I will respond to individual points later, but I’ll address three broad topics that have been brought up.
Feature Parity
While I stand by our original statement about Anytwo not having feature parity with Anytype in the beginning, I believe this requires a better framing—after all, what does feature parity even mean?
- Every feature I showed during the 20 minute demo exists today on Anytwo but not on Anytype. Block links, synced blocks, formulas in table blocks, views across multiple spaces, mini apps, the entire integrations system, agentic workflows, and so on. From that narrow lens, it’s actually Anytype that is below parity compared to Anytwo before it’s even released. This is not even taking into account all the ‘under the hood’ changes we’ve made such as better files sync, faster application speed, vector search, data integrity, etc. which are very difficult to quantify.
- Not every feature that exists in Anytype makes sense to implement as a one-to-one clone in Anytwo because it’s architecturally very different. Widgets being a prime example because it overlaps heavily with mini apps. The sidebars and how you navigate a space is now fundamentally different. We are careful not to promise exact features in Anytype being replicated in Anytwo because it’s through a lens of first principles that we’re able to invent better user experiences. Had we went into this adventure from the lens of, “Let’s just rebuild the infrastructure of Anytype but keep all the features the same," I don’t think people would have been impressed with where we landed in Anytwo.
- Anytype today has so many features that many users don’t even use. Getting to the point of having ‘all the same features’ is a bad goal. The goal is to build all the right solutions in Anytwo, so that our users can accomplish their desired outcomes. For some users who only journal on Anytype, they may reach ‘feature parity’ within a short time from now. For some, maybe never because they don’t want the Collections 2.0 system. This is also ignoring the fact that many users who are not on Anytype at all today may just find Anytwo’s new experience incomparably more suitable for them than Anytype could ever be.
That all being said, at a general and vague level, it’s true that Anytwo won’t be able to accomplish many tasks that Anytype users need when it launches. So indeed, not ‘feature parity’ is a reality. We’d rather set that clear expectation now than disappoint later. And we’d rather release earlier, learn from real users, and adjust—not wait until the more distant future for an abitrary ‘feature parity’ moment.
Broken Promises & Anxiety
This is general response to the questions and sentiment related to:
- Feeling uncertain about the future of the project.
- Anxiety around if this product is right for you.
- Wanting guarantees on what we will deliver.
- Protecting oneself against broken promises in the past.
Firstly, I can 1000% understand why you feel that way. Completely natural. I’m not here to convince anybody that they should spend time on Anytype/Anytwo if it is not providing you value compared to how much it’s costing you. In fact, I would encourage you to use products and participate in communities of much more established companies and just come back to visit when convenient to you. There are many great products in the world today, even if we believe there’s nobody quite like us.
At the same time, we want to be real with you: we are a startup. We can’t guarantee things to even our own families in the long term, let alone to our global community of diverse needs. We don’t make promises to break them because we don’t care, it’s simply that we’re not in full control of our destiny. Things change because the ground beneath us shifts, not because we just change our minds.
We do our best to set expectations, answer questions, and in providing a clear picture of the future. But that should not be mistaken as us being in full control of delivering a deterministic outcome from our ambitions today. I would love for all of you to be with us in this journey, but frankly, what we’re doing is kind of crazy. You’re kind of crazy for reading this. You’re definitely crazy for deliberating on this. But maybe you’re the right kind of crazy. If not, no hard feelings and I genuinely hope to see you again in the future. But if you decide to stick with us, maybe the only thing I can truly promise is that it’ll be one hell of a ride.
The way I see it, the things worth doing are crazy. If it wasn’t, then somebody would have already done it. And I genuinely believe that nobody has done what we’re trying to do.
Why Now?
This is a general response to the feelings of:
- I expected Anytype to just get better, not that I have to switch to a new product.
- I’ve wasted all this time on Anytype being subpar, now I have to wait even longer.
- Why didn’t you make Anytype like Anytwo this since the beginning?
This feeling hits home, believe me. You’ve put hundreds or thousands of hours into your knowledge base and it just might not pan out in the end. We know it’s frustrating and we empathise with you because we are in this exact same emotional space—not only as users of Anytype, but as the builders of it.
If we could wave a magic wand and have it our way, then Anytype would be Anytwo. But the reality is, it couldn’t be—at least not back then.
When this project first started many years ago in 2019, local-first software barely even existed—it was a vision more than a reality. Our team literally had to build our own sync engine to prove that this technology could even work. Then we had to find a product use case to show that this technology could also deliver value to users. Then we had to grow a community who stood behind us and told us where we’re going wrong. It has been thousands of lessons over the years—failed experiments, wrong ideas, misguided architecture, and just poor decisions.
But to us, none of that was wasted. It’s the cost of doing something that nobody else has done. It’s the cost of, dare I say, innovation. Not only has our technology gotten better from all our learnings over the years, but we as builders have gotten better. At the same time, the world did not stand still while we were building. AI changed everything in the software landscape, and with it, so did the expectation of users, businesses, institutions, and the world at large.
What we’re building with Anytwo is possible because of the hard earned lessons and mistakes we’ve made. Are we going to make more? Absolutely, you can count on it. But you can also count on us getting better. It’s just a question of if we’re getting better fast enough for you.