Notion has been our favourite project and knowledge management tool in recent years because of its aesthetic appeal and
functionality. Our team uses it daily, and we are on its paid plan. However, as we all know, Notion has its limitations. These include weak data security and poor compatibility with mobile devices. Likewise, alternative collaborative workplace management tools also have their constraints.

The limitations we encountered using these tools and our past work experience with collaborative productivity tools have led to our firm belief that there is a glass ceiling on what’s possible for these tools in the future. This emanates from the fact that these tools will probably struggle to scale horizontally at some point and be forced to prioritize a proportion of customers whose needs differ from the rest. While decision-makers want a workplace OS, it is impossible to come up with a one-size fits all solution in such a fragmented market.

When a customer’s evolving core needs are not satisfied, they either switch to another or build one from the ground up, in-house. Consequently, they either go under another ceiling or buy an expensive ticket to learn a hard lesson. This is a requirement for many resources and expertise, building a reliable and easy-to-use collaborative tool, not to mention the speed and native experience. The same may apply to individual users as well.

All these restrictions necessitate our mission – to make it possible for anyone to create apps that suit their needs well.

• To individuals, we would like to offer Notion’s functionality, data security, and cross-platform native experience.
• To enterprises and hackers, AppFlowy is dedicated to offering building blocks and collaboration infra services to enable you to make apps on your own. Moreover, you have 100% control of your data. You can design and modify AppFlowy your way, with a single codebase written in Flutter and Rust supporting multiple platforms armed with long-term maintainability.

We decided to achieve this mission by upholding the three most fundamental values:

• Data privacy first
• Reliable native experience
• Community-driven extensibility

We do not claim to outperform Notion in terms offunctionality and design, at least for now. Besides, our priority doesn’t lie in more functionality at the moment. Instead, we would like to cultivate a community to democratize the knowledge and wheels of making complex workplace management tools while enabling people and businesses to create beautiful things on their own by equipping them building blocks.