Anytype has built a devoted following as the privacy-first answer to Notion, and writers here have praised it as a gorgeous open-source note app with an ambitious object-based design. Its boldest claim, though, is technical: your data lives on your devices, end-to-end encrypted, and syncs between them peer-to-peer with no cloud required. That claim is easy to make but hard to test, so I dug in a little deeper, installing it on a MacBook Air M5, an MSI Cyborg gaming laptop, and both a Pixel and an iPhone. I forced each app install into Anytype’s local-only mode, too, to see if it would sync up easily and quickly.
The answer is a qualified yes, with less “easily” and “quickly” for the nuance.
What Anytype’s “without the cloud” means
It uses your local network
First up, Anytype defaults to its own servers when you create a vault. Every new vault joins the Anytype Network, which syncs your encrypted data via a backup node that offers 1GB of free storage. That’s still a cloud solution, in my opinion, so I had to find the local-only mode. It disables the backup node on Anytype’s servers and syncs directly over your local network using the open-source Any-Sync protocol.
That was my first challenge: finding it. This network toggle isn’t in the app’s settings at all. You have to log out, then click a gear icon on your login screen. That reveals a hidden Preferences panel. I dug through Data Management preferences first before I discovered where to set the local-only feature, and I can’t imagine I’m the only one.
Two laptops synced instantly and easily
Mac to PC was a breeze
The desktop experience sold me right away. I set up my vault on my MacBook Air M5, built a test space with some notes and pages, then installed Anytype on my PC, an MSI Cyborg gaming rig. Setting them both to local-only mode took logging out and back in, but Anytype prompted me to copy the entry key, a series of 12 common words that you have to input to gain access to your data.
With no server in between, my Windows laptop pulled the entire vault over from the Mac via Wi-Fi in a quick two or three seconds. I had the machines up side by side — every addition I made to either machine would show up on the other almost immediately. I took out the internet connection but left the Wi-Fi working and the two instances of the app synced back and forth with no trouble.
Mobile to PC and back was tricky
The seams showed
After installing Anytype on the Pixel in local-only mode, my Important Docs space appeared, but the documents inside it didn’t. No error, no warning, nothing. The culprit might have been Android’s Nearby Devices permission, which Anytype needs for local network discovery and never asked me to think about. Until I granted it, the app simply couldn’t see my laptops, and I never got a warning.
Even with permissions sorted, cross-device sync split cleanly into two tiers. My iPhone and Pixel synced with each other quickly. The two laptops synced with each other quickly. But anything crossing the desktop-to-mobile line crawled. A plain text note edited on the Pixel took over five minutes to reach the PC. Syncing from the Mac to either phone was just as slow in reverse.
To be clear, everything did eventually arrive on every device, intact. Local-only sync works. It just takes far longer across the desktop-to-mobile divide than “seamless” implies.
Spaces and channels appear on the receiving device first, while the content within them trails minutes behind. I’d tap into a space too early (before it was synced) and got an error: “space is not ready: please try again later.”
Community threads suggest I’m in good company, with long-standing reports of Android and desktop clients refusing to sync locally and mobile devices syncing only while the desktop app is open. That last part matters in local-only mode: with no server holding your data, a sleeping laptop is a dead sync partner.
The slowness would be easier to forgive if the app told you what was happening. On the iPhone, a “syncing” banner at least confirms something is happening, while the Pixel shows nothing at all. If it hasn’t arrived yet, you don’t know if it’s a short wait or if it’s never going to show up at all.
So does Anytype sync seamlessly without the cloud?
Yes, but with a big asterisk. Every edit I made on every device eventually landed everywhere else intact with no server involved. Between computers, local-only sync is fast, reliable and works with the internet literally unplugged. Between my computer and my phone, however, the sync works, but is slow.
It’s worth pointing out that none of this friction happens with Anytype’s default setup. When I flipped all my devices back to the standard Anytype Network mode, sync across all devices was fast and flawless. Plus, your data is end-to-end encrypted, so maybe the practical takeaway is to use the cloud. If you don’t want to, however, be aware that PC to mobile will take a while to sync up if you choose local only. If you need a non-server solution for syncing your data, Anytype just might be the way to go.