Docs – Open source alternative to Notion or Outline
483 comments
·March 16, 2025nchagnet
KronisLV
Personally, even if this software wouldn't be 1:1 capable of replacing the established players, it still feels like a good idea. With how much people (rightfully) complain about how open source is underfunded and with how often we're forced into borderline exploitative dealings with the established players in the market (the likes of MS Office, Adobe products, Atlassian products, even some Oracle stuff), funding the development of open alternatives (even if done with some comparatively small amount of taxes) seems like a good idea, as long as everyone in the government isn't incompetent.
For example, if we had governments with strong tech departments that could fund helping the development of LibreOffice, then suddenly even if someone wants to use MS Office, that's still a bargaining chip to get a better deal because there's a viable alternative. Or to develop something like OpenProject, Kanboard etc., alternatives to the likes of Jira, that might be enough for many out there, while also possibly benefitting from community contributions. People love to complain about how Jira supposedly sucks, so that'd be a good opportunity to step up and make something "better". Or using open source technologies like PostgreSQL or MariaDB/MySQL for developing their own internal systems instead of always forking over a bunch of cash for Oracle or MS SQL by default.
If you want a government that's cost efficient, then invest in making it be so, treat the software landscape as an investment opportunity - spend some money now to save a bunch of money later. The same way how an app can be a home cooked meal, some software could be a public utility.
slowtrek
Notion is not an example of delightful software and it is very much one of the most reproducible apps ever. I don't know how they managed to make it fashionable amongst startups, but it's certainly not because it's an innovative product.
virdev
I also have to disagree here.
What Notion has built is amazing.
When leadership tells us our job is to replace Microsoft Office. I say it's not
This is Libre Office's job. While I truly admire this community’s work. If I ever get anywhere close to their level I’ll consider myself lucky. They do important work and I hope they continue for may years .
I’m not trying to replace Microsoft Office because work has changed.
As it came online, it became collaborative.
What’s replacing Microsoft isn’t perfectly similar alternatives to text editing, spreadsheets and slides which are tools that were made for formatting more than content editing.
These were meant to be printed to be shared.
What’s actually replacing Microsoft Office are tools like Notion.
Nowadays content is created in real time with 4, 6 or more pair of hands typing at the same time. ⌨
The way we actually replace Microsoft Office is by building products that follow the change in usage like Notion has been doing.
That’s what we need to do as an opensource community.
Adopting Notion won't do in times like we're living as states (hell, all of us!) we need strategic digital autonomy.
The product of our collaborative work is knowledge, we can't have it siphoned because it's sitting on an American server.
Notion has been leading the content over form revolution for a while now.
But revolutions are our thing right ?
We like to start them, but it's way more fun when they spread to the whole continent
Want to join us or support us with a little GitHub https://github.com/suitenumerique/docs
berkes
> very much one of the most reproducible apps ever.
It isn't. The proof is simple: there aren't many reproductions that *tick all the boxes*. And no, "a directory of markdown files" isn't even close, it ticks two, maybe three of the dozens of boxes that notion ticks.
Joplin (my daily driver) and obsidian (can't get to like it) are closer, but certainly not there - though these alternatives tick some boxes that notion doesn't tick. Edit: But most of all, what "boxes notion ticks" very much depends on your (teams) needs and usage. A feature you may deem unimportant or even an anti-feature may very well be what keeps a lot of people on notion because no alternative has it.
The closest I have seen and used is appflowy. In some areas it ticks boxes that notion doesn't. But it's also "0.x" version software: self-admiddetly not 1.x stable software. And this has been in the makings since nov 2021, so over three years. Over three years of development to get to a point that it's on-par-ish with Notion.
If it takes a team three years to reproduce "the most reproducible app", it's clear that this app isn't that reproducible at all. And that's just reproducing features (amongst witch UX and UI). Reproducible also includes familiarity: It's almost a no-brainer to get a team on notion and to have management pay a pro licence. It's much harder, to impossible, to do this with [insert any alternative].
huslage
Y Combinator. They gave it away to all of them. This is how you become popular with startups.
staplers
it is very much one of the most reproducible apps ever
I haven't found one that does what Notion does. I genuinely want to get off their AI training grounds but cannot. Your comment reeks of condescension because you are not the target user.
kellpossible2
please name some open source (or lower priced) alternatives that support: comments on documents, database functionality to a similar level, publishing websites, scripting for properties. I'm very curious!
paulgb
When it came out, block-based editing and always-on wysiwig were novel, and Notion was definitely more delightful than the existing “internal wiki” software category (Confluence etc.)
bayindirh
Notion's data model is incredible, actually. You can embed almost anything into it, and make it work across your knowledge base.
Databases work like spreadsheets, and you can embed pages inside them, too. In fact, every row is a potential page, if you want.
While I prefer Obsidian for my technical (public and private) knowledge bases, life organization, and specific help pages I create for relatives live in Notion, and it works really well. Being able to script and formulate things allows great flexibility.
What I'm not very comfortable yet is "ejecting" from Notion, since the data model is so convoluted, what they give you as a package is not very convenient, yet.
Evernote had the best mechanism, giving you an XML file and an official XSLT to read/verify/transform what they give you. However, Evernote feels very underpowered when you start to use formulae and automation across your database.
slevis
Several companies have tried to "reproduce" Notion and have failed. I don't like or use Notion but that is just extremely ignorant of the USP behind it. Dunning–Kruger much?
afavour
Germany has an interesting history with Open/LibreOffice. Multiple attempts that ended up going back to Windows, but with fresh attempts that are ongoing:
https://www.theregister.com/2024/04/04/germanys_northernmost...
KronisLV
There have been some similar attempts over the years: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LibreOffice#Mass_deployments
Some larger than others, some attempts at having more negotiating power, others as a cost cutting measure, others yet as just exploration of what's doable.
I'd say that LibreOffice is fine for my needs - not great in all respects, but functional. I don't even have MS Office or use Google Docs on any of my devices right now.
daveguy
> ... seems like a good idea, as long as everyone in the government isn't incompetent. For example, if we had governments with strong tech departments that could fund helping the development of...
The US had two very strong and competent tech departments -- 18F and USDS.
They got doge'd -- dismantled and coopted, respectively.
rapnie
All those competent departments. Dismantled on a whim. It is unbelievable. How many billions of investment dollars are wasted that way, spent during many years to organize such departments efficiently?
throwaway2037
This will be a controversial take here on HN: I'm not too excited about governments getting directly involved in the development of software, let alone open source. With possibly a few exceptions (internal software for national agencies, etc.), it is way outside their area of expertise. I think it would be better to pay a vendor like Redhat or SuSE or Cannonical to do it. And, the gov't can write the support contract such that for X EUR per year they get Y competent developers to work on LibreOffice, or whatever they like.
sofixa
This is hilariously ignorant, especially when it comes to France.
There are a ton of open source government projects from various agencies and contributing universities - from the government SSO (https://github.com/france-connect) to the Covid contact tracing and health pass management app (https://gitlab.inria.fr/stopcovid19) to the tax code to the unemployment app to a million other things (https://code.gouv.fr/sources/#/awesome). And all of them are good, usable, and (almost always) with permissive licenses.
Why hire an external vendor that has to add a profit margin, and lose the competency when that vendor changes for the next contract, or become a hostage to them? You literally can only lose.
stephenr
> it is way outside their area of expertise
You realise that when governments write software, they just hire software developers, and designers, and project managers like any other organisation does, right?
They're not just asking around in parliament "so who has dabbled in python?" or what have you.
WhyNotHugo
The governments fund projects which are of public interest. They don't actually have development teams in-house.
This is much like the EU funding open source projects of public interest through grant calls.
It's exactly what we want: to fund individuals who's interests align with the public. In fact, it would be great if there were a browser which matches this criteria: publicly funded and designed for the average citizen (as opposed to designed to maximise ad revenue).
> I think it would be better to pay a vendor like Redhat or SuSE or Cannonical to do it.
We don't want governments to fund for-profit corporation. These corporations typically have interests opposite to end-users. E.g.: less digital rights, less digital autonomy, more vendor lock-in, and solidifying their position of power.
In an ideal world, you'd have none of these type of organisations, but much smaller teams and individuals working on individual projects which can inter-operate.
wvh
I have worked on open-source software that was government/university funded. It's not uncommon in Europe. And yes, typical death-by-committee issues exist, but there is something to be said for a piece of software that holds people's data and is not outright owned by one government, corporation or random group of cats.
I don't know about the US, but I can see some crucial user data software suites moving to an open-source model where nobody has absolute power over or ownership of the data.
How to get such a multi-player project organised efficiently without burning through a load of money and time is another matter...
davedx
Not controversial just ignorant. Various governments have been participating or creating open source for many years now
regularjack
I'd much rather have my government finance open source software for citizens to use than whatever tech behemoth of a foreign country.
Angostura
I’d quite like good software to be squarely within their area of expertise
bootsmann
Why do you think software is outside the area of expertise of government?
artur_makly
But wouldn't a DAPP solution would solve even more problems.. faster? What am I missing?
nrjames
Vendor lock-in is risky and expensive for large corporations and governments, both of which tend to move slowly. I find it completely legitimate that a government would create a tool that's useful to its workforce and helps to avoid vendor lock-in. Insomuch as it's created by the government, it's released as open source.
Most companies and people aren't going to want to maintain the VMs and/or infrastructure to run their own platforms, so they have the option to continue using SaaS offerings like Notion.
wslh
> Of course, there is always the risk that this becomes unmaintained in the future
We can't even be certain that Notion won't be acquired, deprecated, or poorly maintained in the future. Risks exist on both sides.
diggan
> We can't even be certain that Notion won't be acquired, deprecated, or poorly maintained in the future.
At this point, I feel like we can be pretty sure the combination of "Huge VC investments + for-profit startup" will with 99% certainly eventually lead down the road of enshittification, either by acquisition or by going public. At least based on most previous "internet" startups with that combination.
bornfreddy
Not sure why you're being downvoted... This is exactly where the incentives lead the VC-funded companies. Unless they can be extremely profitable by charging money for their product of course, but I don't think Notion can pull this off. The market is just not there, imho.
bluedino
Anyone remember Evernote?
esafak
It happened to Coda.
ivanmontillam
I couldn't upvote you more than once.
I agree wholeheartedly with your point.
Government-funded open source like this, creating alternatives is a good idea. Taxes put to good use!
virdev
Yes yes yes and yes Public Money Public Code!
aitchnyu
How does it work when gov outsources major tech to the private sector?
null
wvh
When universities, libraries, government and open-source community could unite and, perhaps most crucially, find a benevolent dictator for life that could shepherd the herd of cats with all noses in one direction instead of getting bogged down in academic or governmental committee mud, we might have Nice Things that are not in the hands of any one party but owned by all (i.e. the tax payer, and volunteers).
Those projects could truly be owned by the public and not solely corporations or government. Clearly data is the big thing, and I don't want to have to trust a government or corporation with access to all of it.
In reality, having been part of some of these projects, they often get bogged down by getting all parties and funding organised, in other words, death by committee.
zwnow
Speaking from experience, in Germany people refuse to learn any new software and are quickly overwhelmed if 1 thing is different from what they are used to. Open source government solutions are good and all, people will only use them if forced to by law though. Public offices are one of the reasons our digitalization is really far behind.
sitkack
That is what grants are for! The government(s) get the exact software they want by a whole field full of folks that know how to make those changes.
virdev
Docs actually thanks to the open source grant system we have in Europe. The hard part in a project like Docs is the text editor. We built Docs on top of [Blocknotejs](https://www.blocknotejs.org/) an [NGI funded](https://ngi.eu/funded_solution/blocknote/) library. NGI (Next Generation Internet) and NLNet has been doing an amazing job funding thousands of projects and we are seing the amazing results today. NGI is a program of the European Union
sitkack
Nice. Wonderful! This needs to spread as far and wide as it can.
null
virdev
Hey everyone! I'm the PM working with the Docs team. Thanks a lot for the kind words, we're as excited as you to be working on such a cool project. We didn't expect to get posted so soon on HN. We still have a lot to do in terms documentation and reusability. But we'll be working a lot on that next week. We'll keep you posted here. Again thank you everyone!
andyferris
Not a Docs question, but I recently came across Grist and I see that Grist is actually listed as a project under la Suite Numerique. On the other hand, Grist Labs (getgrist.com/about) claim to be the developers, are based in the US (NYC), and I couldn't see any mention any EU collaboration on their website. What is the connection here? How does it differ from the governance and funding model of Docs?
I love that you guys are building a suite of next-gen tools rather than just recreating LibreOffice. Seems really smart to me!
sylvinus
AFAIK, there are lots of contributions from developers in the French government to the Grist open source repository. We also deploy it, we have instances running in various government agencies.
For Docs, we bootstrapped the repository ourselves on top of Django, Next.js, BlockNote.js, Y.js and many others. We welcome contributions!
vviers
Yes, there are lots of PR listed here : https://github.com/gristlabs/grist-core/pulls?q=is%3Apr+labe...
virdev
> The French government agency ANCT Données et Territoires has also made significant contributions to the codebase.
From the Grist-core readme : https://github.com/gristlabs/grist-core
mkl
Do you have plans to add structure to the document collection? E.g. group documents into projects, put documents into order and hierarchy (docs holding chapters, sections). I would really like a system that lets you have projects with a document per chapter or section and has a chapter/section outline on the left panel of the document editor.
Comments and custom styles would also be great.
virdev
Hey! Yes we do, we plan to release sub-docs before the end of the month. That will allow you to create trees of docs (with as many child / grand-child as you want) all inheriting the user rights of the parent.
reacharavindh
One of the things that I rely on with a collection of docs is a usable "full text search". The demo atleast only searches on the titles which only goes so far. It would be very useful for this project to have a proper search solution.
u_sama
Hi, thanks for the project and contributing a nice European alternative to Outline. I had a few questions relating to Docs as it seems a nice alternative I want to integrate in our company.
- Is it a project funded directly by the Governments or by the NGI funds?
- Is there an extensibility via plugins or other in the future thought for integrations ?
- Is the ProConnect the only way or can one use a self-hosted OIDC or another IdP to login?
virdev
Hey! Thanks for your interest. It's directly funded by the governments. BlockNotejs (the library doing the editor bit) received some funding from NGI. And now France and Germany are sponsoring the project (and also Yjs) No plugins plans for now. You can use your self-hosted OIDC, when you run the project locally you'll see a Keycloak as first screen. Let us know if you get it running docs@numerique.gouv.fr would love to hear your feedback as a reuser.
alephnerd
Great work by the Suite Numerique team!
Are you guys looking at adding localization support for languages beyond French as well (eg. English, German)?
It would be a great alternative to multiple disjointed OSS offerings like Mattermost or Appflowy.
Also, I found the DIPT to be fairly intruiging. How much inspiration did the org get from Gov.uk, and are there some resources, papers, or books you could point to about the DIPT initiative?
sylvinus
Indeed, Docs is already available both in English and German :)
AFAIK we took a lot of inspiration from Gov.uk and 18F/USDS (RIP), at least for digital services. You can look at https://beta.gouv.fr/
virdev
Hey! Thanks! Yes we do plan to support more languages, we want the project to be usable by the many. Translations are here : https://crowdin.com/project/lasuite-docs (just added turkish tonight ;)
PoignardAzur
Have you considered integrating Zulip into your chat solution? It's leagues ahead of any other product in the space.
cyberpunkdyst
Did you consider building on top of some existing open source solutions like Docmost, Appflowy, or AFFiNE?
virdev
Hey, we dedided to take an approach where we build on top of libraries like BlockNotejs, Yjs, HocusPocus but build our own wrapper around it in Django and Next.js. This allows to iterate really fast and to catter our own need (we are large organizations we don't have the same as startups or SMEs). Contributing and sponsoring allows us to make improvement that help the whole collaborative software category.
thor-rodrigues
I really like the idea of shifting the business model for office software. Instead of the current model—where companies develop a tool, lock users into their ecosystem, and profit by bundling software with hosting and storage—we could move to a model where different providers compete to offer the best deployment solutions. This would foster competition based on factors like pricing, encryption, customer support, server location, and integration flexibility, rather than simply forcing users into long-term subscriptions.
That’s why I’m glad to see governments supporting Open Source alternatives to proprietary office software. Paying recurring subscription fees for low-maintenance tools like MS Office feels out of touch—especially when Microsoft once offered a one-time purchase model before shifting to SaaS to maximize profits. This change has made it difficult for individuals and businesses to retain long-term ownership of their tools without being tied to costly and recurring fees. The same trend has played out across the software industry, from design tools like Adobe Creative Cloud (which replaced one-time purchases with a mandatory subscription model) to communication platforms like Slack and Zoom, which lock companies into ongoing costs while limiting interoperability with other solutions.
bjackman
> we could move to a model where different providers compete to offer the best deployment solutions.
The Matrix project lead talked at FOSDEM about an issue with this model [0]: a pure market approach to this just doesn't offer any way to fund upstream development.
Luckily the public sector ought to be a an arena where we can solve this problem by being englightened consumers instead of just buying from the provider that provides the most service per dollar. But that enlightenment does require some education.
maxyurk
JFrog is doing very well financially with an excellent self-hosted offering
jahewson
Large organisations had access to subscription software long before modern SaaS, and chose to use it. In the 1990s Microsoft offered an Enterprise Agreement that operated in this manner. Support is also something that large organisations value and are happy to subscribe to.
GraemeMeyer
Microsoft still offers one-time purchase for Office by the way - Office 2024 was recently released.
dkobia
I love this. Open source projects often suffer from a combination of a funding crisis and maintainer burnout. I think state funded open source projects are a wonderful idea!
By investing in open source projects, governments can create more efficient, transparent, and innovative digital services. If anything I’m sure it’ll save tax payers money on expensive licenses paid to a company in another country.
kijin
It's also about risk management from the government's perspective. You don't want to be beholden to a potentially hostile foreign corporation for tasks as essential as managing your own documents. Compared to how much money they already spend on American SaaS, Investing a few million euros in open-source alternatives could be seen as cheap insurance.
maelito
This tool is part of a WIP complete suite of tools for public agents called "La suite numérique".
remram
Ah this makes sense, I was going to comment that "docs" was not really a suitable name.
What is the correct full name then? lasuite docs (judging from the logo, that seem to be the brand part)? docs numerique (from the URL)?
maelito
numerique.gouv is like digital.gov. Kind of a whole ministry.
La Suite Docs is better yes.
bcye
adding to this, it seems to me like most of the projects are yet to be open sourced. the github currently has docs and their video conferencing tool (which also looks great): https://github.com/suitenumerique
manuhabitela
All the projects are already open sourced actually, but admittedly all don't have documentation as good as docs or meet. Still a wip :)
bcye
Cool! Are they under a different GitHub org? I couldn't find grist or tchap
drowntoge
Tchap looks neat as a Slack alternative, but it seems like it's still only for government workers.
maelito
Tchap is just Element/Matrix with some gov specific features.
IshKebab
We use Mattermost at work, and apart from the mobile app being a bit shit, and search being kind of useless, it's easily as good as Slack. In some ways it's better, e.g. you can use proper Markdown in messages instead of Slack's Mrkdwn abomination that doesn't even allow links.
I wish they would improve search though; it's kind of a critical feature in a company.
zellyn
? I put Slack into non-rich-text-editor mode and use standard markdown link syntax dozens of times a day
_zoltan_
search is the #1 feature I use in our corporate slack (huge, huge instance).
without search it's useless.
Terretta
That said, calling the video conferencing capability "Visio" is à la banane.
theflash666
"Visio" is French slang for a videoconference meeting. Open to suggestions for a project name that better reflects its purpose and vision.
modderation
How about "Vidja" -- the .fr domain seems to be available, the top google hit is for an IKEA floor lamp, and it is generally a silly English mispronunciation of "video" (you kids and yer vidja games...) :)
moooo99
I love the effort that is going on here. I'm just curious about some of the efforts taken here. The Docs seems like a good approach to just build it, but really wondering what the motivation behind building another video chat platform was instead of using and improving rather mature OSS solutions like Jitsi.
mkl
Visio is a Microsoft Office app: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/visio/flowchar...
weakfish
This is awesome!
eitland
[flagged]
thiht
Or maybe the target of tools developed by the French government is France. Not everything has to make sense worldwide. I would be happy to see the target expanded beyond just France, but there’s no need to be snarky about it not being the case right now.
theflash666
Great point! this will be addressed and fixed within the week.
tln
Huh?
The linked site is https://github.com/suitenumerique/docs which has the commits, readme, code comments, and issues in English.
The github description links to https://docs.numerique.gouv.fr/ which is available in English, French and German.
eitland
The comment I replied to was linking to this:
f33d5173
What, chinese?
maelito
Or maybe not. Maybe Europe needs to focus first on building local software. Even in 2025, French devs are fare from fluent in English.
Real question, not a rhetorical one.
remark5396
There are already quiet a few softwares that claim to be Notion alternatives or seem to be:
- AppFlowy: https://github.com/AppFlowy-IO/AppFlowy
- AFFiNE: https://github.com/toeverything/AFFiNE
- SiYuan: https://github.com/siyuan-note/siyuan
- Trillium Next: https://github.com/TriliumNext/Notes
- AnyType (only clients are source available): https://github.com/anyproto/anytype-ts
crabmusket
https://getoutline.com mentioned in the submission title
ezst
Count me as a biiig proponent and user of TriliumNext, it's in my mind and experience the most capable note taking and organising app there is, but I don't think I nor any of its developers would call it a "Notion alternative".
hardwaresofton
The future continues to be AGPL
CountGeek
And Docmost - https://github.com/docmost/docmost
sylvinus
Hey. A few developers from the team are on HN and will be happy to answer any questions here!
We also made a small scratchpad you can use to test collaboration features, if it doesn't get too flooded :) https://docs.numerique.gouv.fr/docs/a3f0becc-f2b7-45be-a5e5-...
hysan
What led to the choice of using Blocknote over other editor packages? Would love to read about the decision making and comparisons between all the editors you considered. Also interested in any other write ups about choosing packages (ex: I see you using hocuspocus which I think is from another editor - TipTap) and why you landed on your particular tech stack.
YousefED
Maintainer of BlockNote here (and contributor to HocusPocus). I can't speak for Docs as to why they chose BlockNote, but can answer some of your questions. BlockNote is actually built on top of Tiptap - but designed to take away the heavy lifting. As powerful as they are, to build a Notion-like editor on top of Tiptap (or Prosemirror) still requires quite some engineering firepower. We've built BlockNote to come "batteries-included" with common UI components and a simpler API to make it easy for you to add a modern, block-based editor to your app.
evnp
That's very cool, as a happy user of TipTap this is the first I've heard of BlockNote - excited to check it out. I've also built a few modest things on top of TipTap and felt a slight "tower of babel" unease, would you mind saying a bit about what BlockNote takes from TipTap which couldn't be accomplished with Prosemirror alone?
This comes from a place of pure curiosity, I don't actually believe this strata of editor packages is in any way inherently bad!
virdev
Hey! Not a developer but here are a couple pointers. As Yousef says below, the text editing bit is hard. We wanted to be build fast and BlockNotejs makes it easy, you get the block stucture, the slash command, you can style your editor and extend with custom blocks. The BlockNotejs team researched the live editing space thoroughly so we could just follow the tracks: BlockNotejs, HocusPocus, Yjs. We "just" had to build the wrapper around with authentication, docs permissions and search and boom you have Docs!
Savageman
Really cool to be able to test this directly, thanks for setting it up.
I found something I would qualify as a bug: if you click on the right of any text, the cursor is placed at the beginning of the line, where I would expect to have it at the end.
miki123211
What's your stance on accessibility? Is that something you even consider?
Notion is particularly terrible here, so this could be a great alternative for people / organizations who need that.
manuhabitela
It's not only considered, it's a an actual goal to be 100% usable by everyone. It's already the case for some of La Suite projects. Not quite there yet right now for some others, but it will be.
And I agree, lots of popular, proprietary solutions should do better in terms of accessibility. I believe open-source helps in that regard, as in many others.
Here in La Suite we have some wcag-geeks in the team and regularly include some of our users with disabilities for feedback.
theflash666
https://react-spectrum.adobe.com/react-aria is used in most La Suite projects. Also we have one frontend developer focused on accessibility and few auditors. We always prioritize accessibility
null
npodbielski
Looks really nice. I looked at the readme on github and selfhost section mentions it is only for testing. Why? What is the difference?
mrweasel
Looking at how much infrastructure needs to be spun up, I don't really see this as a good solution for personal note taking. If you use the Docker environment, you spin up 10 or more containers... including KeyClock. I get that this is intended to by hosted by a company or an organisation, but plenty of people are using Notion just as individuals.
Most people would be better of with Obsidian, Bear, Notion or even Apple Notes.
wim
We're working on an "IDE for notes/tasks" [1] in the space of Notion and so on where you can easily self-host the sync backend with a single binary.
The idea is that you can choose between cloud or self-host (and "eject" at any time to switch between the two if you ever change your mind). We hope that might be a good balance between some companies or individuals wanting to self-host but still making it accessible when you don't know how any of that works, which indeed can get complicated fast.
thor-rodrigues
That looks VERY AWESOME. Really looking forward to try it :)
jeelthompson
This looks really cool, signed up for early access. Any plans to have an import from notion feature? I’ve used notion for personal note taking and manually moving over would be a big time sync at this point. But I’d love to have a self hosted solution.
weakfish
I’d love to try this out - I signed up for beta access. Looking forward to giving it a shot!
Nelkins
I see you can @ people. Does that mean you can get notifications when you've been @-ed? Also, is there the ability to comment on documents? For me these are two killer features to leave a Notion or Confluence.
ukuina
This looks neat! Will the self-hosted binary function in air-gapped environments?
jdvh
Absolutely. There is no phone-home of any kind.
wim
Yep, should work!
drio0
do you plan to have a mobile app?
would you implement database function like in Notion?
Is it a full feature todo app or just noting down tasks?
would be a killer app if it has 3 Yes
jdvh
1. Planned, but our first focus is the web app (plus desktop Electron)
2. Yes. We have a bunch of default views like table, kanban, photo gallery, and calendar. You can also create your own views with a JS plugin, like this silly example of spinning globe view: https://x.com/wcools/status/1898828593255346287
3. Our aim is a full feature todo app. But we won't have every feature on day 1.
Bigpet
looks neat. Like Acreom, but with better collaboration capabilities.
grvdrm
Also going to sign up.
Love your site. Looks great. Lots of visual appeal. Not the same cookies cutter Tailwind theme that seems to be present everywhere.
addcommitpush
This is an internal tool (which was open sourced) made by the French government digital service to be used by French government employee on French government infra. I do not think it is trying to be a better solution for individuals. It’s trying to be a better solution for gov employees.
johnecheck
If we can spin up the 10 containers with a single docker compose command on a $5/month VPS, this really doesn't seem like too much for an individual.
And the best part: this is MIT licensed. If it's actually difficult to set up, build a nice web UI that makes it easy and you've got a product.
mrweasel
I'm not worried about the cost, you can probably run all of it in the closet on a Raspberry Pi, it's the complexity. What do you do when part of this inevitably fail, how do you get your data back out, where is the data? In Minio, in Postgresql?
sylvinus
Our primary target is indeed larger organizations but we're working on one-click deployment solutions and an all-in-one container.
xena
Honestly it's a reasonable set of dependencies:
* Postgres for permanent storage
* an OIDC identity provider so you don't have to make your own password system
* Redis for caching
* S3-compatible object storage (so you don't have to reinvent file uploads)
* The app itself
What would you rather them do? Waste time reinventing the wheel for no reason? If you have the IDP and object storage setup already figured out you can get away with just the app, postgres, and redis.
RamblingCTO
That's a typical tech answer. Do you really want to spin up 10 images for note taking for yourself? From a product standpoint that's not sensible and wastes way to much resources.
bayindirh
Are you sure? It’s a collaborative note taking application which is designed to support large groups.
A similar project we collaborate on has Helm charts as an option. “Are you mad? You run an online archive with how many pods, come again?” You may say.
“When said archive can handle a continent’s load and scale almost indefinitely, you engineer things differently”, I’ll answer.
Also, nobody will probably make this comment, if the said application was built by a private company and was not open source.
vvillena
Good thing this is a server app and not an end-user product, then.
dymk
Why do I care how many images it's spinning up? That's an implementation detail - I just copy/paste a docker-compose configuration.
theflash666
you usually don't need a collaborative product when taking note for yourself
mgkimsal
The closest we get is something like USDS, which then gets hijacked in to DOGE.
Open source software built and supported by a national government is inspiring. Are there more examples of this I'm not aware of? I hope so.
mcintyre1994
The UK has Government Digital Services (GDS), which has built and open sourced all the good bits of gov.uk: https://github.com/alphagov
dopidopHN
It’s been happening pretty consistently in France.
The cops are rolling their own distro :)
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/GendBuntu
I think it’s wise. Not idea if it’s good
danieldk
Open source repositories of the Dutch government:
crimsoneer
I have a scraper that covers open source govtech I keep meaning to tidy up...
pcwalton
Ghidra is a fine example from the US government.
dzonga
there was 18f too :(
replwoacause
It really feels like we are in a time where EU countries are taking front and center on the world stage with cool, progressive and unified stuff, and the US is in the ally snorting crack. Saying this as a disappointed American. But yeah…really cool to see governments collaborating this way.
Tadpole9181
It's not like the US wasn't warned about this repeatedly for decades, and yet we chose this.
rtpg
Having both the Notion-like UI and the real time collaboration is exciting! So much stuff has been either/or, and it made it hard for me to find a good alternative.
I really appreciate how Notion is basically "what if Google Docs but you can actually organize your information". The collaborative components feel really powerful.
I do kind of wish that something that was more ... Wiki-flavored would show up though. I like confluence, it's just mega slow!
bryanhogan
What about markdown based tools that focused on the linking part, e.g. Haptic or Logseq, is that wiki-flavored enough?
tommoor
You should take a look at Outline (mentioned in the title). https://www.getoutline.com/
theflash666
All features aren't available in the community edition …
tommoor
Right, but the vast majority are – include those they are talking about.
wuming2
The reality is nowadays few documents need desktop publishing features. Because seldom if ever become paper documents.
Also the average back office author knows a tiny fraction of Microsoft Word or Excel features.
Give them means to type in text, add pictures and collaborate. Templates for beautification. That’s all what is needed.
This has been known for ages. Alas Microsoft has a grip on governments and large orgs we know little about. CERN is an example.
mmooss
> nowadays few documents need desktop publishing features. Because seldom if ever become paper documents.
I rarely read paper, but I find professionally designed documents much easier to read on my screens. It's such a relief to open a PDF of a professionally designed book, for example, after reading screenfuls of html.
wuming2
Agreed. Here I invoke the wisdom of groff old timers and of younger CSS developers: where the latter stops being useful when a professional looking pdf must be generated?
I can prepare a decent looking document, or spreadsheet, with LibreOffice styles (CSS) without particular effort. With Docs should not be much different.
Have seen official government Word documents with formatting in need of assistance. Teams at very large firms share Word documents, via email, forth and back debating about revisions of text and numbers. Publishing was only the necessary last step.
In most cases authors use the bare minimum of functions to get the job done. Professional looking is something else instead. I don’t know where Docs stands here.
This is a really great project from both the French and German governments.
I think state-funded open source solutions to digital platforms is a fantastic opportunity to get away from the big tech walled gardens. Of course, there is always the risk that this becomes unmaintained in the future, but the community at least can take over. But until then, it's a nice platform and a nice contribution to the community.