SiYuan vs Anytype: which local-first notes app in 2026?

Block documents vs objects, types and relations

SiYuan’s unit is the document: pages with headings and paragraphs in a WYSIWYG Markdown editor, where every paragraph is an addressable block you can reference or embed anywhere. Structure comes from Notion-style database and attribute views layered on top — a meeting note is a page with headings, and, if you want, also a row in a meetings database with date and attendee columns. It feels like writing; the database is optional.

Anytype’s unit is the object. That same meeting is a Meeting-type object with relations — Date, Attendees (linking to Person objects), Project — and its body is blocks inside that object; a Set or Collection then shows every Meeting as a table or gallery. Anytype makes you decide what a thing is before you write about it, which is exactly what structured thinkers want and exactly what people who just want to type find heavy. Neither model is more powerful; SiYuan starts from prose and lets you add structure, Anytype starts from structure and lets you add prose. (If your real comparison is with an outliner or plain Markdown files, we’ve compared SiYuan against Logseq and Obsidian, and Anytype against Logseq and Capacities.)

SiYuan pricing vs Anytype pricing — sync, storage and what you actually pay

Both apps are free to install and free to use offline forever. Money enters only when your notes need to reach a second device or a backup — and the two charge for that in opposite ways: SiYuan sells sync as a one-time unlock (or an annual cloud), Anytype includes sync free and sells remote storage. As of August 2026:

Read that as: the cheapest way to sync a laptop and a phone is Anytype, free, with encryption you never configure. The cheapest way to sync without trusting anyone else’s server is SiYuan’s $64 against your own bucket — Anytype can match it by self-hosting any-sync, but that’s a weekend, not a checkbox. SiYuan’s official cloud is the odd one out at $148 a year for 8 GB, and it’s the only tier here with no refunds; most SiYuan users take the one-time license instead.

Licensing and project health — the asymmetry, dated

This is where the two diverge most sharply, and it’s worth being precise. As of August 2026:

• SiYuan is open source under AGPL-3.0 — an OSI-approved license — with ~45,000 GitHub stars. Development is continuous: four stable releases between June 30 and July 21, 2026 (v3.7.0–v3.7.3), v3.8.0 on August 12, beta builds most days since, and an issue tracker kept in the low hundreds. The risk profile is the classic small-core-team one — the project is driven by a tiny group of maintainers — offset by the fact that the code, data format and Docker image are all yours to fork or keep running.
• Anytype is source-available, not open source. All the code is public on GitHub, but the desktop and mobile apps ship under the “Any Source Available License 1.0,” which permits non-commercial use freely and reserves commercial use for networks the Any Association authorizes; the underlying any-sync protocol is open source and self-hostable. It’s a funded organization rather than a volunteer project, and it ships steadily: desktop v0.55.3 in May, v0.56.0 on July 22 and v0.56.1 on July 28, 2026, with alpha and beta builds between.

Read that as: SiYuan’s freedom is legal and unconditional; Anytype’s is practical — you can read, run and self-host everything, you just can’t build a competing commercial service on it. If “open source” on your requirements list means the license, SiYuan is the only one that qualifies. If it means “I can see the code and leave with my data,” both do.

Mobile and offline

Both are fully offline-first — no account, no server, no connection required to write. On the phone, Anytype is the more finished experience: native iOS and Android apps with the same object model as desktop, and encrypted sync that’s already running by the time you sign in with your recovery phrase. There’s no web app, so “from any browser” is not an option, only publishing.

SiYuan has iOS and Android apps too, but they trail the desktop client in polish and get less of the attention — and syncing to them needs PRO or the cloud subscription. Its counter-move is the Docker self-host: the full app served from your own machine and edited from any browser, phone included, which for some people beats a native app. If mobile capture is a daily habit, Anytype; if you mostly write at a desk and want a browser fallback, SiYuan.

Getting your notes out — export and lock-in

What’s on disk? SiYuan stores each document as a JSON block tree in its own local format (with a SQLite index) and exports documents or whole notebooks to Markdown and PDF; block references and database views flatten on the way out. Anytype keeps an encrypted local database and exports to Markdown, plus JSON/protobuf for the full object graph; Markdown keeps your text and links but flattens types and relations. Both are open-format enough that leaving is an afternoon, not a crisis — but neither is “just files.”

Migrating between them: there is no direct importer in either direction, so Markdown is the bridge. SiYuan → Anytype: export the notebook as Markdown and import the folder — files become objects, [[wikilinks]] become linked objects, #tags become tag relations, database rows do not travel. Anytype → SiYuan: export Markdown and import the folder; text, images and links come through, relations arrive as plain text. Run a trial import on a copy first, either way.