AppFlowy vs Capture by RATdeck: Which Is Better in 2026?

Notion is wonderful right up until you remember that everything you've ever written lives on someone else's servers. AppFlowy is the open-source answer to that unease: an AI workspace for notes, wikis and projects that promises you can 'achieve more without losing control of your data.'

One workspace, many shapes

AppFlowy integrates projects, wikis and team collaboration into a single platform, and like the best of this category it's built on flexible building blocks. You organize and visualize information through custom views, blocks and properties, so the same underlying data can appear as a doc, a board, a table or whatever fits the task. If you've used Notion, the mental model will feel instantly familiar — just open, and yours.

AI that can run locally

AppFlowy bakes in AI assistance for answering questions, improving your writing and auto-filling databases. The standout twist is that you can run local AI models directly on your own machine — so you get modern AI help without shipping your private notes off to a third-party model. For anyone who's nervous about feeding sensitive work into a cloud AI, that local-first option is a genuine differentiator.

Own your data, literally

This is AppFlowy's whole reason for being. It's fully open source, works offline, and can be self-hosted anywhere, so there's no vendor lock-in and no anxiety about a company changing its terms or vanishing with your knowledge base. Your workspace is portable and genuinely yours in a way closed tools can never quite match.

Customization without limits

Because it's open source, AppFlowy is endlessly tweakable — a community continually extends it, and technical teams can adapt it to their exact needs. It's the difference between renting a workspace and owning one you can remodel.

Who it's for

AppFlowy suits teams and individuals who prioritize data privacy, customization and collaborative workspaces — anyone looking for a Notion-style tool that doesn't require handing over their information. Privacy-conscious professionals, developers and self-hosting enthusiasts feel especially at home.

Pricing

AppFlowy is freemium with a free tier, and because it's open source you can also self-host it at no software cost. That means you can get a capable, private workspace running without paying a subscription at all — a rare thing in this category.

Bottom line: AppFlowy is the open-source, privacy-first workspace for people who love what Notion does but want to own their data — customizable, self-hostable, and even able to run AI locally.

Capture by RATdeck is a free full page screenshot and screen capture Chrome extension that takes a clean, high-resolution screenshot of an entire web page in one click, even very long scrolling pages. It automatically scrolls the page and stitches everything into a single image, so you never have to take and glue together several partial screenshots again.

As soon as the capture is done, a built-in editor opens so you can mark it up straight away. Add arrows, boxes, text labels and numbered callouts to point at exactly what matters. Use the blur and pixelate tools to hide emails, names, prices, tokens or any other private details before you share. Crop the result to the part you need, then copy it to your clipboard or save it as PNG, WebP or PDF.

There is no watermark and there are no ads. Free full-page capture needs no account and no sign-up. Privacy is a core design choice: your screenshots are processed locally on your own computer and are not uploaded to any server.

Who is it for? Capture is built for people who share screenshots for work every day: developers and QA testers writing bug reports, designers giving and receiving design feedback, marketers and agencies sending client updates, support teams writing help articles, teachers and creators making tutorials, and anyone who needs to save receipts, orders, invoices and other records from the web.

Capture runs in Google Chrome and other Chromium browsers including Microsoft Edge, Brave and Opera.

Pricing is freemium. The core full-page screenshot, annotation, blur and export tools are free. Capture Pro costs $3 per month or $12 per year and adds visible-area and selected-area capture, screenshot history and projects, before/after comparison, shareable reports, and a Guide/SOP builder that turns a series of screenshots into a step-by-step guide. Screen recording is available as an opt-in Beta.

If you are looking for a free, private alternative to GoFullPage, FireShot, Awesome Screenshot, Nimbus Screenshot or Lightshot, Capture by RATdeck gives you full-page capture plus a proper annotation editor without watermarks or forced accounts.

Capture is made by Raja at RATdeck, a bootstrapped solo founder in India building simple, private browser tools.

What problem it solves

Taking a screenshot of a long web page usually means stitching several partial captures, then opening a separate editor to annotate or blur private details, and many free tools add watermarks or upload your images. Capture does full-page capture, annotation, blur and export in one private, local extension.

Alternatives & competitors

A free, private alternative to GoFullPage, FireShot, Awesome Screenshot, Nimbus Screenshot and Lightshot.