About Anytype
Anytype Desktop is the official desktop client for Anytype, a personal knowledge base for macOS, Windows and Linux. It lets you collect pages, tasks, wikis and journals and link them together, while keeping data stored locally and encrypted across your devices.
The client is built around composable blocks such as text, databases, kanban boards and calendars, and you can define your own Types to shape the data model. Storage is offline-first with optional peer-to-peer sync, and encryption relies on the any-sync protocol. It is an Electron application written in TypeScript, and it can be extended through a gRPC API and AI agents described in the repository.
Sign-in uses an Any-ID, and installers are published on the releases page and the download site. The code is published under the Any Source Available License 1.0 rather than a standard open-source licence, and the README includes instructions for building from source and updating the middleware.
Key features
- Offline-first local storage
- Optional peer-to-peer sync
- End-to-end encryption through any-sync
- Block-based pages, databases, kanban and calendar
- Custom Types for your own data model
- gRPC API for extensions
Good fit for
- →Building a private personal knowledge base
- →Keeping notes and tasks offline-first
- Built with
- TypeScript
- Tags
- knowledge-base
- notes
- local-first
- encryption
- p2p
- electron
- privacy
- typescript
Anytype: questions and answers
- What is Anytype used for?
- Anytype Desktop is the official client for Anytype, a local-first, end-to-end encrypted knowledge base for notes, tasks, wikis and custom data types. It is a good fit for building a private personal knowledge base, and keeping notes and tasks offline-first.
- Is Anytype open source?
- Yes. Anytype is open source under a custom licence. Its source code is on GitHub at anyproto/anytype-ts and is written mainly in TypeScript.
- Is Anytype free?
- Yes. Anytype is open source, so the software itself is free to use under the terms of its own licence.
- Can I self-host Anytype?
- Yes. Anytype can be self-hosted on your own server or infrastructure.
- What is Anytype an alternative to?
- Anytype is an open-source alternative to Notion, Evernote, Obsidian and Craft. Other open-source alternatives to Notion include SiYuan, Trilium Notes and AppFlowy.
- Is Anytype actively maintained?
- Yes. The most recent commit to Anytype was on 2 October 2026, and the latest release is v0.57.3, published on 30 September 2026. The project has 8.9k stars on GitHub.
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