Notion Plus, 1 seat → SiYuan, self-hosted
Stay. At $50 an hour, SiYuan costs you $844 more over 3 years.
This one only pays off if your hour is worth less than
$8.64/hrThat is below the minimum wage almost anywhere this software is run. In practice it means stay on Notion Plus: the subscription is cheaper than the hours SiYuan would take, and it is not close.
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 Plus $10.00/month × 1 seat, billed annual | $10.00 |
| Every month | $10.00 |
What the escape costs
| Linode Nanode 1GB 1 vCPU · 1 GB RAM · 25 GB disk · 0.98 TB transfer | $5.00 |
| Backblaze B2 backup 15 GB at $0.00695/GB/month | $0.10 |
| Your time 0.4 h/month keeping it patched and backed up | $20.00 |
| Every month | $25.10 |
| Migration, once 6 hours of your time, our estimate | $300.00 |
The same box elsewhere, if you already have an account. The arithmetic above uses the cheapest.
- Vultr $5.00 vc2-1c-1gb · $300 of credit for your first 30 days
- Linode $5.00 Nanode 1GB · used above
- DigitalOcean $6.00 1 vCPU · 1 GB
The difference
| Saved each month | −$15.10 |
| After one year | −$481 |
| After 3 years | −$844 |
What you give up, and what you get
You lose
- Notion databases, relations and rollups
- Real-time collaboration — SiYuan is built for one person
- A polished web app; SiYuan is a desktop-first tool with a server mode
You gain
- Block-level linking and backlinks that Notion does not do as well
- Local Markdown files you own outright
- A binary small enough to run on the cheapest box any provider sells
Read this before you decide
- We expect this page to say stay, and it is here for that reason. One seat of Notion Plus is $120 a year, which is very hard to beat once your own hours are counted.
- SiYuan is single-user by design. If anyone else needs access, this comparison does not apply to you.
- Some SiYuan features are behind a paid cloud subscription of its own. The self-hosted core does not include them.
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?
siyuan-note/siyuan has 46,835 stars, was last pushed 0 days ago, and last cut a release (v3.8.7) 5 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: “Plus $10 per member / month”.
| Notion pricing page | 19 Oct 2026 |
| Linode plan catalogue | 19 Oct 2026 |
| Backblaze B2 pricing | 3 Sept 2026 |
| siyuan-note/siyuan activity | 19 Oct 2026 |
Hosting requirements (1 vCPU, 1 GB RAM, 20 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 Linode, Vultr and Linode's live catalogues.