I haven't used either one in some time, but I would reframe the question: what makes you think this is similar to Basecamp?
If you're familiar at all with Basecamp, 10 seconds on the page makes it clear how different it is. If you're not, I guess I don't understand why the question is asked.
I'm wondering too, I mean the interface is obviously completely different but it solves the same problems. Why is whatever this interface is better since I already enjoy basecamp? Edit: Also highly enjoy basecamp's pricing.
Does the linked page not answer this? That's what I'm confused about I guess.
In a nutshell, the biggest philosophical difference between the two is that Notion is "free form" while Basecamp has a sort of built-in workflow.
(Take this with a grain of salt, I haven't used Basecamp since shortly after they rolled out the new interface and it was much more limited then than it is now. And I've only briefly used Notion.)
Notion is sort of a wiki, with built in to-dos and spreadsheets. You can build your own workflow or adapt an existing template to how you work.
I just started using Coda.io now and I already think it's amazing. It's like Excel in Word (Or Javascript in HTML) with superpowers and it's very usable.
You can't alt+tab to it and offline support isn't there. Not sure if there are any global keyboard shortcuts for quick/easy note capture, but if so, those wouldn't work in the web app either.
We use it to keep track of all
Of our tasks and projects. Switched to it after getting annoyed with Asana and not wanting to use something like Jira. We love how freeform it is and allowed us to create a workflow that fit us.
There are some gripes I have with it, notifications are still hit or miss despite talking to support about it multiple times - they’ll be delayed or missed altogether if you’ve recently opened the iOS app or have the desktop app open on another computer. Search still needs some love. It should probably weigh recently opened pages higher. And I’d love it if the Mac app was native instead of electron based.
Their team is pretty responsive when messaging them so that’s a huge plus.
This is one thing I've wanted. A local app that lets me store all my data with markdown syntax, syntax highlighting, in local files and directories, specifically for macOS although a cross platform app would be fine. One that doesn't require an account or the internet at all for it to work. I've wanted this kind of app for many years (and wouldn't be opposed to making it if no existing solution is all that great at it).
Been using it for a work journal for a while, and it's pretty reasonable. I used to use RedNotebook before that, but I finally got fed up with the lack of Markdown syntax.
Bootsnote and Joplin works great for notes, but Joplin was less than ideal last time I checked. Hugo is really the tool I think will get me closest to what I'm looking for.
Because the way it backs up your files isn't symbolic with the file system. The Hugo template I'm working on does this for you. Their are some minor annoyances, but it is the most powerful tool that I know of to get setup quickly. Wish there was some more standardization around Templates though, and the ability to do custom output templates for section lists that create paginated sections of content based on grouping, custom parameters and more. Best thing is it is all managed in a logical folder (section) and file (page) hierarchy and so far I've just about got a infinitely nested template setup with paginated sections and pages throughout, with the ability to add custom paginated sections using specific layouts for custom sections.
It's a bit less than ideal, overall. I would like to see you be able to assign a custom output format, so for each index and section kinds it would be nice to automatically create paginated sections that you want for specific layouts. I've tried this and it only sort of works, but expects them to be the pages as your lists.html or index.html, and can't paginate a path.
Also, built in client-side search. I'm working on Mermaid.js, Chart.js and Reveal.js short-code integration next.
Emacs with org mode, helm, and projectile as a starting point would hit all of your asks (although org syntax has differences from markdown, it's still quite intuitive).
I use org mode for: my tasks (gtd style), food log (using org columns), notes (easy export to any other format), habits. Alongside beorg for iOS for quick capturing on the go, I cannot imagine I would be any happier elsewhere.
Same here, org-mode is going nowhere, it's one of those things that just works. From wikis, todos, document authoring, agendas, code notebook, ...
On mobile, there's a few options, I made one, a web app called filestash: https://demo.filestash.app/s/hn . It has a lot of the org mode candies: agenda, todos, and the real org-mode exporters: HTML, PDF, Markdown, TXT, Latex, iCal, ODT and even beamer
It sounds like a private git repo would suite you fine. You'll only need an internet connection to update when you've made changes on a different device.
I’ve been using Quiver for a few years, and love it. Totally replaced Evernote for me. Not sure if they have syntax highlighting though — there is a “code” cell, but I haven’t used it.
I also use Quiver, I just wish I could have my notes on my Android phone. No one has yet brought together quite everything -- there's always tradeoffs between the various note apps, even though there doesn't have to be.
Same, I tinkered around a bit and so far really like the semi-free form nature of how this looks and feels, plus the dirt simple, out of your way/distraction free interface is something that could easily line up with how I scribble down notes in my pocket journal, but am averse to signing up to another account somewhere for my obsessive checklisting and note-taking.
I'd gladly pay for a desktop application of this where I kept all of my notes and todos with local persistence that I could backup, migrate and move (similar to something like Notational Velocity), I like this, but I guess so far OneNote remains my personal champ in this regard-even though I have to tie it to OneDrive across my pc and surface.
Edit:
Although feverishly refreshing the thread and looking at all the praise...maybe I'll give it a more thorough shot for a couple of weeks.
Why is it every time something like Notion is mentioned, there is always someone who wants "local, self-hosted, Markdown"? Just build it yourself.
This clearly shows you have no understanding of the product at hand. Notion is so incredibly powerful that Markdown doesn't even scratch the surface here.
Many people care about things such as "what is this company doing with the data I store with them?"
And many people don't have the time or skill to "just build it yourself," so when something awesome like this comes along that looks really appealing, you get people asking for self-hosted options.
Exactly... I've started building something using Hugo that does all this. That way you can create a calendar section, and then use front-matter to define the calendar entries in that section. It even creates an ICS for each item and a calendar for the entire section.
I'd prefer a local or self-hosted product because when the innevitable "incredible journey" blog post comes out, I don't want to have to try and migrate everything to a new service. If I've paid for a product, I can at least keep using it as-is when the company goes under.
Friends don't let friends use web apps. Aside from privacy concerns, relying on someone else's server functioning and being forced to use whatever the newest "improved" version are all strikes against em. Who needs another login collected by someone else (so trustworthy) that you fill with credentials that will be stolen in a hack revealed a few years down the line? There's never any real consequences for service providers. It's best not to use new web services for anything important.
You can either log-in with Google account (which you most likely already have) or via 2fa mechanism where they send an expiring login link to your e-mail address.
There are no password and therefore nothing to hack.
Having no password doesn't mean it can't be hacked. Maybe Notion won't end up in a haveibeenpwned email, but that only addresses half of a single one out of three of my objections to web applications.
You're pointing out that there seems to be this unmet demand for a self-hosted markdown based product. Rather than wonder why people keep asking for that, maybe you should include those features in whatever it is that you are building.
Maybe the demand is from the worst kind of users a business would want, those that would never convert to actual customers but want something for to tinker and install for free...
those that would never convert to actual customers but want something for to tinker and install for free...
There also might be a valid demand from those who would want to use the features of a collaboration suite like this for internal projects but find themselves beholden to internal or even client-demanded security/data retention policies.
Markdown and front-matter does scratch the surface, and I do have an understanding of the product. It just isn't what I'm looking for. I care about my data and having it accessible, even outside of the application. I like organizing my content using directories for sections, and files for pages. I don't want everything saved to the cloud using a database. I want to use local files and front-matter to create content, and Hugo does this... I've started building what I'm looking for already.
Markdown is a fileformat, while Notion is an interface which can utilize this fileformat. I don't see anything in notion which I could not fit in that fileformat and some folder-structure.
The problem is that making a good interface is a though and long task. It's not done with crapping something together which then barfs out some file. That's people just can't build it themself, because it would be months and years to reach a good quality.
The demand for local&selfhosted on the other side is clear: people don't trust the companies. Companies peek into your data, sell them to other, or just disappear one day. With something under your control this will not happen.
Business is not synonymous with 'subscription model.' It's good for people to express their desire for on-prem, one-time payment products. Maybe the market can find a middle rather than the utter domination of subscription services.
It's surprising that I (for personal use) and my company (commercial use) would be willing to pay good money for the ability to run this app on-prem?
Personal data notwithstanding we have data we put in our company wiki that is simply not allowed to be hosted on cloud services without lots of red tape and compliance certifications. Offering a on-prem option, at least for us, pushes all that responsibility onto our ops team, and Notion gets paid about the same but without the hosting costs.
I'm not sure I understand your math. The support burden is very real but why would the pricing be anything other than $premium/user/month with tiers based on support requirements?
Self-hosting nerds like myself would be able to get by on a no-support 'community edition' for like $10-15/mo.
But that’s fine. My company can easily afford a few tens of thousands per month for the on-prem version.
If the on-prem version does not exist, I’ll never even try to convince them to switch, since we aren’t going to store anything sensitive on someone elses infrastructure.
So we stick with Confluence. Which everyone hates, but is still the best solution around.
I'm pretty happy with Gollum (https://github.com/gollum/gollum/wiki) for this. Your data is just a Git repository containing a hierarchy of files. You run Gollum to fire up a local web server, which gives you a wiki interface to view and edit any Markdown files in the hierarchy. You can use a local Markdown editor if you prefer, as long as you commit your changes. You can choose whether to run Gollum all the time and expose the server to others, or just launch it locally when you want to browse your own repository. And you can use Git to create, push and pull branches.
Gollum also seems to have powerful customisation features like macros and YAML front matter, but I have yet to make use of them. For now, Gollum suits me as a simple, free alternative to Confluence. Notion is obviously a far more powerful product.
I’ve started using notion as a kind of personal wiki a few months ago, and I really like it for that. Breaking the distinction between files and folders is one of the ways it’s way easier for me to navigate/structure than it is in google docs.
My only issue with Notion is that I feel it’s hard to get stuff out of it, especially on mobile. I sometimes type draft documents with it that I really don’t want to share as notion links, and I haven’t figured out how to export them on a phone - I usually have to go to my computer and export the markdown/process it then share...
We use them in lieu of JIRA. Overall I like the product!
I wish they had ticket numbers (I like to put ticket numbers in TODOs in the code for more context; I think it leads to more TODOs being done). I had to hack them in using timestamps and hashes.
The ability to see tickets assigned to you (and not in closed status) would be useful too
Respectfully, I disagree. Notion and jumproot both have the philosophy of an arbitrary node structure used for composition. I prefer my ui, that's why I'm working on it.
Thanks for your feedback though.
No I haven't published a roadmap. I don't liken jumproot to evernote much.
To illustrate my point, see the Viewer node types in the demo. You can see that it allows composition of documents using the node structure. Was super handy in university.
Would love to try some time but can't imagine porting all my notes (and knowledge base) from Evernote that I've accumulated over the years. Too exhaustive.
I've been using Notion for quite some time now. It's pretty neat although I wish it was (a) faster and (b) had a better writing experience. I find Dropbox Paper to offer the best writing experience but Notion is unbelievably flexible, so I use it instead.
I use Notion for my personal productivity, and I highly recommend it. It's one of the few personal tools I'm happy to pay for. It many ways it's a personal wiki, and it is incredibly easy to use.
Notion has made it much easier to keep track of and refer back to my old notes. For example, I used to draft emails in an unorganized OneNote notebook. If I needed to find an old draft, I'd have to use search and hope that I remembered the right keywords. With Notion, I make all of my email drafts a subpage of an email page, which makes them much easier to find.
For me, Notion replaced Evernote and I haven't looked back. Three features that have been particularly useful for personal productivity are
1) explicit support for Kanban board-ing tasks and similar to-do management
2) collapsible blocks
3) substantially smoother linking to, or embedding, notes within notes
Notion is just as sleek as Evernote for small independent notes, but these two features allow Notion to scale much better for projects that require an inter-related network of notes with substantial breadth and depth.
I use search way less in Notion than Evernote due to the ability to hierarchically organize notes in a manner that better matches my mental map, to the point where it's hard for me to comment on the quality of search in Notion. I haven't had any complaints with it during the occasional times I have used search though.
Edit: After testing, seems not too bad. Reconciles non-conflicting edits just fine. But apparently, in the iOS app, search doesn't work in offline mode!
Edit 2: It seems like "attachments" (files like PDFs, and also images) are not stored offline, either. In the iOS app, clicking on a file or image brings up an S3 URL inside an embedded web browser.
I hard-swapped to Notion from Evernote about a ~month ago. The Markdown support is excellent, and I really like:
- The "database" type that give a table view over child pages has been great for organizing recipes. I can quickly filter by {protein, core ingredients, cooking time, etc}
- The same again for blog posts
- Free-form writing for talks & other notes
- Shared to-do lists, which I used for organizing an apartment move w/ my partner
- Search works great - across titles, labels and document content - with a quick Ctrl+P.
- The web-app is fantastic. The Electron app on Windows is solid, although sometimes takes a while to sync after being minimized for a while.
Being able to export everything into a reasonable format was a requirement for me, and they've had that for a while. I'm OK with having "some" element of lock-in for the convenience, provided I can get my data out in a structured format. There's _always_ a risk something might be deprecated or shutdown.
Basically it's free to start with limited data/upload and then a small ($4) monthly for a personal subscription that is unlimited. Team and Enterprise subscriptions from there.
There is something about Notion that makes it feel very well-made and coherent. It’s one of the few apps I use with this inherent feeling of quality (off the top of my head Sublime Text/Merge, Beyond Compare, Things fall into this category of intangible greatness). Every interaction is delightful, and the app scales really well from basic note-taking to decently complex databases with grouping, filters, relations, templates and permissions. It comes with really good real-time collaboration.
On the flip side the software a bit slow to start and uses a lot of resources—it’s based on Electron, but I encourage everyone to try it (the demo on their website is cool!).
This is as close to “painting the back of the fence” as it gets.
I honestly never use their Electron app, even though I have it installed. One thing about Electron apps is that they also usually work great in the browser :)
The "quality" feeling of sublime app for me is majorly undermined by the constant nagging popups to pay for it. so many other services I happily pay for and somehow sublime has made me not want to pay for their services.
If you'd happily pay for it without the popups, why didn't you pay for it the first time the popup appeared? Would've saved you a lot of annoyance, no?
You know it goes away if you buy it, right? I own Sublime and honestly the nag is so NOT-annoying that I have more than one instance of sublime where I simply haven't bothered to enter the code
Say what you will about Electron apps that use excessive resources and lack native touches, but they are definitely not “as close to painting the back of the fence as it gets.”
That Jobs-ism was specifically about caring about the internals of a product that nobody looks at, but you know are there.
This has been downvoted so let me expand on this. I am not judging Electron so please relax.
The Steve Jobs quip about painting the back of the fence sought to explain why the Apple II and Mac teams cared so much about the inside of the box and even signed it. It's why they invested so much in the OS X internals and stuck with a native focus that helped iOS be so fast and nimble out of the gate on extremely resource-constrained mobile devices. That's "painting the back of the fence."
It is a very distinct concept from focusing on user-visible details, which I think is what you're referencing here. That's still the front of the fence. Back of the fence is the fine touches on the unseen internals, but reflect a general care and pride in your craft that will probably pay off in the long run.
"And while sacrifices were often made of money, time and frustration, users of Apple products often reaped the rewards."[1] This is definitely not the Electron approach. It's about taking the extra time and care to do it native. You can chose that path or not, but understand what this very important element of Apple's philosophy means because it affects so much of the past couple decades of our industry.
Some people like to have things in separate apps (even if they are not native) just so you can open and close it quicker than finding it in your tabs or getting distracted by all the other content open in your browser.
Yes it matters. I could write a WebKit2 wrapper for the webapp in 10 minutes just so I can treat it a like a standalone app and not just another tab.
If it's electron, give me linux.
Having built an electron app with linux support: it takes time and effort to get it right, you have to come up with a different updating strategy than windows/mac, and they might not have many users on linux at the moment (low priority).
It's not as simple as "add a flag to build linux." There's a little bit more to it.
I really like Notion and have this same feeling. The app being Electron is a really big bummer for me, though. Performance is terrible on my Android phone. I really want to ditch Evernote but nothing seems to compare still.
Lillie from Notion here! We're improving our speed and performance across the board. We're also still working on features that Evernote has to make the transition easier, stay tuned ;)
Notion's founder here. Thank you for the kind words - we are honored :-)
To be honest, nothing we are doing is that new. Most of the ideas came from the 70s-80s (Alan Kay, Doug Engelbart, Ted Nelson...) We are just applying a fresh coat of paint.
Of course, there's still a lot more to be done to fully realize these pioneers' dreams of computing as a medium for everyone – not just programmers like us. If you are interested to learn more or work with us, feel free to message me directly at ivan at makenotion.com, or link below. We are happy to host you for lunch:
https://www.notion.so/notion/Join-Us-e7aeb157238a4603a2964b2...
What do you find wrong with the search? It's pretty good for me, except one day where the indexing must have screwed up and it was ignoring the thing I knew was there.
I downloaded the app months ago for my Mac but honestly forgot I even had it installed until I read this thread. I use the website every day just fine. There’s no need for the app.
I use Linux, am a heavy Notion user through the web app and I'm very happy. I'm not sure why people would want the desktop apps (I do use the android app for a bit of on he go reading and adding images).
I see a lot of potential for Notion and really enjoy the service, but currently it still feels a little rough. Some thoughts:
- while the browser-based webapp is mostly fine, the mobile apps feel really subpar and somewhat out of place on iPad and iPhone alike: Sluggish, slow animations, inconsistent keyboard behavior, unnecessarily large fullscreen modals on iPad - it's very noticeable that it isn't a native app. It feels like a second class citizen. I'd like to make Notion a central part of my daily, essential tools - similarly to an app like Things. Unfortunately the difference in user experience is night and day. Please consider developing native apps.
- this is a very minor issue, but since I often use Notion as a note taking tool the rigid separation of paragraphs into multiple isolated content blocks is rather annoying. It leads to side effects like "Select all" on iOS actually not select all, but just the current block/paragraph. I think text, regardless of the number of paragraphs or format, should be one single block until it's actually interrupted by inline data structures like tables or galleries.
Other than that I love the idea of your service, which can turn a blank canvas into a simple text document or a fully featured Airtable-like application, or anything inbetween.
I also have similar issues with the text processing.
I like the model they use that everything is a block - you get predictable behaviour, but I do think the normal shortcut for select all should select a page, and that I should be able to select text from multiple paragraphs using keyboard commands (if you do ctrl+shift+arrow you get stuck at the edge of a block).
It is impressive that your work is directly on top of the work done by the guy who invented the mouse, the guy who invented smalltalk and so on. Are you sure there were no inventions in between?
I am a paying customer and it has always stand out for me in terms of UX. The only problem I see is that sometimes when I am editing a page I need to use the mouse because the keyboard just does not work in the way I am used to. This is a huge UX pain and I don't understand how didn't they fix it yet.
I love the product, but the login workflow is awful. Why innovate on logins? We've solved that problem.
Specifically, the login is a randomly-generated one-time code sent to your email address. Notion says this is more secure than them storing a username+password, but that's a dubious argument. They've also said this is two-factor auth (lolno). A side effect of this is that Notion is unusable on my mobile device since I have no email on it.
I really hope they implement a more traditional login system. Until then, I'm sticking with Evernote. :(
I actually love their login, but it's not for the reason you would think. They expire the session very frequently which has been an annoyance for me, so log-in with the magic link has been faster than digging for the password through my manager.
Yeah, Medium does this same thing and it makes me hate logging in so I'm rarely in the account I pay for. Especially since Medium makes you log in seemingly every few days.
They imply that the login is 2FA-protected because your email or Google account can be 2FA-protected, and they're piggybacking off that...
Having passwords means storing them correctly and still implementing some form of reset -- and if email is a weak point, they would have to 2FA prompt you to reset your password, or not use magic links, or handle such issues out-of-band. They're probably trying to avoid auth/password support by outsourcing this function to Google for the time being.
I agree though, the user experience that is hardest-hit by this is mobile, where iOS now supports much better integration with password managers than was allowed previously...
Thanks for telling me this. I will definitely avoid Notion now. I want a username/password combo at the very least, both different for every site I use, and preferably with TOTP as well. I never want my email to be used for security purposes as it is among the most hackable target out there.
Yeah dude someone might go through the trouble of hacking your email just so they can find your todo page with an unchecked checkbox for feeding your goldfish.
You have no idea what they want to put in their Notion account. And so what if they want to have high security for something you deem trivial? You gain nothing by being an asshole about it.
Ugh you reminded me why I never went all-in with Notion. Having to remember what email I signed up with every time I need to log in is super annoying (as it doesn't seem to trigger my browser's autofill dialogue).
> A side effect of this is that Notion is unusable on my mobile device since I have no email on it.
It’s unusable for me as well, but for a similar reason on the computer. When I’m on a computer, the last thing I want is to be forced to login to email for a code since I use web based email (which I don’t keep open all the time). Even if I were to use a desktop client, I wouldn’t have it kept open all the time.
488 comments
[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 299 ms ] threadIf you're familiar at all with Basecamp, 10 seconds on the page makes it clear how different it is. If you're not, I guess I don't understand why the question is asked.
In a nutshell, the biggest philosophical difference between the two is that Notion is "free form" while Basecamp has a sort of built-in workflow.
(Take this with a grain of salt, I haven't used Basecamp since shortly after they rolled out the new interface and it was much more limited then than it is now. And I've only briefly used Notion.)
Notion is sort of a wiki, with built in to-dos and spreadsheets. You can build your own workflow or adapt an existing template to how you work.
There are some gripes I have with it, notifications are still hit or miss despite talking to support about it multiple times - they’ll be delayed or missed altogether if you’ve recently opened the iOS app or have the desktop app open on another computer. Search still needs some love. It should probably weigh recently opened pages higher. And I’d love it if the Mac app was native instead of electron based.
Their team is pretty responsive when messaging them so that’s a huge plus.
- not showing today on top like it used to, unwilling to change or add an option (same as above, database views are awesome)
- forcing us into a flow that didn't really fit the way we worked (notion lets us have a completely custom flow)
- no good way to have documentation stored in
- limited ability to document tasks, like images inline with the description, code blocks, etc.
Been using it for a work journal for a while, and it's pretty reasonable. I used to use RedNotebook before that, but I finally got fed up with the lack of Markdown syntax.
It's a bit less than ideal, overall. I would like to see you be able to assign a custom output format, so for each index and section kinds it would be nice to automatically create paginated sections that you want for specific layouts. I've tried this and it only sort of works, but expects them to be the pages as your lists.html or index.html, and can't paginate a path.
Also, built in client-side search. I'm working on Mermaid.js, Chart.js and Reveal.js short-code integration next.
I use org mode for: my tasks (gtd style), food log (using org columns), notes (easy export to any other format), habits. Alongside beorg for iOS for quick capturing on the go, I cannot imagine I would be any happier elsewhere.
http://happenapps.com
I'd gladly pay for a desktop application of this where I kept all of my notes and todos with local persistence that I could backup, migrate and move (similar to something like Notational Velocity), I like this, but I guess so far OneNote remains my personal champ in this regard-even though I have to tie it to OneDrive across my pc and surface.
Edit:
Although feverishly refreshing the thread and looking at all the praise...maybe I'll give it a more thorough shot for a couple of weeks.
Why is it every time something like Notion is mentioned, there is always someone who wants "local, self-hosted, Markdown"? Just build it yourself.
This clearly shows you have no understanding of the product at hand. Notion is so incredibly powerful that Markdown doesn't even scratch the surface here.
Why not? Is there something wrong with wanting a local, self-hosted tool? Or wanting to pay for it instead of building it yourself?
And many people don't have the time or skill to "just build it yourself," so when something awesome like this comes along that looks really appealing, you get people asking for self-hosted options.
For some people like me that's a basic condition to even consider a tool.
Do you publish the progress of this project you're working on for interested persons to keep track or should we wait until you're ready to unveil it?
https://gitlab.com/equalos/equal
I've been trying to get it into a nice state, but it is a process.
In other words: you're not willing to pay enough for such a feature to make anyone capable of building it make it for you.
There just aren't enough people like you to support self-hosted $4/month product and you're not willing to spend $2000/month for self-hosted version.
So your options are not using the product at all or using hosted, incredibly cheap, version.
You can either log-in with Google account (which you most likely already have) or via 2fa mechanism where they send an expiring login link to your e-mail address.
There are no password and therefore nothing to hack.
There also might be a valid demand from those who would want to use the features of a collaboration suite like this for internal projects but find themselves beholden to internal or even client-demanded security/data retention policies.
The problem is that making a good interface is a though and long task. It's not done with crapping something together which then barfs out some file. That's people just can't build it themself, because it would be months and years to reach a good quality.
The demand for local&selfhosted on the other side is clear: people don't trust the companies. Companies peek into your data, sell them to other, or just disappear one day. With something under your control this will not happen.
Personal data notwithstanding we have data we put in our company wiki that is simply not allowed to be hosted on cloud services without lots of red tape and compliance certifications. Offering a on-prem option, at least for us, pushes all that responsibility onto our ops team, and Notion gets paid about the same but without the hosting costs.
Their personal plan is $4/month.
Maybe one in a few hundred people (let's say 500 for easy math) would want self-hosted version.
Are you willing to pay $2000/month for a note-taking application? I doubt it.
Not to mention the support burden of trying to figure out why something doesn't work on your self-hosted installation.
That economic reality is why on-prem, self-hosted software is almost exclusively a very expensive, enterprise software.
Companies can justify paying a few thousand a year for installation and a salary of an in-house employee to manage and maintain it.
Individuals can't.
Self-hosting nerds like myself would be able to get by on a no-support 'community edition' for like $10-15/mo.
If the on-prem version does not exist, I’ll never even try to convince them to switch, since we aren’t going to store anything sensitive on someone elses infrastructure.
So we stick with Confluence. Which everyone hates, but is still the best solution around.
Gollum also seems to have powerful customisation features like macros and YAML front matter, but I have yet to make use of them. For now, Gollum suits me as a simple, free alternative to Confluence. Notion is obviously a far more powerful product.
I also made this site for people to share their Notion pages: http://notionpages.com You can use that to get a better sense of use cases for Notion.
My only issue with Notion is that I feel it’s hard to get stuff out of it, especially on mobile. I sometimes type draft documents with it that I really don’t want to share as notion links, and I haven’t figured out how to export them on a phone - I usually have to go to my computer and export the markdown/process it then share...
I wish they had ticket numbers (I like to put ticket numbers in TODOs in the code for more context; I think it leads to more TODOs being done). I had to hack them in using timestamps and hashes.
The ability to see tickets assigned to you (and not in closed status) would be useful too
I started using Trello.
Sure, it's self-promotion, but highly pertinent.
Did you publish a roadmap, that would allow us to differentiate it from something more like evernote?
Thanks for your feedback though.
No I haven't published a roadmap. I don't liken jumproot to evernote much.
To illustrate my point, see the Viewer node types in the demo. You can see that it allows composition of documents using the node structure. Was super handy in university.
TLDR: Notion does not own your data, nor do we sell it to others or use it for advertising. It's your data, period
Would love to try some time but can't imagine porting all my notes (and knowledge base) from Evernote that I've accumulated over the years. Too exhaustive.
Notion has made it much easier to keep track of and refer back to my old notes. For example, I used to draft emails in an unorganized OneNote notebook. If I needed to find an old draft, I'd have to use search and hope that I remembered the right keywords. With Notion, I make all of my email drafts a subpage of an email page, which makes them much easier to find.
1) explicit support for Kanban board-ing tasks and similar to-do management
2) collapsible blocks
3) substantially smoother linking to, or embedding, notes within notes
Notion is just as sleek as Evernote for small independent notes, but these two features allow Notion to scale much better for projects that require an inter-related network of notes with substantial breadth and depth.
Edit: After testing, seems not too bad. Reconciles non-conflicting edits just fine. But apparently, in the iOS app, search doesn't work in offline mode!
Edit 2: It seems like "attachments" (files like PDFs, and also images) are not stored offline, either. In the iOS app, clicking on a file or image brings up an S3 URL inside an embedded web browser.
- The "database" type that give a table view over child pages has been great for organizing recipes. I can quickly filter by {protein, core ingredients, cooking time, etc}
- The same again for blog posts
- Free-form writing for talks & other notes
- Shared to-do lists, which I used for organizing an apartment move w/ my partner
- Search works great - across titles, labels and document content - with a quick Ctrl+P.
- The web-app is fantastic. The Electron app on Windows is solid, although sometimes takes a while to sync after being minimized for a while.
Being able to export everything into a reasonable format was a requirement for me, and they've had that for a while. I'm OK with having "some" element of lock-in for the convenience, provided I can get my data out in a structured format. There's _always_ a risk something might be deprecated or shutdown.
Would be cool if they had the ability to import / export structured text.
Would that not make them money?
Basically it's free to start with limited data/upload and then a small ($4) monthly for a personal subscription that is unlimited. Team and Enterprise subscriptions from there.
I use Notion.so personally and professionally and must say its totally changed my game. Notion.so feels like a personal digi Marie Kondo.
On the flip side the software a bit slow to start and uses a lot of resources—it’s based on Electron, but I encourage everyone to try it (the demo on their website is cool!).
This is as close to “painting the back of the fence” as it gets.
You know it goes away if you buy it, right? I own Sublime and honestly the nag is so NOT-annoying that I have more than one instance of sublime where I simply haven't bothered to enter the code
That Jobs-ism was specifically about caring about the internals of a product that nobody looks at, but you know are there.
The Steve Jobs quip about painting the back of the fence sought to explain why the Apple II and Mac teams cared so much about the inside of the box and even signed it. It's why they invested so much in the OS X internals and stuck with a native focus that helped iOS be so fast and nimble out of the gate on extremely resource-constrained mobile devices. That's "painting the back of the fence."
It is a very distinct concept from focusing on user-visible details, which I think is what you're referencing here. That's still the front of the fence. Back of the fence is the fine touches on the unseen internals, but reflect a general care and pride in your craft that will probably pay off in the long run.
"And while sacrifices were often made of money, time and frustration, users of Apple products often reaped the rewards."[1] This is definitely not the Electron approach. It's about taking the extra time and care to do it native. You can chose that path or not, but understand what this very important element of Apple's philosophy means because it affects so much of the past couple decades of our industry.
[1] https://thenextweb.com/apple/2011/10/24/steve-jobs-obsession...
That's why there are apps packaging websites in apps too: https://meetfranz.com
It's not as simple as "add a flag to build linux." There's a little bit more to it.
Were it not in Electron, it would most likely still have a big web widget occupying most of its frame.
To be honest, nothing we are doing is that new. Most of the ideas came from the 70s-80s (Alan Kay, Doug Engelbart, Ted Nelson...) We are just applying a fresh coat of paint.
Of course, there's still a lot more to be done to fully realize these pioneers' dreams of computing as a medium for everyone – not just programmers like us. If you are interested to learn more or work with us, feel free to message me directly at ivan at makenotion.com, or link below. We are happy to host you for lunch: https://www.notion.so/notion/Join-Us-e7aeb157238a4603a2964b2...
Have a good one! Ivan
- while the browser-based webapp is mostly fine, the mobile apps feel really subpar and somewhat out of place on iPad and iPhone alike: Sluggish, slow animations, inconsistent keyboard behavior, unnecessarily large fullscreen modals on iPad - it's very noticeable that it isn't a native app. It feels like a second class citizen. I'd like to make Notion a central part of my daily, essential tools - similarly to an app like Things. Unfortunately the difference in user experience is night and day. Please consider developing native apps.
- this is a very minor issue, but since I often use Notion as a note taking tool the rigid separation of paragraphs into multiple isolated content blocks is rather annoying. It leads to side effects like "Select all" on iOS actually not select all, but just the current block/paragraph. I think text, regardless of the number of paragraphs or format, should be one single block until it's actually interrupted by inline data structures like tables or galleries.
Other than that I love the idea of your service, which can turn a blank canvas into a simple text document or a fully featured Airtable-like application, or anything inbetween.
I like the model they use that everything is a block - you get predictable behaviour, but I do think the normal shortcut for select all should select a page, and that I should be able to select text from multiple paragraphs using keyboard commands (if you do ctrl+shift+arrow you get stuck at the edge of a block).
Ivan
It is impressive that your work is directly on top of the work done by the guy who invented the mouse, the guy who invented smalltalk and so on. Are you sure there were no inventions in between?
Specifically, the login is a randomly-generated one-time code sent to your email address. Notion says this is more secure than them storing a username+password, but that's a dubious argument. They've also said this is two-factor auth (lolno). A side effect of this is that Notion is unusable on my mobile device since I have no email on it.
I really hope they implement a more traditional login system. Until then, I'm sticking with Evernote. :(
But on the merits: not storing the password is safer than storing it so it's a valid claim.
And it is a 2fa mechanism to a tee (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-factor_authentication)
Having passwords means storing them correctly and still implementing some form of reset -- and if email is a weak point, they would have to 2FA prompt you to reset your password, or not use magic links, or handle such issues out-of-band. They're probably trying to avoid auth/password support by outsourcing this function to Google for the time being.
I agree though, the user experience that is hardest-hit by this is mobile, where iOS now supports much better integration with password managers than was allowed previously...
It’s unusable for me as well, but for a similar reason on the computer. When I’m on a computer, the last thing I want is to be forced to login to email for a code since I use web based email (which I don’t keep open all the time). Even if I were to use a desktop client, I wouldn’t have it kept open all the time.
These are “chores” added to the user experience.