Flowplan

Documents, databases, whiteboards and a daily journal for teams. Open source, self-hosted in one container – or hosted in Germany. AI optional, also completely local.

English · Deutsch

Website · Documentation · Self-hosting · Hosted version · Discord · Changelog

At a glance

• Everything in one page tree – documents, databases with ten views, whiteboards, notebooks for handwriting, a daily journal, projects with tickets and sprints, surveys.
• Completely open source under the AGPL-3.0 – no closed enterprise edition, no features behind a licence key.
• One container with SQLite – no Postgres, no Redis, no external search service. Or hosted in Germany at app.flowplan.org.
• Optional AI – off by default; admins switch it on per feature and per person, completely local with Ollama or with a key for OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini or any OpenAI-compatible service. You decide which pages it may read.
• Private by design – no tracking, permissions down to a single record, two-factor sign-in, encryption of files and backups with your own key.
• Your data stays portable – Markdown with frontmatter, CSV and ZIP, scheduled exports to S3 or Git, import from Notion, AppFlowy, Obsidian, Jira and Trello.

The interface is available in English, German and French – further languages can be added as JSON catalogues (Languages and translations); the documentation is in English and German.

Contents: Write · Databases · AI · Whiteboards and journal · Handwriting · Home page · Together · Admins and integrations · Quick start · Development · Community

Write and think

A block editor that stays out of the way. Type / for the block menu or use Markdown shortcuts; long pages keep their table of contents beside the text.

Calculate right in your notes – type a calculation and =, press Tab for the result; expand, factor or solve a term, draw function graphs and vectors in 2D and 3D.

• Headings, lists, tasks with assignee and due date, tables, code with highlighting, Mermaid diagrams, KaTeX formulas
• Callouts like GitHub alerts, toggles, up to three columns, embeds and link cards, synced blocks
• Footnotes, citations with a bibliography (DOI, BibTeX, Zotero), Pandoc-style in the Markdown export
• Edit a page as Markdown and apply it back in one step
• Show authors – who wrote what, in colour
• Right-to-left text for Arabic, Hebrew and Persian
• Voice notes with transcription, photo annotation, focus mode with a word goal
• Version history with comparisons and single-paragraph restore, print and PDF layout
• Answers pasted from ChatGPT keep their formulas, lists and tables

Organise with databases

Table, board, calendar, timeline, gallery, list, feed, chart, form and sprint views on the same records – with relations, rollups and formulas.

• 23 property types including formula, relation, rollup and AI property
• Filter groups, sorting, grouping in three levels, swimlanes, calculations per column
• Recurring dates and reminders, record templates, record pages with their own layout, permissions per record
• Projects and tickets (optional, per database): ticket numbers like WEB-123 linked in text, subtasks and epics, sprints with backlog, burndown and velocity, automations, status workflows, WIP limits, time tracking, Git connection for GitHub, GitLab and Gitea, dashboards
• Surveys with 19 question types, conditions and results – every answer is a record
• Import from CSV, Jira and Trello; Markdown with YAML frontmatter in both directions (Obsidian-friendly)

AI, optional

AI in Flowplan is off until an admin switches it on – and then only for the features and people they choose. It runs completely locally with Ollama, so no text leaves your server, or with a key for OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini or any OpenAI-compatible service. Admins can also let everyone bring their own key instead.

• Writing assistant – improve, rephrase, shorten, expand, translate, change the tone, or write from a prompt (⌘ J, /ai).
• Summaries of pages, database views, records and voice notes – with key points and open tasks.
• Ask your workspace – full-text and, optionally, semantic search with embeddings.
• AI in databases – AI properties that fill themselves, fill in fields, create a database from a description.
• You decide what it reads – exclude workspaces, spaces or pages for yourself; managers can close pages to AI for everyone. PIN-locked journals and private records are never read.
• Keys stay secret – stored encrypted, never shown again, bound to the provider address.

See AI in the documentation.

Whiteboards and a journal

Handwriting and notebooks

Write with the Apple Pencil, another tablet pen, a mouse or a finger – in notebooks, on PDFs and in the middle of a document.

Notebooks are a page kind of their own: sheets of blank, lined, grid, dotted, Cornell or music paper, A4 or Letter, light or dark, with previews to jump to and reorder them. A PDF opens as a notebook to write on page by page, and every notebook exports as a PDF with the handwriting as vectors.

• Pen with pressure, highlighter, erasers for whole strokes or parts, lasso to move, resize and recolour, text and a laser pointer; three favourite pens
• Hold the pen still at the end of a stroke and it snaps into a straight line, rectangle, ellipse, triangle or diamond
• Once you write with a pen, only the pen draws: fingers scroll and zoom, a resting hand leaves no marks
• In the iPhone and iPad app, handwriting is recognised on the device: search finds it, and Convert to text turns selected strokes into typed text

See Notebooks and handwriting.

A home page of your own

Arrange the home page from 20 widgets – tasks to tick off, agenda, journal today, focus timer, habits, counters, a scratchpad, a database view, links and more. Drag, resize and set them up per workspace, give the page a header colour, gradient or cover, an emoji, spacing and a background; workspace owners set the default for their members. See Customize your home page.

Together, everywhere

Live editing with cursors (Yjs/CRDT), comments and inline threads, mentions, reactions, suggested changes, an inbox, e-mail digests and Web Push. Share a page with one person, with guests through links (optionally with password and expiry date), publish it on the web, or turn it into a form. Flowplan installs as an app and works offline; desktop apps for macOS, Windows and Linux are at flowplan.org/download – with quick capture from any app (shorthand like morgen 15 Uhr #kunde @anna !hoch, links, files, screen regions and voice notes, an offline queue; docs). For iPhone and iPad there is a beta app on TestFlight, for Android an app to download without the Play Store (it updates itself) – with widgets, notification buttons, Siri and Shortcuts, sharing from other apps, the Apple Pencil and windows on the iPad (Apps). Their notifications travel through the open-source Flowplan push relay, end-to-end encrypted: they show their text, while the relay, Apple and Google only handle ciphertext.

For admins and integrations

• E-mail and password, passkeys (WebAuthn), two-factor sign-in with an authenticator app (enforceable for everyone or admins only)
• Single sign-on with OpenID Connect; SSO groups control roles and groups in workspaces
• Permissions per space, page and record; guests; audit log; session management
• Encryption of files, backups and exports with your own key; secrets such as AI keys stored encrypted

• Limits per workspace and per person (storage, own workspaces, upload size)
• Continuous backup to S3 with Litestream, scheduled backups and Markdown exports to S3 or Git
• Full-text search including OCR for scanned PDFs and Office files
• Prometheus metrics, health endpoint, the running version and commit at a glance
• Docker image for amd64 and arm64, a Helm chart for Kubernetes

• REST API with read or write tokens, signed webhooks
• OpenAPI description of every instance (/api/openapi.json, readable at /api/docs; for signed-in people and API tokens, public with FLOWPLAN_PUBLIC_API_DOCS=true) with generated TypeScript and Python clients
• n8n community node (n8n-nodes-flowplan)
• MCP server for Claude, ChatGPT and other assistants – with the person's own permissions only
• Calendar subscriptions and two-way CalDAV, Git connection, web clipper
• Import from Notion, AppFlowy, Obsidian, Markdown, HTML, CSV, Jira and Trello (moving guide)

Quick start (Docker)

You need Docker and a domain with HTTPS in front (Caddy, Traefik, nginx, Coolify …).

curl -O https://raw.githubusercontent.com/yannicschuller/flowplan/main/compose.yaml
curl -o .env https://raw.githubusercontent.com/yannicschuller/flowplan/main/.env.example
# edit .env: at least APP_URL (optionally OIDC_* and SMTP_*)
docker compose up -d

Open your domain: a new instance offers Create account – the first account administers the instance.

• Local AI (optional): docker compose --profile ai up -d starts Ollama next to Flowplan; set OLLAMA_URL=http://ollama:11434 and choose a model under Administration → AI (AI).
• Kubernetes: the Helm chart in deploy/helm/flowplan (one pod with a volume, as SQLite needs).
• Single sign-on: register a confidential web client at your OIDC provider with the redirect URI https://<your-domain>/api/auth/callback (Sign-in).

All data lives in the volume on /app/data. Run exactly one container per data directory (SQLite).

The image is published to the GitHub Container Registry for linux/amd64 and linux/arm64:

ghcr.io/yannicschuller/flowplan:latest     # the latest release
ghcr.io/yannicschuller/flowplan:1.2.3      # a fixed release (also :1.2 and :1)
ghcr.io/yannicschuller/flowplan:beta       # the latest manual build, not for production

Images are built only for a release or by hand: Actions → Docker image → Run workflow builds :beta from the chosen branch (with a version, it rebuilds that release instead). Every :beta image can be rolled out on Coolify automatically: set the repository secrets COOLIFY_WEBHOOK (the resource's deploy webhook) and COOLIFY_TOKEN (an API token with deploy permission), and let the Coolify resource use the :beta image. See Coolify and reverse proxies.

More in the documentation: Installation · Configuration · Storage, S3 and backups · Operations

Development

Node.js 22.13 or newer (the Docker image and CI use Node 26).

npm ci
cp .env.example .env.local
npm run dev        # http://127.0.0.1:3000

Development mode also offers Open local workspace, a shared local example account. Production mode has no such access.

Command	What it does
npm run dev	Development server
npm run build / npm start	Production build and server
npm run typecheck	TypeScript
npm test	Core tests (Node test runner, temporary data directories that are removed afterwards)
npm run test:e2e	Browser tests (Playwright, desktop and mobile); start a server with its own FLOWPLAN_DATA_DIR and set TEST_BASE_URL
npm run check:standalone	Runs the standalone build like the container and checks health, persistence and restore
npm run quality	Accessibility and performance budgets on the production build: sign-in and a seeded workspace at 1280 and 390 px – no serious axe findings, nothing focusable inside aria-hidden, no horizontal scrolling, JavaScript (gzip) and LCP within budget
npm run test:visual	Screenshots of key screens against the baselines in tests/visual/__screenshots__ (npm run test:visual:update writes new ones); not part of npm test

Stack: Next.js 16 (App Router), React 19, TypeScript, SQLite (node:sqlite), TipTap/ProseMirror with Yjs, Zod and Playwright. The documentation lives in flowplan-docs (docs.flowplan.org), the website in flowplan-website (flowplan.org), the desktop apps in flowplan-desktop; this repository contains the app, the Helm chart (deploy/helm) and the n8n node (integrations/n8n).

Community

Questions, ideas, show-and-tell or just a hello: join the Flowplan Discord. Bugs and feature requests are best filed as GitHub issues, so nothing gets lost.

Contributing, security and licence

Contributions are welcome – see CONTRIBUTING.md. Please report security issues privately as described in SECURITY.md.

Flowplan is free software under the GNU Affero General Public License v3.0. If you run a modified version as a network service, you must make its source code available to its users. The n8n node in integrations/n8n is MIT-licensed, as n8n requires for community nodes.