Anytype: Private Second Brain

At a glance

Anytype is a free, end-to-end encrypted, local-first knowledge management app built by a Swiss non-profit association. Think Notion’s flexibility plus Obsidian’s data sovereignty, on every platform except the web. As of May 2026 it is on v0.54 stable, has 7,500+ GitHub stars, $13.4M in funding (Aug 2023, led by Balderton), and a thriving release cadence. Best for privacy-conscious solo knowledge workers; weaker for teams that need real-time collaboration or third-party integrations.

Beginners in AI › General Technology › Software Tools › Anytype

If you have spent any time thinking about where your notes actually live, who can read them, and what happens to your second brain if a tech company gets acquired, you have already done the hard part of understanding why Anytype exists. Most popular note apps store your data on their servers, monetize your attention, and tie your knowledge to a company you do not control. Anytype is built on the opposite premise: your data lives on your device, only you hold the keys, and the company behind it cannot read what you write even if it wanted to. This guide walks through what Anytype actually is, how it works, what it costs, who it is for, and where it falls short.

What is Anytype, in plain English?

Anytype is a free knowledge management app. You can use it as a note-taker, a personal database, a journal, a project manager, a personal CRM, a reading log, or all of those at once. Functionally, it sits between two well-known categories: Notion‘s flexible block-and-database editor, and Obsidian‘s “your files belong to you” philosophy. Anytype borrows the best of both. You get drag-and-drop blocks, rich databases, and graph views; you also get encrypted storage on your own device with sync that nobody else can decrypt.

The defining mental shift compared to Notion is that everything in Anytype is an object. A note is an object. A person you know is an object. A book you read is an object. Each object has a Type, and Types can have Relations to other Types. Once that clicks, you can build something closer to a Wikipedia for your own second brain: people linked to projects linked to meetings linked to action items, all queryable. It takes about a week of daily use for the model to feel natural.

“Second brain”: a personal knowledge system, usually a software app, where you offload thoughts, references, decisions, and reading notes so future-you can find them. The term was popularized by Tiago Forte. Anytype, Notion, Obsidian, Logseq, and Roam are the five tools most commonly used to build one.

Why does Anytype exist, and who is behind it?

This is where the original Anytype story gets misreported. Anytype is not run by a German foundation. The legal entity is “Any”, a Swiss Association (Verein) registered in Switzerland, with a GmbH operating subsidiary in Berlin that employs the team. The public GitHub organization name reflects this: github.com/anyproto is labeled “Any Association.” The Swiss Association structure is unusual for a software company; it functions as a non-profit collective ownership vehicle, while the GmbH handles employment and commerce.

The founding team is led by CEO Anton Pronkin and co-founder Zhanna Sharipova, joined by co-founders Roman Khafizianov and Anton Barulenkov. The product was in closed beta from 2020 to 2023 and launched out of open beta in 2023. In August of that year, the project closed a $13.4 million funding round led by Balderton Capital, with notable angels including Trent McConaghy (Ocean Protocol), Jutta Steiner (Polkadot), Adam Wiggins (Heroku, Muse), and Peter van Hardenberg (Ink & Switch, the lab that coined “local-first software”). That last name matters: van Hardenberg’s involvement signals that the deep technical vision aligns with the local-first research that inspired the whole category.

Funding gives Anytype runway, but the team also runs a freemium membership model so the product can sustain itself long-term. That balance is unusual: most well-funded productivity apps either stay free until they pivot to enterprise sales (Notion, until very recently), or charge from day one (Obsidian Sync). Anytype is trying to thread a third option.

How does Anytype actually keep your data private?

This is the part most reviews skip. Anytype uses its own open-source sync protocol called any-sync, which is fundamentally different from how Notion or Google Docs syncs work. Three pieces matter:

Local-first storage. Every Anytype object is stored on your device first, in an encrypted local database. The cloud (Anytype Network) is optional and only holds encrypted backups, not the actual content. If your internet drops, Anytype still works.
End-to-end encryption (E2EE) before anything leaves your device. The Anytype servers, even if compromised, see only ciphertext. No employee of Any Association can read your notes. There is no “support reset my password” flow because they have no way to access your data.
CRDT-backed peer-to-peer sync. A CRDT (Conflict-free Replicated Data Type) is a math structure that lets two devices edit the same data offline and merge their changes without conflicts. Anytype uses CRDTs over signed Directed Acyclic Graphs so your phone and your laptop can each go offline, edit notes, and reconcile cleanly when they reconnect.

Your master key is derived from a BIP39 mnemonic phrase, the same 12-to-24-word seed-phrase standard cryptocurrency wallets use. It is stored in your OS’s keychain (Apple Keychain on Mac, Credentials Manager on Windows, GNOME Keyring on Linux). If you lose that phrase and your devices, your encrypted backup is unrecoverable. This is the price of true privacy: there is no central authority that can reset access for you.

What does Anytype cost?

The app itself is free forever for personal use. Paid tiers buy you more encrypted backup storage on the Anytype Network and more shared-space collaboration slots. Pricing as of May 2026:

Tier	Price	Network storage	Best for
Free	$0	1 GB	Solo, light use, or self-hosters
Builder	$99 / year	128 GB	Heavy individual user with media-rich notes
Co-Creator	$299 / 3 years	256 GB	Committed long-term user, locks in a reserved short username
Business	Custom quote	Custom	Teams

Importantly, every feature of the app works on the free tier. You only need to pay if your encrypted backup exceeds 1 GB or you need more than three shared spaces. If you self-host (run your own any-sync node via the team-maintained Docker image), you can skip the paid tiers entirely and use Anytype for free with unlimited backup storage forever. Self-hosting docs are at doc.anytype.io.

How does Anytype compare to Notion, Obsidian, Logseq, and Roam?

Direct comparisons from people who used all of them (the most useful one being Android Police’s 30-day test of Notion, Obsidian, Capacities, and Anytype from October 2025) generally land in the same place: Anytype wins on data sovereignty and mobile experience, and loses on integrations and team features.

Need	Best tool	Why
Private personal notes	Anytype	Only one with true E2E encryption on built-in sync
Real-time team collaboration	Notion	Multiplayer editing, comments, mentions, AI features
Plain markdown files on disk	Obsidian	Your notes ARE markdown files in a folder; Anytype’s are not
Outline-first daily-notes flow	Logseq or Roam	Built around the outline; Anytype is page-first
Polished native mobile	Anytype	Best mobile PKM in the Android Police 30-day test
3rd-party integrations (Zapier, Slack)	Notion	Anytype has none yet; Notion is the integration leader
Massive plugin ecosystem	Obsidian	Thousands of community plugins; Anytype has zero

What works well, and what frustrates new users?

After reading dozens of forum threads and reviews from 2025-2026, the praise and complaints fall into very consistent patterns.

Praise that comes up repeatedly

Speed. Local-first means no loading spinners. Even with thousands of objects, Anytype feels instant in a way Notion does not.
Mobile parity. The iOS and Android apps were singled out as the best PKM mobile experience in the Android Police comparison.
The slash-command editor. Type “/” anywhere and pick a block type, the same gesture Notion users expect.
The graph view. A live visual map of how your notes connect, similar to Roam Research.
Object-and-relation modeling. Once it clicks, building a personal CRM or research wiki takes minutes.

Complaints that come up repeatedly

Steep learning curve. The Object-Type-Relation model takes about a week to feel natural. Many new users abandon Anytype in the first three days because Notion’s flatter model is just easier to grok.
No real-time collaboration. Edits are reconciled by sync, not multiplayer’d live. If two people edit the same paragraph at the same time, you get conflict resolution, not a Google-Docs-style cursor.
Zero third-party integrations. No Zapier, no Slack bot, no Google Drive picker. Heavy automation users notice immediately.
No web client. Every device needs the native app. There is no anytype.io/app you can log into in a browser.
Mobile gaps. Search inside Sets and Collections is desktop-only as of mid-2026. Homescreen widgets and embed-block rendering are partial.
The recovery phrase is your problem. Lose the BIP39 mnemonic AND your devices, and your backup is gone. There is no Anytype-side reset.

How do you install Anytype and get to your first useful page?

Go to anytype.io and download for your OS. macOS, Windows, and Linux desktops are all officially supported. iOS and Android are on their respective app stores.
Open the app and create a new account. The app will generate a recovery phrase (a BIP39 mnemonic of 12 to 24 words). Save this somewhere offline. A piece of paper in a locked drawer is fine. Without it, you cannot restore your backup to a new device.
Choose sync mode. Default is Anytype’s free Network tier (1 GB encrypted backup). You can switch to a self-hosted node later by editing config, or stay local-only with no cloud at all.
Create your first Space. Spaces are workspaces; you can have many. Most people start with one called “Personal” and add a separate Work space later.
Inside the Space, hit the “+” button to create your first Object. Pick a Type (Note, Page, Task, Book, Person; there are many built-in Types, and you can create your own).
Try the slash command. Type “/” inside an object and you’ll see every available block type (heading, list, image, embed, callout). The slash menu is how you build pages.
Optional, but recommended: connect your Anytype to Claude or other AI assistants via the team’s new anytype-mcp server. This lets your AI read and edit your Anytype data securely. See our MCP explainer for what that protocol is.

Is Anytype actually open-source?

This is a subtle but important question. Anytype is source-available, not open-source in the strict OSI sense. The code lives publicly at github.com/anyproto under the Any Source Available License 1.0 (ASAL 1.0). You can read the source, audit it, run it yourself, contribute patches, and fork it for personal use. What you cannot do under ASAL 1.0 is what you can do with a fully permissive license like MIT or Apache: commercialize a competing product based on it.

For most users, the practical difference does not matter. You still get to inspect the encryption code, run your own backup node, and survive any future business pivot by the company. The difference matters more to commercial open-source advocates than to end users. If the distinction matters to you, our FOSS Glossary has the full definition of source-available vs OSI-approved licenses.

What if Anytype shuts down?

This is the right question to ask of any private app. Anytype’s local-first model means your data does not disappear with the company. Three layers protect you:

Your data is already on your device. Even if Anytype Network goes offline tomorrow, every Object you have created is sitting in the local encrypted database on your laptop and phone.
Export to Markdown. Space Settings → Integrations → Export Space gives you a JSON-formatted dump of every Object. A community tool called AnyBlock-To-Markdown converts that verbose format into clean Markdown files compatible with Obsidian, Logseq, or any plain-text setup.
Self-host the sync node. If you are worried about company longevity, run your own any-sync node now. Then the only thing that needs to keep working is the open-source code, which will outlive the company.

Who should NOT use Anytype?

Anytype is wrong for you if any of the following are dealbreakers:

Your work needs real-time multiplayer editing on the same paragraph (use Notion).
You want plain Markdown files in a folder structure you control (use Obsidian).
Your workflow depends on Zapier, Make.com, or Slack-bot integrations (Anytype has zero).
You will only use a web browser, no native app installs (Anytype has no web client).
You manage a large team that needs admin tooling, SSO, or role-based permissions (use Notion Business or Confluence).
You hate dealing with recovery phrases (use any cloud app with a normal password reset).

Frequently asked questions about Anytype

Is Anytype really free?

Yes, the app is free forever for personal use with 1 GB of encrypted backup on the Anytype Network. Every feature works on the free tier. The paid tiers buy more backup storage and shared-space slots, not features. You can also self-host and use Anytype with unlimited backup for free.

Can I import from Notion or Obsidian?

Yes. Anytype supports Markdown import (so any Obsidian vault works) and has a dedicated Notion importer that walks through the OAuth flow and pulls your pages, databases, and blocks. The import preserves nesting; some Notion-specific features (synced blocks, AI blocks) do not translate.

Does Anytype work with Claude or other AI assistants?

As of early 2026, yes. The team shipped anytype-mcp, an open-source server that exposes your Anytype data to AI assistants that speak the Model Context Protocol. Claude can read your notes, search across objects, and draft new ones. Because the connection is local, the AI sees only what you grant it access to.

Is the company likely to survive?

Strong signals point to yes. The team raised $13.4M in 2023, ships ~6 stable releases per year, has 7,500+ stars on the main repo, and runs an active community forum with monthly Town Halls. The Swiss Association structure is designed to outlast typical startup pressures. That said, no software company has a guarantee. The self-hosting and Markdown-export paths exist precisely so you do not need to trust corporate longevity.

Is Anytype open-source?

It is source-available under the Any Source Available License 1.0 (ASAL 1.0). The code is public, auditable, self-hostable, and forkable for personal use, but it is not OSI-approved open-source in the strict sense. For most users, this is a distinction without a practical difference.

Sources and where to go deeper

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