Notion Business, 8 seats → Docmost, self-hosted
Switch. At $50 an hour, Docmost saves you $3,910 over 3 years.
Worth doing only if your hour is worth less than
$182.09/hrBelow that rate, moving to Docmost pays for itself inside 3 years. Above it, your time is worth more than the saving, and you should stay on Notion Business.
Every figure on this page updates as you move these. Most comparisons of this kind quietly assume your time is free and your team never changes size.
What you pay now
| Notion Business $20.00/month × 8 seats, billed annual | $160.00 |
| Every month | $160.00 |
What the escape costs
| Vultr vc2-1c-2gb 1 vCPU · 2 GB RAM · 55 GB disk · 2 TB transfer · $300 of credit for your first 30 days via our referral link | $10.00 |
| Backblaze B2 backup 40 GB at $0.00695/GB/month | $0.28 |
| Your time 0.6 h/month keeping it patched and backed up | $30.00 |
| Every month | $40.28 |
| Migration, once 8 hours of your time, our estimate | $400.00 |
The same box elsewhere, if you already have an account. The arithmetic above uses the cheapest.
- Vultr $10.00 vc2-1c-2gb · used above · $300 of credit for your first 30 days
- Linode $12.00 Linode 2GB
- DigitalOcean $12.00 1 vCPU · 2 GB
The difference
| Saved each month | $119.72 |
| After one year | $1,037 |
| After 3 years | $3,910 |
Or don't run it yourself
PikaPods runs Docmost from $2.80/month. Runs the same open-source software, applies updates, and takes daily encrypted backups to storage you own. The maintenance hours drop to zero, because not spending them is the entire product.
| PikaPods Docmost their published minimum for this app | $2.80 |
| Your time nothing per month; they patch it and back it up | $0.00 |
| Every month | $2.80 |
| Migration, once 4 hours — half our estimate for the self-hosted route, since there is no server to build | $200.00 |
| After 3 years, against Notion Business | $5,459 |
At $50 an hour that saves $5,459 over 3 years, against $3,910 for running it yourself.
That figure is PikaPods's own minimum for Docmost and rises with the CPU, memory and storage you give it — it is not the same allocation as the Vultr box priced above, and a busy install will cost more. Verified 19 Oct 2026 from their catalogue.
What you give up, and what you get
You lose
- Notion databases, relations and rollups entirely
- Notion AI
- The maturity that comes from a decade of use
You gain
- Real-time collaborative editing, which Outline does not have
- Spaces and permissions built for teams rather than bolted on
- AGPL-3.0 and free seats at a tier where Notion charges $20 each
Read this before you decide
- Docmost is younger than Outline and moves faster. If you want the settled option in this category, read the Outline page.
- It has a Notion importer, which is why the estimate is 8 hours rather than more. Verify nested pages after import — that is where imports usually lose things.
- Some features are behind an enterprise edition. Check which side of that line you need before migrating.
Other projects that replace Notion
AppFlowy are catalogued on OpenStore, a curated directory of open-source software with notes on what each project replaces and how actively it is maintained. This site prices the exit; that one browses the market. Weighing the options before committing hours to a migration is time better spent than time spent monitoring a server you chose too quickly. Entries verified 19 Oct 2026.
Is the project alive?
docmost/docmost has 22,031 stars, was last pushed 1 day ago, and last cut a release (v0.96.0) 41 days ago. Licence: AGPL-3.0. We rate it active. We do not publish comparisons against software that has gone dormant, however good the arithmetic looks.
Every number above comes from one of these, on the date shown. The Notion figure is the site's own wording: “Business Recommended $20 per member / month”.
| Notion pricing page | 19 Oct 2026 |
| Vultr plan catalogue affiliate link | 19 Oct 2026 |
| Backblaze B2 pricing | 3 Sept 2026 |
| docmost/docmost activity | 19 Oct 2026 |
Hosting requirements (1 vCPU, 2 GB RAM, 30 GB disk), migration hours and maintenance hours are our estimates, not measurements. They are the numbers most worth arguing with, so we put them where you can see them. The cheapest plan meeting those requirements is selected automatically from Vultr, Vultr and Linode's live catalogues.