I have used it on a personal basis for around 3 years. Big fan, of course. Never collabed though. Now my job is looking at a new software for collaboration and notetaking. Notion and Anytype have come up as options. We are around 250 people. Does anyone have experience working with Anytype in large teams? Grateful for feedback.
It’s not ready. I’ve tried with multiple small teams (from 2 to 10 people) and that’s not ready yet (too unstable and missing critical collaboration features). For a 250 person team, you’ll have to wait until the release of 1.0, there’s no way around it (I’m not part of the Anytype team, but I’ve been a daily user since 2023, and I have a feeling 1.0 will be for the second half of 2027).
We hope it’d be before then, but it’s impossible to forecast these things. 
An honest self-assessment of the situation today: Anytype is only suitable for small teams. However, as mentioned in this reddit post and as seen in our latest roadmap, we are actively prioritising features for organisational usage. This ranges from user management, authorisation, integrations, etc. Beyond that, we’re also working on essential areas such as reminders, object discussions, general stability, performance, and quality-of-life upgrades.
In our own dogfooding (our own team using Anytype), we’ve been able to fully deprecate Slack and use it as our primary communication and knowledge base tool. However, it does have its pains.
Could you elaborate a bit on your plans for organizations? As an EU school, we need to keep in mind data privacy. Therefore, we were hoping that one day Anytype could be a universal tool for us to work as colleagues and with students. Would a local-only or self-hosted setup work with that in mind?
Overall, I’d say that school usage would likely be an easier bar to reach when it comes to organisational needs, but it depends on the type of school/class setup. Do you have specific requirements that you’re looking for in a tool? If so, I’d love to know them and potentially work towards developing solutions.
Local-only would not be a good idea due to the challenges around keeping data synced across many users and devices. Self-hosted could definitely work, however the school would need to be capable in running their own infrastructure. However, even using Anytype as local-first (synced via Any Network) would be a perfectly reasonable solution to meet security and privacy needs. With everything end-to-end encrypted, it means that nobody can access the data (that includes Anytype itself) besides those given permission. Additionally, local-first also means that all the data is always accessible on device (works offline) and you can’t be locked in/out.
When it comes to plans for organisations, right now there are various features we need to work on but it’d be too extensive to detail them here. Some high level points:
- Space management. If you’re an organisation, you will have many members creating multiple spaces, you want to have an overview of them with some management capabilities.
- Authorisation. Many organisations use single-sign on (SSO) to manage their member’s accounts, this way you can more simply manage access rights.
- Integrations. Typically organisations will have other tools that need to be integrated, from CRMs to file systems. There may also be higher requirements on APIs.
- Cross-space functionality. Organisations may want to standardise systems, processes, templates, etc. across their multiple spaces. So having features that take into account cross-space workflows would be important.
Thanks so much for your quick and differenciated answer.
Our students get iPads from a pool of school devices. All devices (also teacher devices) are logged into the same Wifi. So students are likely to get a different device each time. From the top of my head, a great setup would be: some kind of master device (teacher iPad/Laptop) where Spaces are created and managed. A guest access (shareable via QR code, for example) would allow students to edit certain objects within the space.
Once our students (some other school have that already) have their own iPads, accounts would be an option. That’s why I was asking about the host side. Would accounts be manageable within a local-only P2P network as well or would this require at least a self-hosted version?
Is there a reason why you would want to use local-only and P2P networking for your use case? I’m trying to understand the operating parameters of why you would want this method of syncing. Is there a specific security, privacy, or compliance goal you’re trying to meet?
This use case is already possible today. The master account/teacher can create a space and set it up however they like. They can then share the invitation link and all the students can enter the space with editor rights. There is no ability to have granular permissions (you can edit object A but not object B), however we do plan to implement features such as locking objects and deletion prevention.
If there are objects that you want to prevent being tampered with, you can always have them in a separate space and then duplicate as needed into the spaces with students in them.
Well, it’s way less of a hassle. For syncing within the Anytype network we’d have to pay and make sure, we have an AVV. For self-hosting we’d have to bring in a server and install AnyType (which, even with quite some experience in self-hosting ist still not that easy). That’s why I’d love to go with P2P, as I see it as a major strength of Anytype compared to other competing software.
Sure. But is there a guest function where guests don’t have to have their user setup on the device? What would be great for us would be guest access with easy “logout” so that the next student who gets the iPad won’t be able to make any changes. Or as an alternative: time limits for sharing (e.g. 45 minutes).
I see, so the motivations are that you don’t want to pay and go through the data compliance process. Thanks for sharing that feedback. Local-only and P2P is literally possible in the scenario you’ve described, but it obviously it’s going to have many notably drawbacks that I’m not sure teachers and students would put up with. Besides performance and stability, you will have no backups unless you manually manage that yourself. Your teachers would only be able to use school devices with local-only mode and when they are using Anytype away from P2P network, there are going to be gaps in real-time collaboration syncing. This can lead to a lot of challenges when working from multiple devices, personal devices, being away from school WIFI routers, etc.
It’s worth giving it a try, we’d love to learn more about how it goes.
These scenarios sound complex for a local-only P2P setup, e.g. how would you be managing ‘master’ spaces and ‘master’ accounts in an environment where everything is peer-to-peer? In short, what you’ve described is not possible today with guests accounts.
Thanks for elaborating on the technical aspects. I haven’t tried anything with regards to collaboration myself yet. My understanding is that everyone opening the Anytype app is prompted with a message about creating their own user and first space, right? So “guests” are always not really guests but invited users? Or is there a way to share a space with others and they just join (like in Google Sheets, Miro.com) with a random username?
I see the drawbacks and I’m just in a conceptional phase right now, figuring out what is possible and will be possible. It’s not so much about us not wanting to pay for services, but school budgets are often tight and bound to certain budget-buckets.
That’s an important point, yes. So I was first thinking about working with my students. So they will always be there when I’m as the P2P space owner am there. Obviously they couldn’t work or access when home. That would be a downside definitely.
The key difference here is end-to-end encryption of all spaces in Anytype, which is why it’s secure regardless of which syncing mode you choose. When sharing a space with others, in order for another device to access the space, it needs to have a key. In order to have a key, it needs to have an account. With other web-based apps that you’ve described, you are accessing the data much like a webpage—which is an entirely different security and privacy model.
Unfortunately, there would be a lot of complications that arise with ‘guests’ and it would seem to only solve for quite an esoteric use case in my point of view, so it’s unlikely something we’d work on.
Yes, it would be a big downside. In my opinion, you’d be much better off either self-hosting or finding another solution.