This app is very promising but extremely counterintuitive. If you've ever used Notion and Notion AI, you'll feel like someone has amputated your arm.
When you select text and use "Improve with AI," you'll likely get back content that's mostly unrelated to your text and in markdown format.
Unlike Notion, which offers an intuitive flow for working with text—allowing you to write several paragraphs, select them, and immediately open an AI field to add instructions—Affine requires a more cumbersome process. In Affine, you need to select the text, switch to the right-side panel, and then return to the text, repeating this process as needed.
Affine does have some cool features that Notion lacks. For example, you can select an image within the text and ask AI to explain it. However, you can't select a screenshot from Google Analytics that you’ve put into the text and type in an empty AI field "explain the connection between relative conversion and seasonal factors." Instead, you need to select the image, click "Ask AI," then "Continue with AI," explain in the right-side panel what you need from the AI, and if you get the expected context (which usually you don't), you then need to click below your text block and select "insert below" in the right-side panel. If you use AI again, there's a high probability that you'll receive the text in markdown format.
None of these issues are apparent in the first free 10 uses of Affine AI. But you can't pay for Affine AI monthly; you need to pay for a whole year’s subscription. And when you start working, you realize you bought an AI assistant that doesn't actually assist.
The text in the app is too tiny and small, causing eye strain, and after 20 minutes of working, you'll want to sleep.
Generally speaking, nothing works as your brain expects it to. Affine is not a "second brain". It is a raw, unaligned, and pretty unsatisfying app.
You can try writing to the Affine community, and you'll get a polite answer that "there is no scheduling for AI because the team is busy with everything else."
What is the point of positioning the product as a replacement for Notion and Miro if Affine is no match for either of them separately?
I need Affine only for a particular project I lead. Whatever I need, I write in Notion and then paste it into Affine.
AFFiNE