Seven self-hosted Notion alternatives side by side, and the two wikis Pilae operates for you, Outline and BookStack, on your servers and behind your sign-on.
- Replacing
- Notion, by Notion Labs, Inc.
- With
- Outline, BookStack, Nextcloud
- Runs on
- Your servers, or Pilae Cloud in Switzerland and the EU
- Migration
- Included in onboarding, at a fixed price
Self-hosted Notion alternatives compared
Seven tools teams move to from Notion, filled in from each project’s own site and licence. They differ most on the two things Notion does that a wiki does not: databases, and a team’s worth of sign-on.
| Tool | Licence | Built for | Databases | SSO | Notion importer | Operated by Pilae |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Outline | BSL-1.1 | Team wiki | No; tables inside documents | OIDC, Google, Microsoft and Slack; SAML in paid editions | Yes, built in | Yes |
| BookStack | MIT | Team wiki, in shelves, books and chapters | No | OIDC, SAML2 and LDAP, all in the free edition | No | Yes |
| AppFlowy | AGPL-3.0 app; commercial self-hosted server | Workspace with docs and databases | Yes: grid, board and calendar views | OIDC, SAML and LDAP on paid self-hosted plans; the free tier has one seat | Yes, from a Notion export, on the server edition | No |
| AFFiNE | MIT and MPL-2.0 (Community Edition) | Docs, whiteboards and databases | Yes, multi-view database blocks | OIDC, Google and GitHub sign-in | Yes, from a Notion HTML or Markdown export | No |
| Docmost | AGPL-3.0 core; enterprise features licensed separately | Team wiki | No | SAML, OIDC and LDAP in the paid Enterprise Edition | Yes, in the free Community Edition | No |
| Anytype | Any Source Available License 1.0 | Local-first notes, synced between devices | Yes: table, board and calendar views | No; accounts are keys held on each device | Yes, through the Notion API | No |
| SiYuan | AGPL-3.0 | Personal knowledge base, one writer per workspace | Yes: database views over blocks | No | Through a community plugin | No |
Run it yourself or have it operated
Run it yourself
Most tools in the table can be running by the end of an afternoon. The afternoon is not the work: upgrades that change the schema, security advisories, backups nobody has restored and sign-on that breaks when the directory changes are. If your team already carries that for other apps, the table is the whole decision. The rest is set out under doing it yourself.
Have Pilae operate it
Pilae operates Outline and BookStack on your servers or in any of 12 Pilae Cloud regions, six of them in Switzerland and the EU: wired to your directory, upgraded in your window once you approve the plan, backed up daily and restore-tested every month. It is the same software you could run yourself, so leaving Pilae never means leaving the tool.
Why teams leave Notion
What a wiki actually holds
Runbooks, contracts in draft, incident notes, board papers. With the wiki on your own machines, the workspace that knows most about your organisation stays inside it.
Access follows your directory
Sign-on through Keycloak or Entra ID, with groups deciding who sees which collection. A leaver loses access to the wiki with everything else.
Pages you can take with you
Outline and BookStack store pages in your own database and export them as Markdown. The content is never held in a format only one vendor can read.
Notion vs Outline operated by Pilae
| What is being compared | Notion | Pilae |
|---|---|---|
| Where pages are stored | In Notion infrastructure, operated by Notion. | In your Postgres and object storage, on your premises or on dedicated machines in any of 12 Pilae Cloud regions, six of them in Switzerland and the EU. |
| What it does | An all-in-one workspace: pages, databases, projects, calendars, AI and a large template gallery. | Outline or BookStack for the wiki: nested documents or shelves and books, fast search. Nextcloud for files, calendars and shared folders beside it. |
| Databases | Relational databases with many views, built into pages. | Outline and BookStack have tables inside pages, not databases. Structured data moves to NocoDB or Nextcloud Tables where a team needs it. |
| Sign-on and permissions | SAML SSO and SCIM provisioning on higher plans, with workspace and page permissions. | OIDC sign-on through Keycloak or Entra ID on every plan, with permissions per collection and per group. |
| Export | Markdown, CSV, HTML and PDF export from the workspace. | Markdown export from Outline and BookStack, an API for each, and the database itself. |
| Operation | Fully run by Notion as a SaaS product. | Daily encrypted backups with monthly restore tests, planned upgrades by the Pilae Agent, 60-second probes. |
| Pricing | Per member, per month, by plan. | On request, for the operated platform. Outline, BookStack and Nextcloud carry no per-member licence fee. |
A self-hosted wiki for your organisation
Notion is a flexible workspace, and teams that like it tend to put everything in it. That is the reason to ask where it lives. A company wiki ends up holding the runbooks, the decisions and the drafts that describe how the organisation works.
Outline is a fast, well-designed knowledge base: nested documents, real-time editing, Markdown shortcuts and search that finds things. Pilae runs it on your own servers or in any of 12 Pilae Cloud regions, six of them in Switzerland and the EU, behind the sign-on your staff already use. BookStack is the open-source alternative, with pages arranged in shelves, books and chapters. Where Notion was also holding files and calendars, Nextcloud takes that part. The wider picture is on the sovereign workplace page.
Moving off Notion without losing pages
The pages import cleanly. The databases need a decision each: some become tables in a document, some move to a proper database, and some turn out to be unused. We make that list with you before the move, as part of the fixed-price migration, and sign-on is set up through identity so nobody gets a new password.
After the switch, the Pilae Agent plans each upgrade, waits for your approval and applies it in your window, and backups are restore-tested every month. Pricing is on request. Tell us about your workspace and we come back with a plan.
Moving from Notion to Outline
Map the workspace
Which teamspaces are live, which pages are really databases, and which databases people depend on. The answer decides what goes to Outline and what goes elsewhere.
Import the pages
Outline imports a Notion workspace: pages, nesting, images and attachments. We check the links between pages afterwards and fix the ones that broke.
List what does not come across
Database views, formulas, relations and embedded automations do not survive as they are. Each one is written down and given a home before anyone relies on it.
Switch sign-on, then close the workspace
Staff sign in with the accounts they already have. Notion stays read-only for a month, then the subscription ends.
The apps that replace Notion
Outline
A fast, well-structured team wiki and knowledge base, on a server you choose, signed in through your own identity provider.
Replaces Notion, Confluence
BookStack
An MIT-licensed wiki of shelves, books, chapters and pages for documentation and runbooks, run in Switzerland, the EU or your own datacentre with sign-in from your directory.
Replaces Confluence, SharePoint wikis
Nextcloud
Files, calendars and shared documents for the whole organisation, on storage you can point at in a room you control.
Replaces Google Drive, Dropbox, SharePoint