Combining Notion and Miro on Your Own Server with Wax

Ever been in a situation where you need four tabs open just to describe one feature? You've got a spec draft in Notion, a flowchart in Miro, a quick interface sketch in Excalidraw, and tasks scattered across a Trello board. Information keeps spreading across different services, and context switching eats up a ton of time.

Recently came across an interesting project called Wax. The developers tried to combine familiar text documents, an infinite drawing canvas, and databases into a single workspace. They put emphasis on the local-first concept and privacy.

What's Under the Hood and How It Works

If you look closely at the repository, you'll immediately notice the connection to AFFiNE and the open-source Blocksuite engine. The architecture is built on a combination of TypeScript on the frontend and Rust for fast system operations.

The main principle here is simple: all entities exist as independent blocks. You can start writing a regular article or documentation, and then right in the middle of the page, expand an infinite canvas, sketch a relationship diagram, or attach sticky notes. There's no strict separation between "this is a text page" and "this is an interactive board".

Here are four things worth paying attention to:

1. Unified canvas for everything. You can drop formatted text, sticky notes, embed web pages, linked pages, and tables with different views onto the canvas.
2. Local-first approach. Your files and knowledge base are stored locally on disk. If the internet goes down, the app continues to work without delays, and synchronization catches up when you reconnect to the network.
3. Multimodal assistant. The project includes AI trained to assemble presentations from text, condense long articles into mind maps, and generate prototypes on demand.
4. Real-time collaboration. Despite the local storage, you can invite colleagues and edit files together.

Deploying on Your Own

For those who don't want to hand over their corporate knowledge base to third-party clouds, the authors offer self-hosting. Everything spins up through a standard Docker container without the hassle of configuring a dozen microservices.

If you just want to explore the codebase or write your own plugin, you can run the project locally the standard way:

# Клонируем репозиторий
git clone https://github.com/WaxAppAI/Wax.git
cd Wax

# Устанавливаем зависимости и запускаем сборку
pnpm install
pnpm dev

Building requires a recent Node.js version 18.16 or higher and the Rust toolchain if you're working with native modules.

Who This Project Is For Right Now

Wax looks great if you're looking for an independent replacement for the Notion and Miro combo for personal notes or a small team. The local-first architecture ensures fast interface responsiveness because every click doesn't wait for a response from a server on another continent.

Of course, the project is still actively being developed, documentation lags behind commits in places, and the third-party plugin ecosystem is still taking shape. Nevertheless, the concept of merging text and canvas without cloud dependency is quite convenient. If you value control over your own data, spinning up a container and testing Wax is definitely worth it.