Anyone even remotely interested in both productivity and digital tools that support it has probably at least heard of Notion. Notion is currently one of the most popular productivity apps available. Notion is fantastic and offers a huge arsenal of standard building blocks to build your productivity applications relatively easily. Notion is used in organizations, by students, by one-man entrepreneurs, and so on. However, Notion isn’t all roses and moonlight, and many people are looking for alternatives. One available alternative is AppFlowy, an open-source, local-first application that is developing very rapidly and already offers many of Notion’s features. At some point during your experimentation, you may be excited and might want to migrate parts or even your entire Notion database to AppFlowy. However, there is quite a bit of confusion about the best way to approach this migration. In this short article, I describe what I believe to be the most practical approach to migrating a simple Notion structure to AppFlowy.
Content of the article
- Introduction
- How can we migrate individual Notion content directly into your existing AppFlowy workspace?
- How to migrate an individual table from Notion to AppFlowy?
- How to migrate an individual page from Notion to AppFlowy?
- Final words
Introduction
Notion is a fantastic platform for many users that enables you to design digital solutions for a multitude of use cases. But Notion not only has advantages but also some disadvantages. For individuals who prioritize features like local data storage for control, self-hosting freedom, open-source advantages, and enhanced performance due to local operation with in-house data, Notion may not be the ideal choice. One of the applications that, in contrast to Notion, supports these points is the open-source application AppFlowy. I have studied several alternative applications and in my humble opinion, AppFlowy comes very close to Notion on quite some points but additionally offers local storage of your data, offline support, so you can work without an internet connection, self-hosting of your applications, Open Source foundation, higher performance, and AppFlowy allows you to choose from different AI models, like Llama 3 and Mistral 7B and run them on your local machine for privacy. Oh, and there is an official version for Linux.
At some point, after extensively comparing Notion and AppFlowy, you might have decided to migrate from Notion to AppFlowy. So, you’ll want to know how to perform this migration. On the AppFlowy Docs page, there is an operating procedure that explains how to do this migration. The approach is currently the only way to migrate a complete Notion environment to AppFlowy. Although it works, it has, in my opinion, a drawback. The problem with the approach described by the AppFlowy team is that the result of the migration is a completely new and separate workspace containing your Notion export. That is not a problem if that is your starting point, but what if you had already created some nice tables and pages in an existing AppFlowy workspace? Now you suddenly have two separate workspaces that you probably want to merge. One of the functionalities still missing in AppFlowy, as mentioned in numerous online discussions, is the ability to move pages and tables between workspaces. So, based on https://docs.appflowy.io/docs/guides/import-from-notion, importing Notion data results in two separate workspaces. Sadly, this is the only practical approach if you have a large Notion environment with many pages and tables, so you have to accept that you can’t merge two AppFlowy workspaces after you have done the Notion to AppFlowy import.
But if you don’t have that many pages or tables in Notion, there is a simple way to migrate those one by one to your existing AppFlowy workspace. Let’s have a look.
How can we migrate individual Notion content directly into your existing AppFlowy workspace?
If you have a simple structure in Notion with a limited set of pages and tables, in my opinion, a better way to migrate your Notion data to AppFlowy is via the Import CSV and Import Text & Markdown options offered within your existing workspace. In the steps below, I’ll show you how to migrate both a single page and a database into your existing AppFlowy workspace, so you can repeat that for every page and table and then reorganize the migrated components as you see fit within your existing AppFlowy structure.
Note: keep in mind that AppFlowy does not (yet) offer all the functionality that Notion is offering, like rollups, formulas. When migrating your data from Notion to AppFlowy, you will lose that specific functionality in your tables and pages.
How to migrate an individual table from Notion to AppFlowy
To migrate an individual database from Notion to an existing AppFlowy workspace, follow these steps:
1) In Notion, select the table you want to migrate to Appflowy.
2) Now go to the menu icon (3 dots) in the top right corner and select the Export option.
3) Now, keep the settings as below and click Export.
4) Now, go to your Downloads folder and look for the zip file that has been added.
This zip file contains two CSV files, which are the same because you only exported one table.
5) Extract the all.csv file to a location of your choice.
6) Now go to AppFlowy and click the ‘+’ icon on the location in your structure that you want to import your Notion data into, for example, on the workspace level or subfolder level.
7) Select Import and CSV.
8) Now select the all.csv Notion export file to import your data into your existing AppFlowy structure.
Now you can rename the table, move it within your structure, and use it with your other AppFlowy pages, without having the problem of having two separate workspaces in which you cannot move pages between them. Repeat the above steps for every table in your Notion environment.
How to migrate an individual page from Notion to AppFlowy
To migrate an individual page from Notion to an existing AppFlowy workspace, follow these steps:
1) In Notion, select the page you want to migrate to Appflowy.
2) Now go to the menu icon (3 dots) in the top right corner and select the Export option.
3) Now, keep the settings as below and click Export.
4) Now, go to your Downloads folder and look for the zip file that has been added.
5) Extract the all.csv file to a location of your choice.
6) Now go to AppFlowy and click the ‘+’ icon on the location in your structure that you want to import your Notion data into, for example, on the workspace level or subfolder level.
7) Select Import and instead of CSV select Text & Markdown.
8) Now select the downloaded and extracted .md Notion export file to import your page into your existing AppFlowy structure.
You will see that the imported page has a messy title based on the exported file name with a hash value. Change it manually so it fits your needs.
Repeat the above steps for every page in your Notion environment.
Final words
While the above procedure isn’t practical for a very large Notion environment with a complex page structure, it is useful if you want to migrate a limited number of pages and tables directly into your AppFlowy workspace and don’t want to create a second workspace for your Notion import that can’t be merged with your existing AppFlowy workspace. I realize the approach in this article is more of a workaround and doesn’t offer a robust solution for people with a large Notion environment. But hopefully, it will help some of you. Let’s hope the AppFlowy team quickly comes up with a solution for moving pages and tables between different workspaces, and that the migration approach they describe becomes truly workable. Until then, hopefully, my approach will help you with migrating a relatively simple Notion environment.
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