When Obsidian introduced Cavas, it felt like a big leap forward for visual note-taking. Being able to map my ideas across an infinite space was refreshing compared to the rigid structure of a standard notes app. It’s been my go-to spot for brainstorming, laying down my notes, and connecting projects in a more freeform way.
After I found AFFiNE as a replacement for Notion, one of its features I quickly fell in love with was its whiteboard, called Edgeless. And Obsidian Canvas started taking a backseat. AFFiNE is open-source, lightweight, and simpler to navigate than both Notion and Obsidian, in my opinion. Having its own canvas feature is a big win on top of that. In practice, it didn’t just replace Obsidian Canvas for me, but also outperformed it.
What is the Edgeless feature in AFFiNE?
It’s an infinite whiteboard
The Edgeless feature in AFFiNE is exactly what it sounds like: a canvas without borders. Many productivity tools have started to incorporate features that give you some type of visual overview of your notes and projects – Obsidian has Canvas, Notion added Mermaid for diagram coding, and even NotebookLM got mind maps. But none of them do it as smoothly as AFFiNE…
Edgeless is a whiteboard that lets you visualize your work. The space is wide open and infinitely scrollable, so you can quite literally drop as many blocks, notes, and elements in there as you want. It also comes decked out with a toolkit that lets you create elements directly in the canvas, such as text, shapes, and connective arrows. What makes Edgeless stand out is how it integrates with AFFiNE’s other features.
To access Edgeless, on any given page, you’ll see two buttons on the top left: Page mode and Edgeless mode. Click on Edgeless. You can also use the slash command, add a Frame, and double clicking on the frame will automatically open Edgeless.
Why Edgeless is better than Obsidian Canvas
It has an Edge over Canvas
Obsidian Canvas has always been great for jotting down quick notes in the form of cards, rearranging them, and pulling in other pages for an overview of my projects. But it feels walled off because it’s its own separate environment apart from the rest of Obsidian. Even though you can link to other Obsidian notes in Canvas, it still exists as its own “space”.
AFFiNE’s Edgeless feature, on the other hand, takes a different approach. It’s not quite a standalone tool like Canvas, but rather a view mode. At any point, you can toggle to Edgeless mode on a document, and it takes you into the whiteboard with all your blocks still there, just laid out in a more visual format. Everything is instantly visible on the whiteboard, whereas with Obsidian Canvas, you have to go through the effort of dragging or linking other pages onto the canvas to get them there – there’s no switch to flip your documents into canvas mode.
Beyond this, Edgeless also has way more tools than Canvas. In Canvas, you can add cards, notes, and media, and also get some line links and color options. That’s pretty much it. AFFiNE’s Edgeless is almost like a design tool. You can insert links and frames (these act as little containers in the canvas), and the arrow connectors are highly customizable in terms of size, shape, and color. You can also create and insert a new note directly in the canvas, whereas Obsidian Canvas only lets you add existing notes. Then there are also customizable shapes, mind map templates, project management templates, and a library of icons and visual elements that you can insert.
How I’ve been using Edgeless in AFFiNE
There is no need for Canvas anymore
Since I started using AFFiNE, I’ve found myself reaching for Edgeless in ways that replaced Canvas. Where I’ve been getting the most out of it is in diagrams and mind maps. When you add a shape and select it, an arrow will appear on every side of the shape, and clicking it adds another shape connected to the previous one – creating mind maps couldn’t be easier than this.
For pages that have multiple blocks, entering Edgeless mode is also an excellent way for me to connect them visually, whereas they’d have remained in a vertical structure in Page mode. I can zoom out and arrange different parts of my work spatially: research in one corner, to-do lists in another, and so on. It gives me that bird’s eye view I liked about Canvas, but with much less effort since I don’t need to add my notes or blocks; they’re already there.
This is also an excellent way for me to arrange different sections of my articles or scenes in my novel; I can even draw a timeline for it. I've also been loving the Kanban and other project management templates for my design projects. Beyond this, I just enjoy doodling with the drawing tool and elements; it almost feels like playing around in Canva.
The canvas I actually use every day
I wasn’t really looking to replace Obsidian Canvas; it’s one of my top features of the app. But the more I’ve been using AFFiNE, the more I got used to Edgeless, and Canvas just fell to the wayside. I love how it’s integrated into every document in AFFiNE, rather than its separate space that I have to manage on its own. And the features in Edgeless make it the winner for mapping things out visually.