Editorial policy

This policy describes how the AFFiNE Product Team writes, tests, fact-checks, and updates every comparison, guide, and review published on affine.pro. We publish it openly because the tools we cover compete with our own product — readers deserve to know how that conflict is handled.

Maintained by AFFiNE Product Team·Last updated June 2026·Reviewed quarterly

Who writes here

Every comparison and guide is written by a member of the AFFiNE Product Team — currently 12 engineers and designers based in Singapore, Beijing, Tokyo, and the EU. We have used productivity, PKM, whiteboard, and knowledge-base tools daily since 2020, both individually and as a distributed team. Drafts are reviewed by at least one second team member before publication, and pricing claims are independently verified by a third reviewer.

Where individual articles benefit from named expertise, we credit the author in the byline. For comparison and alternative content under /blog) the "AFFiNE Product Team" attribution reflects collective authorship by the team listed on about us.

How we test and compare

Hands-on use, 30 days minimum. Every product compared is used daily by a member of our team for at least 30 days before we commit to a verdict. We import a real workspace (typically the AFFiNE company wiki, or a 200-document PKM vault), push the tool to failure on common workflows, and document where it breaks. "Tested by reading the marketing site" is never a substitute for hands-on use.
Pricing verified against vendor public docs, monthly. All prices on comparison pages are sourced directly from the vendor's public pricing page on the publication month, and re-verified the first Monday of every month. When a vendor changes a tier mid-month, we update the affected pages within 7 days.
Feature claims tied to vendor docs. Where we state a tool does or does not support a feature, the claim is linked to or screenshotted from the vendor's own documentation. We do not rely on third-party G2 / Capterra summaries because they lag the underlying product by months.
Reproducible datasets. When a comparison reports an aggregate statistic ("free tiers vary 10×", "60-80% collab tax"), the underlying dataset — which tools, which features, which prices — is documented in a public Google Sheet linked from the article. You can rerun any calculation we publish.

Conflict of interest disclosure

AFFiNE is a commercial product that competes with most of the tools we compare. This creates an obvious conflict. Our rules for managing it:

We disclose the conflict on every page that mentions AFFiNE. If a reader could mistake us for a neutral third party, we have failed.
We do not pay or accept payment for placement. No affiliate links, no sponsored sections, no "best of" lists where vendors paid to be included.
We recommend competitors when they are genuinely better. Every comparison explicitly states scenarios where the non-AFFiNE tool is the right pick. When we tell you to pick Notion or Obsidian over AFFiNE, it costs us a signup — which is why we'll do it.
The "third option" callout for AFFiNE appears only when warranted. We add AFFiNE to a comparison page only when AFFiNE solves a real gap the two compared tools leave open. We do not insert AFFiNE into pages where it would be off-topic.

Update cadence

Monthly: pricing. First Monday of every month, every comparison page is checked against current vendor pricing pages.
Quarterly: feature changes. Every 3 months we re-test the major features compared. New features that change a verdict trigger a same-week update.
Semi-annually: full review. Every 6 months, each comparison is reviewed end-to-end by a team member who did not write it.
Ad hoc: vendor announcements. When a vendor announces a major pricing, ownership, or feature change (Notion acquiring X, Confluence repricing, Evernote sunsetting Y), affected pages are updated within 7 days.

Corrections and reader feedback

If you find an error — a stale price, a misattributed feature, a broken link, a misleading verdict — please email [email protected] with the URL and the specific claim. We correct verified errors within 7 days and add a "Corrections" line at the bottom of any page where a substantive claim has changed.

We do not edit comparisons in response to vendor complaints unless the complaint identifies a factual error we can verify. Subjective verdicts ("Notion's UI is heavier") will not be removed simply because the vendor disagrees.

Sources we use

Vendor public pricing pages (primary)
Vendor product documentation and changelogs (primary)
Hands-on use by the AFFiNE Product Team (primary)
Vendor public roadmaps, status pages, and community forums (secondary)
Industry research (Siege Media, Gartner, Forrester) — cited inline when used

We do not use AI-generated summaries of third-party reviews as primary sources, and we do not republish G2 / Capterra aggregate ratings.

License and openness claims

Whenever a page on affine.pro describes AFFiNE as "open-source," we mean specifically the following structure, defined by the root LICENSE file in the toeverything/AFFiNE repository:

The editor, desktop app, and the majority of the codebase are licensed under the MIT License. You can use, copy, modify, sublicense, and distribute that code freely, including for commercial use.
The backend server (everything inside packages/backend and packages/common/native) is licensed under the AFFiNE Enterprise Edition (EE) License, a source-available license. You can read, modify, and run the backend code freely for development, testing, and self-hosted personal use. Running the backend in production at scale requires a paid AFFiNE Enterprise Edition subscription with the correct number of user seats.
Third-party components bundled into AFFiNE retain their original upstream licenses; the LICENSE file at the repository root lists these.

We use the phrase "open-source" because most of AFFiNE — by line count and by the parts a developer typically interacts with — is genuinely MIT-licensed. We acknowledge that the EE-licensed backend is technically "source-available" rather than OSI-approved open-source, and we link to the authoritative LICENSE file from every page where licensing matters: see the root LICENSE and the EE License text. If you build commercial products on top of AFFiNE, we recommend reading both before deploying.

What this policy covers

This policy applies to comparison, best-of, and alternative content under /blog, plus any future review or evaluation content published on affine.pro. It does not apply to product marketing pages (such as /ai and /whiteboard), which are clearly marked as product pages and use a different editorial voice.