlowy and see what are their differences.

rich-markdown-editor

The open source React and Prosemirror based markdown editor that powers Outline. Want to try it out? Create an account: (by outline)

AppFlowy

AppFlowy is an open-source alternative to Notion. You are in charge of your data and customizations. Built with Flutter and Rust. (by AppFlowy-IO)
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rich-markdown-editor AppFlowy
11 97
2,570 47,678
- 4.0%
9.2 9.9
about 2 years ago 5 days ago
TypeScript Dart
BSD 3-clause "New" or "Revised" License GNU Affero General Public License v3.0
The number of mentions indicates the total number of mentions that we've tracked plus the number of user suggested alternatives.
Stars - the number of stars that a project has on GitHub. Growth - month over month growth in stars.
Activity is a relative number indicating how actively a project is being developed. Recent commits have higher weight than older ones.
For example, an activity of 9.0 indicates that a project is amongst the top 10% of the most actively developed projects that we are tracking.

rich-markdown-editor

Posts with mentions or reviews of rich-markdown-editor. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2022-02-11.
  • Switching Rich Text Editors, Part 1: Picking Tiptap
    13 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 11 Feb 2022
    Great article and fantastic choice!

    This is a topic I have been very interested lately. I had been lucky to start using since Slate 0.61.x, but I cannot say anything good about it. It has a major problem with managing large documents [0]. I tried to introduce multiple improvements of performance, but it is very ungrateful project – change in one place affects many things at the same time. I am shocked, how many projects are still using it. For example, open-sourced Notabase [1]. My 4+ weeks with Slate.js completely killed motivation, and I was only thinking to put a whole project to litter.

    In the result of being unhappy, I switched to Draft.js. It was 2020, and I was eager to try it out, so I did. Sadly, in 2020 there was also the last release [2]. Initially, I didn't like how it works. I preferred the Slate data model. Also, the draft.js project felt not maintained at that time (by looking at commits activity, issues and pull-requests). It is written in the Flow which I detest. I spent few weeks to try "merge" the draft.js and sentry with doing a "rewrite" to TypeScript. Obviously, quickly I realized myself it is stupid idea.

    Then, I took a look at ReMirror. Yet another problem that was struggling with maintenance and active contributors. It is based on ProseMirror, so I thought it is better choice than previous. ReMirror is overly complex for simple things. It was hard to find any help - neither by googling examples nor via ReMirror's Discord (it was dead silence there).

    After that, I have found information about the TipTap. Back then, there was only provided support for Vue.js. Fortunately, it was that time, when they have promised the v2 with React support. I skipped it to wait for the new version.

    Maybe, a raw ProseMirror with React? Yep, tried it, but I wasn't very happy of the result. I knew the TipTap v2 will be released and there were already existing projects that were using ProseMirror behind the scene, for example: Outline's rich-markdown-editor[3]. It has tons of built-in components that I had with Slate. I was extremely happy about it, because "everything what I needed" was there – typical bold, italic, code, code block, quote, multi-level list and even table editing. Really awesome piece of code! However, authors decided they are opting for TipTap and they have archived repository on GitHub, which means officially the project is dead.

    I had no time to test Quill.js. It looked interesting, but it has noticeable poor development pace, and it looks a dead project with many bugs.

    Currently, I am using the TipTap v2 and I can't say how happy I am now. I guess I will stick with it for longer. However, I know the journey to find the best Rich Text Editor has not ended. There are more alternatives, for example Stylo [4] that I've found in this week.

    [0] Try to copy the contents of https://www.slatejs.org/examples/huge-document and paste it back. In a result, my Firefox on Macbook M1 hangs.

    [1]: https://notabase.io/

    [2]: https://github.com/facebook/draft-js/releases/tag/v0.11.7

    [3]: https://github.com/outline/rich-markdown-editor

    [4]: https://stylojs.com/

  • I moved this blog from Medium
    6 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 23 Jan 2022
  • Appflowy – open-source Notion Alternative
    11 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 15 Nov 2021
    Outline's rich-markdown-editor (https://github.com/outline/rich-markdown-editor) package is pretty nice. I have used it to make some custom MD editor/CMS experiment.
  • I built a new platform, using NextJS, for creating a blog & newsletter (and earning money from your readers). I focused on speed, simplicity, privacy, and beautiful design. I'd love to get some early feedback!
    2 projects | /r/nextjs | 23 Oct 2021
    Good eye! This is indeed based on ProseMirror. I didn't create it myself though, I'm using this: https://github.com/outline/rich-markdown-editor
  • Ask HN: Open-source notion.so like block editor?
    5 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 28 Aug 2021
  • I made a simple Markdown editor and publisher that stores files on web3.storage!
    2 projects | /r/ipfs | 9 Aug 2021
    Ah yes, I found the library I was using for the editor (rich-markdown-editor) to insert a lot of \ newlines when they weren't needed. I'll take a look at this sometime!
  • Notea - Self-hosted note-taking app stored on S3 | AKA a self-hosted Notion alternative
    9 projects | /r/selfhosted | 28 Apr 2021
    The outline editor is open source https://github.com/outline/rich-markdown-editor
  • What is your tech stack?
    2 projects | /r/SaaS | 18 Mar 2021
    It runs a mult-tenant SaaS app with very low memory/cpu requirements (https://getoutline.com/)
  • CodeMirror 6
    6 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 5 Feb 2021
    I had a similar experience starting out with ProseMirror; I wanted to make something similar to the editors in Dropbox Paper and Notion, and found an out-of-the-box rich text editor called tiptap built onto of it.

    They already had nodes for images and embeds [1, 2] which made development easy (I would recommend checking out the source code; its about a hundred lines of code for each, and simple). But as I made more custom nodes, I learned pretty well the internals of tiptap and how it used ProseMirror. And over time, I've come to appreciate knowing its api.

    So if there's any advice for people trying to get started with ProseMirror, I would say to look at libraries which built upon it as example code such as tiptap or the outline rich-markdown-editor [3].

    [1] https://github.com/ueberdosis/tiptap/blob/main/packages/tipt...

    [2] https://github.com/ueberdosis/tiptap/blob/main/examples/Comp...

    [3] https://github.com/outline/rich-markdown-editor

AppFlowy

Posts with mentions or reviews of AppFlowy. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2024-01-17.
  • 🏞️5 beautiful open-source web apps to learn from and get inspired 🙇‍♀️💡
    9 projects | dev.to | 17 Jan 2024
    💾 Source code: https://github.com/AppFlowy-IO/AppFlowy 👕 Size: M 🛠️ Stack: Flutter, Rust
  • 9 years of Apple text editor solo dev
    4 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 5 Jan 2024
    You can use Rust with QML[1].

    QML is actually pretty amazing. I've been building my block editor[2] view entirely in QML while the model is in C++. This separation of logic and presentation works great. And yes, there are some crashes sometimes (that I find quite easy to debug thanks to the built-in debugger), but take for example a similar app that's built with Rust and Dart[3], in my testing there were still memory leaks that caused my computer to hang. It's better to know you have a bug than for it to be hidden from you.

    I agree with parent commenter, saying these cross-platform frameworks will end up supporting the least common denominator set of features. But I found with external open source libraries, the community is catching up very fast. For example, you want the awesome translucency macOS apps have for your Qt app? Here you go[4]. Many such cases. It's also pretty straightforward to add your own custom OS-dependent code, especially so, if someone already open sourced his approach. I recently wanted to move the traffic light buttons on macOS for my app, but couldn't figure the Objective-C code for that. I ended up looking at either Tauri or Electron source code and found my answer.

    [1] https://github.com/woboq/qmetaobject-rs

    [2] https://www.get-plume.com/

    [3] https://www.appflowy.io/

    [4] https://github.com/stdware/qwindowkit

  • Quasi Self-Hosted Quasi Open Source Notion Alternatives from Asia (SiYuan, Affine, AppFlowy)
    3 projects | /r/selfhosted | 11 Nov 2023
    AppFlowy - GPL Licensed - their unique selling point is that they're farther along than SiYuan or Affine on their database table functionality. Both Siyuan and Affine have database tables for project management but Appflowy's solution is solid. https://github.com/AppFlowy-IO/AppFlowy
  • Tell HN: Nearly all of Evernote’s remaining staff has been laid off
    22 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 5 Jul 2023
  • I created a versus list for note taking apps (last tab). What do you guys think? Did I miss anything?
    4 projects | /r/logseq | 4 Jul 2023
    AppFlowy has doesn't have links to pages, but they're working on it, and "This feature will be expanded to support Mention a block in the future." (https://github.com/AppFlowy-IO/AppFlowy/issues/2196)
  • BlockSuite: An open-source Notion-like editor with multiplayer support
    5 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 28 Jun 2023
    It seems like there's a lot of recent interest and effort in open-source or self-hosted Notion-like/markdown-with-widgets applications and platforms. AppFlowy (https://github.com/AppFlowy-IO/AppFlowy) comes to mind; I attended one of their monthly "town hall" meetings a few months back, and looks like they're rapidly increasing in popularity. I think there was another similar project like this on HN front page last week, IIRC.

    This makes me happy, because I switched to Obsidian primarily for local-first file storage in a platform-agnostic format. I've learned to love many things about Obsidian and am writing a few plugins myself, but there are still several Notion-esq functionalities I wish I had, and I find myself handing off between Obsidian and other webapps for certain effort, like team project management.

    I used to get far more excited to explore new projects like BlockSuite, and I really appreciate their documentation, but I find it hard to justify allocating time to reviewing and trying out new tools when I still have much more improve on with my Obsidian usage; this is especially true of newer projects where I'm unsure of their shelf life.

    To assuage my internal conflict I remind myself that I think plaintext is fundamentally the right choice for much knowledge collection, and I'm proud to say that if the internet shut down, I'd retain a significant growing fraction of my personal data.

  • I'm making a GlowUI text editor to get back into coding
    3 projects | /r/Windows11 | 9 Jun 2023
  • Will Notion ever get an adaptive icon on Android?
    2 projects | /r/Notion | 4 Jun 2023
    https://www.appflowy.io/ There's this open source thing I found the other day in case you're interested :)
    2 projects | /r/Notion | 4 Jun 2023
  • What is the best notes app for Mac in your opinion?
    3 projects | /r/macapps | 17 May 2023
    There’s an open source version of Notion: AppFlowy. Haven’t used it myself but figured I’d share it since I came across it a few days ago

What are some alternatives?

When comparing rich-markdown-editor and AppFlowy you can also consider the following projects:

focalboard - Focalboard is an open source, self-hosted alternative to Trello, Notion, and Asana.

Outline - The fastest knowledge base for growing teams. Beautiful, realtime collaborative, feature packed, and markdown compatible.

logseq - A local-first, non-linear, outliner notebook for organizing and sharing your personal knowledge base. Use it to organize your todo list, to write your journals, or to record your unique life.

AFFiNE - There can be more than Notion and Miro. AFFiNE(pronounced [ə‘fain]) is a next-gen knowledge base that brings planning, sorting and creating all together. Privacy first, open-source, customizable and ready to use.

obsidian-releases - Community plugins list, theme list, and releases of Obsidian.

flutter-quill - Rich text editor for Flutter

Monaco Editor - A browser based code editor

Joplin - Joplin - the secure note taking and to-do app with synchronisation capabilities for Windows, macOS, Linux, Android and iOS.

affine-client - client for https://github.com/toeverything/AFFiNE

notion-markdown-cms

obsidian-outliner - Work with your lists like in Workflowy or RoamResearch

obsidian - GraphQL, built for Deno - a native GraphQL caching client and server module