The two leading open-source knowledge management tools projects, compared on the signals that predict whether a dependency survives: commit cadence, release history, licence and health.
SiYuan is the safer default: actively maintained maintenance, 6966 commits in the last twelve months and a health score of 100/100, against 756 commits and 94/100 for AFFiNE Community Edition. Licence still decides the commercial question — SiYuan ships under AGPL-3.0, AFFiNE Community Edition under MIT, AGPL-3.0. Both are Knowledge Management Tools projects; the category scores 41/100 on saturation with 8 open-source implementations tracked.
| Metric | AFFiNE Community Edition | SiYuan |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | 72k | 46k |
| Maintenance status | Actively maintained | Actively maintained |
| Commits (12 months) | 756 | 6966 |
| Commits (3 months) | 161 | 3601 |
| Active months / 12 | 12 | 12 |
| Last commit | 2026-08-15 | 2026-08-12 |
| Last release | 2026-08-14 | 2026-08-15 |
| Licence | MIT, AGPL-3.0 | AGPL-3.0 |
| Licence family | copyleft | copyleft |
| Health score | 94/100 | 100/100 |
| Replaces | Team knowledge base, Knowledge Bases | Note-taking/ Knowledge management, Note-taking / Personal Knowledge Management |
| Repository | toeverything/affine | siyuan-note/siyuan |
Repository metadata refreshed August 2026. Stars never decay — read the maintenance rows first.
Next-gen knowledge base that brings planning, sorting and creating all together. Privacy first, customizable and ready to use (alternative to Notion and Miro).
A privacy-first personal knowledge management software, written in typescript and golang.
On maintenance signals, SiYuan leads: 6966 commits in the last twelve months across 12 active months, versus 756 commits and 12 active months for AFFiNE Community Edition. Star counts (72k vs 46k) reflect historical popularity, not current health, so read them second.
AFFiNE Community Edition is licensed under MIT, AGPL-3.0 (copyleft) and SiYuan under AGPL-3.0 (copyleft). Permissive licences (MIT, Apache, BSD) allow closed commercial products. Copyleft (GPL) triggers on distribution and AGPL triggers on network use, which covers SaaS. Source-available licences usually forbid competing hosted services outright.
AFFiNE Community Edition is marked actively maintained with its last commit recorded 2026-08-15 and 161 commits in the last three months. It still qualifies as having momentum, so it is a viable dependency.
The Knowledge Management Tools category is rated contested at 41/100, with 3 maintained implementations. In a crowded category every prospect can find a free version in minutes, so your wedge has to be something maintainers structurally will not build: compliance, SLAs, managed scale or a workflow they reject.
Communication
Software Development
Miscellaneous
Media Streaming
File Transfer
Content Management Systems (CMS)
Money, Budgeting & Management
Document Management
Two maintained free tools already own this category. IdeaProof scores your idea against live competitors, market size and 1,000+ documented failures in about two minutes.
Validate your idea freeSearch this database by category and by the commercial product you would replace. It covers 1665 projects across 130 categories, each mapped to the paid tool it substitutes. If your category shows a "Crowded" verdict, a maintained free version almost certainly exists and your positioning has to account for it.
No. It means free is your price anchor. Plenty of large companies were built next to a good open-source project — the ones that failed were the ones selling the same job at a price the free tool made indefensible. Find the part of the job the project deliberately does not do, and sell that.
Each category gets a 0–100 score built from three inputs: how many implementations exist, what share of them are still actively maintained, and how far ahead the leading project is compared with the category median. 62+ is Crowded, 38–61 Contested, under 38 Open. 11 categories are Crowded and 88 are Open.