AFFiNE Self Host Guide

What is AFFiNE?

AFFiNE is a privacy-focused, local-first, open-source, and ready-to-use alternative for Notion & Miro. One hyper-fused platform for wildly creative minds.

Features of AFFiNE

A True Canvas for Blocks in Any Form: Merging Docs and Whiteboard

Many productivity apps boast about being a versatile canvas, but AFFiNE truly delivers. It allows you to place any type of building block on an edgeless canvas—whether it’s rich text, sticky notes, embedded web pages, multi-view databases, linked pages, shapes, or even slides. Yes, you read that right; we’ve got it all covered.

Multimodal AI Partner Ready to Boost Your Work

Need to write a professional report? Transform an outline into a compelling slide deck? Summarize an article into a structured mind map? Organize your job plans and task backlog? Or perhaps you want to draw and code prototype apps and web pages with a single prompt? With AFFiNE AI, your creativity knows no bounds. It’s like having a supercharged assistant ready to elevate your work to new heights.

Local-First & Real-Time Collaboration

We believe in the local-first approach, which means you always own your data on your disk, regardless of the cloud. Plus, AFFiNE supports real-time synchronization and collaboration across web and cross-platform clients. It’s collaboration redefined.

Self-Host & Customize Your Own AFFiNE

You have the freedom to manage, self-host, fork, and build your own version of AFFiNE. A plugin community and third-party blocks are on the horizon. For more details on self-hosting AFFiNE, check out the traction on Blocksuite.

Why Self Host AFFiNE?

As a note taking and knowledge management app, privacy is very important.

Self-Hosting allows you to take full control of your knowledge and notes, you can also easily export and backup those files.

How to Self Host AFFiNE?

There are several ways to self host AFFiNE, including using Docker-Compose, Zeabur, Railway or other platforms.

AFFiNE requires three services: AFFiNE, Redis and PostgreSQL, which makes it hard to self host with docker on your own machine. Zeabur provides a one-click deployment for it, so this article will take Zeabur as the example.

Step 1

Before you start, you've to make sure you have an account on Zeabur. If you don't have an account, you can create one here.

Step 2

After you've successfully created an account, you can follow the steps below to deploy AFFiNE on Zeabur:

• Press on the deploy button below to deploy AFFiNE on Zeabur.

• You will be redirected to the Zeabur dashboard, where you can see the AFFiNE deployment. Within one minute, you will see 3 services starts running.

• Now you can access the AFFiNE dashboard using the domain you've bound to it.

Here is a more detailed guide for deploying AFFiNE on Zeabur.

FAQ

Cost to Host AFFiNE on Zeabur

You just need to pay $5 Developer Plan fee for Zeabur.

AFFiNE vs Notion

Notion is a closed-source software solution that stores your private data on its own cloud servers. With AFFiNE, you have the flexibility to host your data according to your preferences.