I know it's a niche need but any note-taking app I use needs to support Latex and code highlighting. Unfortunately, once I throw this criteria in just about every app gets excluded, but at least VSC + sync is still very nice.
... You have a cookie pop-up that says, "Can we use cookies?" but the only option is a "Yes" button. If you're not giving people a choice, why even pretend?
How do you see this as a "dark pattern"? I see it as more of a reasonable compromise. If you visit my site, I think it's reasonable for me to understand how you're using it. If you don't want to participate in that, you are given a choice. That choice is between being tracked and having a mildly distracting banner at the bottom of a landing page. This doesn't seem like a betrayal of trust in any way. The implicit trust here is that you will not be tracked unless you agree to be tracked. This is in fact the case.
Of course, on the one hand we do want you to opt in to tracking. This is a marketing site, after all. If you're actually interested in the product, tracking helps us understand who is interested and why, which in turn allows us to improve the product and reach more potential users. If you're not interested in the product, you don't need to click yes and there is no problem – because presumably you won't be spending very much time on the landing page for a product you're not interested in.
I think a landing page like this one is slightly different from, say, a big cookie banner on a news website, as the intent is not really for you to be spending a lot of time reading content on this site.
Just because it's annoying doesn't mean it's a dark pattern in the typical sense of the word. Here's darkpatterns.org's definition:
> Dark Patterns are tricks used in websites and apps that make you do things that you didn't mean to, like buying or signing up for something.
And here is the one used by the verge [0]:
> A dark pattern is a user interface carefully crafted to trick users into doing things they might not otherwise do, such as buying insurance with their purchase or signing up for recurring bills
Here there's no trickery and no chance that a user would unintentionally agree to cookies when they didn't mean to. It's just a little annoying thing that bugs you until you do what they want. It's not unethical, but if you don't like it you shouldn't use their site.
What exactly is your definition of ethical? Because a little box at the bottom of a webpage that just sits there does not really cross the unethical line for me.
For me, this is only a dark pattern if the cookie banner makes the site unusable (as many sites do) until you click "Yes". Ours clearly does not.
Regardless, the initial accusation was:
> If you're not giving people a choice, why even pretend?
Which is clearly not true. There is a very real choice – we are not pretending. Your choice matters.
Because we do actually want you to click "yes", so that we can understand how you're using the site. Annoying? Absolutely. Unethical? I don't think so.
However, since a lot of people are not a fan of our banner, we've decided to add an explicit "no" option. I still disagree that our original implementation is a "dark pattern", as we very explicitly[1] will not sell your data, and tracking for the sake of improving the product seems like a square deal to me. But I understand that people are finding it annoying, so it's been changed. Sorry about that.
I trust people on HN to have the ethical relationship you envision, where someone uses your service, steps into a place you pay for, and can be generally expected to advance their own interests in a land of push and pull.
But for kids, older adults, and recent immigrants I feel this is borderline confusing (the right way to say no is to ignore?) and manipulative, and I would prefer more margin from the border.
The difficult conversation is to what degree do we expect rational agency from different kinds of folks, how do we think about formal or business relations with them, etc, but I don’t think the answer is “you shouldn’t let older moms or kids into the web”.
As far as the EU Cookie Directive is concerned, I don't think this is correct. The directive stipulates that you cannot use non-vital cookies until the user explicitly consents. This consent must be freely given, i.e. it must not be a requirement to use the site. Since our banner is mildly annoying but doesn't prevent use of the site, I think this complies. As a side note, I'm not sure you can be in "violation" of the ePrivacy directive, as it is a directive, not a regulation (unlike GDPR). This will change when the ePrivacy Regulation[1] comes into play. I might be wrong here though, IANAL.
However, since a lot of people are not a fan of our banner, we've decided to add an explicit "no" option. I still disagree that our original implementation is a "dark pattern", as we very explicitly[2] will not sell your data, and tracking for the sake of improving the product seems like a square deal to me. But I can understand how people would find it annoying, so it's been changed. Sorry about that.
Joplin[0] supports code highlighting and TeX math. I assume you just need TeX for equations, not for the whole document. It's also open source, and works with several different sync back-ends. I've been using it for some time and am very happy with it so far.
Nothing has beaten having a local Hugo server running (with a theme that has Katex and syntax highlighting). Note taking can be like blogging to yourself, and the flat markdown means it's easy to edit and search. I don't have the time to learn orgmode, which I'm sure is better.
So this isn't a structured notes app like Notion, but InkDrop has support for Latex and code highlighting. It's not free, but it's the only notes app I've ever been willing to pay for aside from Bear.
One more suggestion for you – dropbox paper (https://paper.dropbox.com/) has latex support + syntax highlighting. It's quite simple but it works well as a google docs replacement. As others have mentioned Notion is also fantastic.
This changes a lot for me. I like Notion's interface, as well as the functionality included. It feels like a desktop app, which Google Docs simply can't compete with (they're also Google products, do with that what you will). The "blocks" limit always felt arbitrary on Free, so I never really got into it, but now that I can use this like I would normally use a note-taking app, I can see it being very valuable.
edit: apparently there's also a free upgrade to Personal Pro for EDU users, I wonder if that's been around for a while.
This is kinda weird, because I was happily giving them $4/month after running out of space in their trial plan, and now I absolutely have no reason to keep giving them money.
Which, sure, I guess I'll take it. My $4/month isn't going to make or break their business and they probably barely give a shit about getting money for personal usage. Does remind me that my usage of their app doesn't align with their business model, which makes it feel rather... tenuous? Like at any time they might say "actually we're going to only support paid enterprise usage now" or "oh we're shutting down because companies just used Confluence and Airtable instead" (I have yet to sell any employer on using Notion because it's too unstructured for them to grok the benefits of :\).
it's product as marketing: make happy individual users, in the target market, and you're likely to tell others, hopefully workmates or others like you. if you can get a workgroup using the product and happy with it, it's worth quite a bit more with their per-user subscription model for groups.
it can work well for productivity apps, slack, for example.
Recently they have been hiring aggressively and expanding their templates for specific use cases. Coming from a cynical HN perspective, this looks like another promising startup falling into the vicious cycle of using VC money to fund hyper growth.
However their founder Ivan Zhao has been outspoken about not taking more VC money than necessary, and creating sustainable growth. So for now I'm approaching this news with cautious optimism.
Knowing their aversion to VC in their history, I had the opposite reaction — this feels like a play to boost raw user count in order to attract an investor.
I share your cynicism on this. Good chance this is a play to drastically boost numbers to court a big company for an exit. Not a bad idea if that keeps the product alive since it seems to be very loved in the world of productivity apps.
Also, I find it interesting that they're working on an API. A lot of organizing products lack integrations and this might open to door to sync items between Office, GSuite, fitness applications and other services for life management.
Github just did the same thing! It’s because the math works like this: They’d need 1,000 people to pay them $4 to match a single enterprise company paying them $4k/mo. So they just need one of those 1,000 people to bring Notion into their company, and they’re ahead. If they get 10, they’re way ahead. (This is slightly simplified, of course)
Don't overlook the importance of the economy. It's tough to get individual customers to pay $4/month for a service like this in a good economy. (They were already giving it away to academics, which will never be a lucrative market.) I wouldn't want to be selling Notion to individuals in an economy like this.
This is exactly what I did. Free student user. When I started working at a new company, and they wanted to modernise internal knowledge tools, I recommended Notion. Fingers crossed it gets traction.
In Github's case I feel like it helps that they have Microsoft backing them up. MS is much more used to this model, I imagine they make a ton more off enterprise licensing then they do off individually sold ones.
Got about the same feeling, but then I noticed that this free personal plan allows only 5mb of file uploads as opposed to the unlimited uploads in the paid plan, which is one of my use cases – I store quite a lot of files there as a personal software archive, and then I felt relieved.
Are there any open source Notion alternatives? This is the main benefit of open source software, in my mind: no one can "take" it from you because it doesn't belong to "them" in the same way that a product does.
I'm a happy user of QOwnNotes and Markor with a shared dir with a sync tool of your choice. Indeed, committing my data to a closed (source) silo is what prevents me from using tools like this (Notion does look very neat).
Yeah I don't think Joplin has collaboration features. I also found the UI to be extremely bad on iOS.
BookStack doesn't have any client apps — it's basically a PHP app like WordPress that you can self-host, but the collaboration feature set is pretty good. It's a wiki that feels a bit like Notion.
Outline could be an alternative if your main usecase was internal team documentation. I understand that Notion can be used for a lot of other things too…
It is BSL licensed, the only restriction is that you cannot run a hosted version for other organizations to use (aka compete with the only way the project maintains itself).
No. There are tools doing similar stuff of some aspects of Notion. But the main benefit of Notion is the interface and collection of ability. And there is nothing like that at the moment. But the question is what you really want. Maybe you are just care for some specific aspect, not the whole tool?
they might have ruined it for people paying for Notion Personal
>>
What if I had multiple members in my free workspace?
No worries, you don’t have to remove anyone! Nothing is different for you until you hit 1,000 blocks of content. At that point, if you want to add more, you can:
Upgrade to our Team Plan.
Start a new workspace for just yourself and use it for free, indefinitely.
Remove members, and enjoy no content limits on your own.
Note: Make sure members in your workspace have their private pages backed up before you remove them!
Don't feel bad, they just got a major cash infusion from a VC firm. Looks like they figured those $4 a month individual users won't move their need much long term?
By keeping SSO out of personal use, they can be assured that most businesses will have to pay as thus they can more easily give this part of their service away.
I paid for Notion for a little over a year. Ultimately, though, I migrated to using Zim backed by Dropbox. I just didn't need the powerful features of Notion. I only needed a wiki with a desktop interface and cloud storage.
Anyone mind giving me a TL;DR on the value proposition/use case of Notion? I have a friend that works at a small company who is absolutely nuts about it (every single one of his tweets is about it), but I also have seen other people say it's a convoluted mess once you get above a certain size and they regret ever going down that path.
Also curious if anyone has comments on how it compares to similar apps like Dropbox Paper (which Notion seems like a direct clone of) or Quip.
> Anyone mind giving me a TL;DR on the value proposition/use case of Notion?
Have you ever used Confluence? If not, have you ever used any Atlassian products? Atlassian is all over corp structures, and everything they make is painful to use without a training course or the desire to immerse yourself in boring-as-shit documentation. A lot of corps jumping onto Notion are jumping off of Confluence.
I guess I'm struggling to understand it because my aforementioned friend talks about how he uses Notion for basically every possible use case under the sun (probably even some where it's not meant for that but he found some way to finagle it). Based on that knowledge, I still don't really know what Notion is meant for other than being just-another-note-taking-app-that-supports-markdown-and-embedded-pics.
I really don't mean to be rude, but why don't you just read their homepage (and the one posted here)? It should answer most of your questions. (Hint: It really is _way_ more than "just-another-note-taking-app-that-supports-markdown-and-embedded-pics".)
Because I have read their homepage (multiple times) and I find it to be nothing more than marketing speak that doesn't actually explain what it does or what it's good for, nor does it convey actual human experience using the product (which HN is excellent at discussing).
"With Notion, all your work is in one place" is a terrible descriptor of a product.
Uhh... Have you tried reading past that? They literally list pretty much all of the most important features right there (though I believe not all of them). They even show which services each feature replaces. It's true there is marketing speak sprinkled throughout it, but all in all it's the opposite of the "nothing but marketing speak" trend most services follow.
Yes. Here are some excerpts from the (very minimally descriptive) page:
> Write better. Think more clearly. Get organized.
Totally useless in terms of explaining what the product is.
>A simple, beautiful writing experience,
with 30+ types of content to add.
Great, so I can... write things in it? What are these 30 types of content? It doesn't even give examples.
> Turn your tribal knowledge into easy-to-find answers.
How does it do this? No explanation given.
> Kanban boards, tables, lists, and more.
"and more"? And more what? This is what I'm trying to get information on.
> Lightweight and flexible.
Flexible how? This phrase is meaningless to me.
This is one of the more marketing speak ridden websites I've encountered.
If someone made a post on HN asking people to compare and contrast, say, AWS vs Azure, would your response be "just go read the AWS website duh"?
Take a look at the other comments in this thread and ask yourself if the Notion website conveys even half of the insight that the other commenters have provided. Those comments are the entire point of HN, not "just go read the website".
I just read it again and it's true there's a lot of marketing speak, but it seems you've been blinded by it and ignored all of the rest.
It's great to have these questions and insightful answers. The thing is you've said your friend is nuts about it, but apparently haven't bothered to ask them the same questions you're asking here. Not only that, you do seem to be fairly interested in knowing what it's about, but you don't seem to have read anything about it at all, so maybe you could have at least followed the hacker spirit and... I don't know, scanned for the links on the top of the page... and formed a basic opinion?
>so maybe you could have at least followed the hacker spirit and... I don't know, scanned for the links on the top of the page... and formed a basic opinion?
or I could ask about it on a forum that is dedicated to discussing topics exactly like this? As you can see, other commenters have given some great insight that is infinitely more helpful than "just go read the website", and is definitely more insightful than the website itself could ever be. I thank them greatly for their insight.
To be clear, I didn't say you shouldn't have asked. I just suggested you inform yourself minimally before you do. I believe this is better for everyone involved, but ymmv.
I feel like you're nit-picking this to depth. Most of the answers you've mentioned may not exist on the homepage but within one click. Under the Product menu, there's a bunch more contextual detail.
I'm not sure why you would expect the main page to list, individually, 30+ types of content. Do you similarly complain that the homepage for Lightroom doesn't say that you can edit the following parameters on an image:
Or do you settle for "Wide ranging, comprehensive non-destructive image editing"?
> What are these 30 types of content? It doesn't even give examples.
There are, just off the main page.
I'm just not sure what you're expecting is at all reasonable of any product. The main page draws you in, and the Product page breaks it down by use context. You're certainly entitled to "I don't want to have to go to any additional pages", but that doesn't work for anything more than the simplest products.
I don't think it's especially great at note taking. I'd prefer a different directory structure for that.
The love for it makes more sense if you think of it as a really simple website builder. You can have a database of pages with structured data, unstructured data, and nice layout. That sounds simple, but it covers a lot of use cases.
If you check out communities talking about Notion, you'll see the layout stuff is huge. You might even think it's overboard, to the point of productivity porn. But if you're the kind of person who cares about that (think the girl in middle school who took notes with 6 colored pens) or you want to make something pleasing to use for a tiny organization, you can end up falling in love with it.
I think this is what's mostly caused some confusion for me, so thanks for taking the time to explain it a bit. I've seen tons of stuff about how to customize Notion to fit personal preferences and specific layouts, and that kind of drowns out the actual discussion about what those customizations/layouts are used to accomplish.
Notion is basically an app framework with a standardized UI surface and a couple of apps built in. So it’s not surprising that your friend is using it for almost anything the same way you can use Ruby on Rails to build anything.
It's a nice wiki with some interesting database features (a la airtable). Writing in it is pretty nice because it's basically markdown.
I'd stopped using it because it was too easy to outgrow the free plan. Now with unlimited pages I'll give it another shot but I'm still not sold on its benefits vs storing all my notes locally in plain markdown files.
The killer feature that made me switch from OneNote is that when you add dates you can set it to remind you before they pass. Some ways I've used this:
- Implementing GTD, when I move a task to "waiting" I add a date when I want to be reminded to check on it.
- I create a new table quarterly with a row for each week with columns for goals (e.g. practice Spanish or get out running 3x), then embed date reminders for each one so I don't forget to keep it updated.
- I keep a table of annual subscriptions I pay for, with the date the payment occurs, and a reminder a few weeks earlier. This way I can decide whether I want to renew (this alone has paid for the cost of Notion).
Used Dropbox Paper before Notion. Paper is great for stand-alone documents. I even made a nice presentation using it because it was quicker than using Google Slides.
I've been using Notion for 3+ years now and I've been happily paying for it. The main reason I went away from Dropbox for organizing and writing is b/c each Paper document felt like a separate piece of work. In Notion, documents are easily linked, workspaces are a starting point and there's child documents and sibling documents that can help keep things organized. I have over 200+ documents and about 3 months ago the search started to feel sluggish and they updated their search code and it now feels pretty fast again.
It's not all perfect though, with 3+ years of use, I can tell you their mobile apps have come a long way but still don't feel as native as some other writing apps (iA Writer).
My final thoughts are that if you're hearing good things about it and haven't given it a shot, try it for a 1-2 week period and see how it works for you. Some people like the way it does 90% of the things and others hate the same things ️
Notion gives you a number of options for structuring data (tables, datatypes, formatting) and collaborating (great comment/tagging system + nice doc hierarchy). As a builder I have to say that it's a really nice product. The interaction design is extremely good, but.....
IMO the biggest issue with these sorts of better-mousetrap documents/business tools is that they add another application to your organization. They're almost all slightly better than Confluence/GSuite (and I say that as a GSuite fan), but my team already runs our SSO/Email etc through GSuite and our issue tracking through Jira. Even with better functionality, maintaining another tool can turn the value proposition negative for scaling companies due to time spent on enablement, vendor negotiation, change management, wrangling of docs, security, etc.
Of course, these products like to sell/market via guerrilla, bottoms-up strategies propelled by their great design and natural appeal: the people introducing them to organizations are typically insulated from the negative logistical externalities. This allows them to dodge a top-down procurement process that would have much higher requirements. There's a whole organizational question of whether it's best for your company to accept new bottoms-up tools that incrementally improve efficiency, or accepting "worse" tools that simplify the overall logistics of running a team.
Fwiw my team also used Dropbox Paper in the early days of the product, and the story then was quite similar to Notion (we weren't customers of Dropbox's storage product).
I used Evernote for years and switched to Notion like 2 years ago. I use it on a daily basis, mainly to take/read notes at work and track articles/papers I've read, but also to track movies/series/books/games I've seen/read/played (the "database" template is great for that), track gym sessions and keep a grocery check list.
While it's a good product (and now totally free), I don't really get why people are absolutely nuts about it all over Twitter. There is also like a Notion community, organizing Notion meetups and events. That's kinda beyond me. At the end of the day, it's just a note taking app.
The best way to understand notion is as a relational database. You can build arbitrary collections (tables) of "cards" and choose structured properties (columns) on them. The "body" of the card itself is a standard markdown note.
The way you can display these cards is also very flexible (views): kanban, a table, list, gallery, etc with easy to setup filtering and sorting options. You can have multiple views attached to each collection (e.g. a KanBan board for team project managment and a separate "my TODOs" list)
The most powerful part is when you start to setup relations (foreign keys) between tables, which allows you to use all the power of relational data using GUI point and click. Anyone familiar with SQL (or Django ORM) will feel right at home with Foreign key, and reverse relationships.
The reason people are so excited about notion is that it "democratizes" the power of database — to non-technical people.
>Anyone mind giving me a TL;DR on the value proposition/use case of Notion?
There isn't one.
Notion blasted the Youtube Selfhelp/Productivity space with sponsored videos to get a buzz going and now are moving to continue their growth story by offering a free tier.
It's designed to convert your productivity into minuscule parts to convince you that you are achieving goals. Akin to playing a game.
Using Notion is awesome, but does require you to bring your own structure. Templates help, but much like any other process in your organization, it requires occasional review to keep the team on the same page to keep it tidy and useful. It helps to have a champion/steward for it.
The one thing that bothers me about Notion (and Slack and other "everything in one place" tools), is the lack of encryption. I might have FAANGophobia, but whenever there is a free tier without a form of end-to-end encryption in place, it feels like a data puddle waiting to become a lake.
That being said, having clear-text data would allow features like an API on publicly shared pages/blocks, to use Notion as a CMS. I have seen some attempts [1] at reverse-engineering their internal API, but an official one on a paid plan could be a nice addition.
There is no easy way to implement client side encryption. You will have a private key or long password the you will keep safe. You lose that all your data in gone. Plus it's difficult to securely move that password to a new platform
People rightfully get skittish when there's no "forgot password" mechanism to get their account and data back.
I certainly agree that that's the point, but such a system needs some potential usability affordances. For instance, a key stored in the browser rather than a password the user has to remember, and ideally a key synced between multiple devices controlled by the user so that the loss or failure of one device does not mean loss of the account.
For example, imagine having the browser generate an asymmetric key for the user, and making sure browsers store such keys (encrypted) in Firefox Sync or equivalent, so that the keys are safe even if the user moves to a new device or an existing device fails or gets lost.
You derive a master key from a password, and use that to encrypt other keys, or a more complex key chain if needed. You then only sync encrypted keys with the server.
Keeping an unencrypted local mirror on your own device(s) would solve that problem, as well as potentially the "my data is stuck on their servers" problem. On devices with space for it, I mean, so maybe laptop but not phone by default.
Much more critical (imo) software such as Backblaze offers full encryption, it’s the user choice and responsibility. That’s what privacy is also about.
The idea is not to move the password, or any derived key, but the clear-text data. GDPR and other laws enforce that you give customers the right to access their data (in clear text), if possible in an interoperable form. Notion does so in CSV and Markdown, which is good enough to transfer to another service.
1Password figured it out, and even wrote a paper about it. So it's a solvable problem. They even figured out a good model for helping recover lost passwords when my family members forget it.
this is the only thing that stops me from using Notion, too. just downloaded it and it looks like it would change my life... except i don't own the data.
right now i'm trying out Outline [1] which has an option for self hosting.
i've only been using it for a little bit, but here goes:
* unlike Notion, it's one workspace per instance. makes sense, but worth noting as using workspaces as for organisational purposes won't work so well here.
* for personal instances, Slack doesn't make all that much sense. i see a PR for LDAP support on GitHub, so i will play around with that
* supports embeds just like Notion - paste the link and it just works. supports codepen, figma, gsuite, youtube and others. this was the feature that made me take notice of notion, so it's good to see it here.
* even better, the embed API seems pretty easily extensible, so the sky's the limit here. i can't wait to make some sweet dashboards based on entirely self-hosted data!
* no mobile app is a bit of a bummer, but the PWA experience works pretty well. considering i'll be authoring predominantly on desktop and only reading on iPhone, this isn't so much of a big deal for my use case
* no auto-save :(
* you can share a read-only, fully public link of any page you want. pretty damn cool.
all in all i'm pretty impressed. it seems pretty robust! i mean, it's definitely not as full-fat as Notion, but perhaps that's a good thing - and OSS means it's easily extensible for whatever you need to use it for. who knows which way my opinion will change after some more extensive use, but this definitely shows promise.
I can tell you that a large majority of in-production API docs use Stripe's docs as a template. I did it for my company, and I've seen a ton of other API services do it. Stripe leads in API docs, so it's easier to not reinvent the wheel and just do what works. I know this instance isn't even for a production product, but meh.
I just checked outline out and went to try the hosted version, but looks like they don't let me sign up with my own email. I generate emails for each service I use, and am much too lazy to generate a Slack account just to use it to sign into this. I suppose I could spin up an instance and self-host, but don't want to dedicate 30 mins to just setting this up to test it out.
I'm assuming you are talking about end-to-end encryption, which in case of tools like Slack doesn't really make sense because it's the company that owns and has total control of the data, not you the end user. What happens when they need to hand over records for discovery, for example?
It's a legal term - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discovery_(law). Most countries/industries have some kind of regulation around data storage and retention for exactly this purpose.
The entire point of end-to-end encryption is to prevent this from being automated and abused by either the legal system or the company. Requiring a warrant to access the secret key on the user device reduces the risk of mass surveillance. Metadata (access logs) remain in clear text and can still be used to help authorities identify nefarious activity.
We've been working on Portabella (https://portabella.io) for the last four weeks in an effort to bring end-to-end encryption to everyday tasks. Currently we support basic kanban boards and lists. Like other comments have highlighted there is no reason for data not to be encrypted in this day and age.
Currently everything happens client side, however we believe homomorphic encryption is at a level of sophistication that should support most users and their needs.
Hi there. I'm a co-founder of Emvi [1] and we have an API on our paid plan (free as we are in beta right now) that you can use as a headless CMS. Our blog is an example of it. We have (incomplete) client libraries on GitHub [2].
Made me puke when Evernote introduced the "Context" feature, a disgusting data grab. It's a much worse option than just searching for whatever I want by myself, with the added anti-feature of losing all privacy to Evernote staff (and whomever hacks/has already hacked them).
My guess is that all these apps are salivating over the data to be able to train their NLP models which they can sell to an acquirer. I can't wait for Obsidian or some other app to reach feature parity (including wide, stable platform support). Would happily pay $$$ per year for it.
That's up to you, really. If you're prone to just making everything look pretty without actually using any of the data, you'll probably find a way to do the same with any other tool out there.
Notion's just a tool, like a pen and a pad. If you decide to use it for nothing but busy work, that's an option I suppose. But I get a lot of real work done using Notion.
According to this description I believe you could also say writing tests or using git is just busy work. Nevertheless, a lot of people use tools like git and notepad (or notion) to organize their work.
That doesn't make any sense. Notion is literally just a powerful text editor. If the act of using Notion is busywork, then so is the act of using a typewriter, a pen, a whiteboard, any other text editor, etc.
This is the downside of webapps, they have to reimplement all the UX that native apps have builtin. In this case, Apple updated things like buttons and text inputs in their native components, so any app using those didn't have to do anything to make it work as expected.
I've been comparing Trello and Notion recently, and even though both use Electron, Trello feels infinitely faster.
Trello can be toggled with a global hotkey with absolutely no delay, while re-opening the Notion window or loading another Notion page takes quite a while. It is a day and night difference for note taking.
I think that Notion can't be implemented other than Web technologies because it should support many features for many platforms. I generally don't like Electron but I accept for Notion.
I love using Notion, but I think the general discussion about it does not talk enough about how it's flexibility is also a problem many times.
1. Flexibility of blocks is a cognitive overhead for most folks in my team. They would rather prefer more constrained and opinionated approaches like Trello
2. Notion is currently a jack of all trades and master of none. We have tried to use it as a wiki, project tracker, issue tracker, CRM & spreadsheet. Though it's good to have one tool that can do many things, we quickly reach limits of what is possible automatically and have to spend a lot of time to manually maintain it
3. Convention over configuration creates problems for other team members to follow because conventions are not documented properly.
But I see a lot of potential of it becoming a platform. If they can incentivize 3rd parties to build over their platform and build trust, I think it's gonna be the next big thing. "One platform for all my data" with specialized tools to deal with different kinds of data. I can imagine tools like Tello, Jira, Hubspot, Google spreadsheets & draw.io running over it.
I am a 10yr+ Emacs user, this hit too close to home than I would like! I am seeing a lot of momentum in Emacs ecosystem for last couple of years and Spacemacs rocks! So hopefully it's gonna get better :)
I just started using orgmode to compliment notion. So far it feels to me as Notion is a bit like emacs / orgmode without API, and orgmode is a bit like notion without collaboration.
The nice thing about org-mode is that it automatically gets all the cool stuff that emacs has. (Although, I have never tried any of the solutions listed in that wiki page and I suspect even the "working" ones have issues).
Certainly is, though slowly but surely you zero in on the "best configuration" for yourself. Whereas when I was using vscode, onenote, google keep, and a bunch of other shit to manage everything, I had "topped out" at productivity.
I'm trash at vim (I use evil-mode), org mode, and org-agenda, but I'm still lightyears ahead of where I was 2 years ago before I used these tools.
Did you topped out the tool or your personal ability?
> but I'm still lightyears ahead of where I was 2 years ago before I used these tools.
But is this because of the tools, the gain of new experiences or the 2 years difference?
And how do you know whether you are really moved forward, and not just run in circles appearing busy without being more productive? Do you have some objective metric for this?
I've tried to use Notion, but my experience mirrors yours:
There's just enough flexibility to slow you down, but not enough flexibility to make it down exactly what I need without jumping through a lot of hoops.
My favorite productivity tools blend into the background. I can get down to doing the work without mental overhead of managing the tool. Notion, on the other hand, feels like I'm spending half of my energy fighting with Notion, and only half of my energy doing the work I'm trying to accomplish.
> There's just enough flexibility to slow you down, but not enough flexibility to make it down exactly what I need without jumping through a lot of hoops.
This reads as if you except Notion to give you meaningful work to do, a workflow you can follow? Or do you just don't know how to implement the workflows you envision yourself?
Only on HN can people question the existence of an app which has 50M users. Trello might not be this month's flavor but I'll be damned if it's not one of the most useful planning tools out there.
I don't know how Trello has 50M users, and how so many people and companies can use it for project management. For anything more than a single board, I find it terribly lacking in functionality. Can't even see all your cards across boards without scrolling 50 times.
Well then they’re something wrong with you and your understanding of what people want in software. Can you link an app that you’ve made that people actually use?
It will soon be dead as Atlassian have started to kill it. For example, it now quite often now does browser page refresh when I open a card to add a comment. WTF ATLASSIAN!
Can anyone explain to me why Trello is so popular? I'm serious; I honestly don't get it.
If I want to track tasks, I just make a Google Spreadsheet with a row for each task. This scales up easily to a hundred tasks or so, and it's straightforward to filter on a column to focus on particular categories or statuses. In Trello, I can see maybe 30 cards max before my screen space is all used up, and I spend so much time hunting around for cards. If a card has moved, I have to just read linearly through all the cards to find the one I'm looking for. I could use the search box, but that only pops up the detail window for the card; it doesn't show me where the card is in context.
Trello is like a task spreadsheet where you can only see a small amount of information at once, it's really hard to find tasks, you can't add custom columns, you can't colour-code things the way you want, you can't add tabs, you can't add formulas to do simple things like addition, you can't see previous versions, and on and on.
So why would you use Trello when you could use a Google Spreadsheet and get things done twice as fast? Does the whole product exist only because people like the cute little animation of picking up the tilty little cards and dragging them to other columns?
You are right that a spreadsheet gets more information on the screen, but Trello's kanban layout really highlights which task is "where" (in what state).
I've often used it with clients to let them know which high-level features are in progress, which are done, etc. It has also worked really well for collaborative trip planning. Both of these workflows benefit from cards with cover images too.
It's not a replacement for a company-wide knowledge base or an issue tracker for hundreds of tickets.
I like Trello A LOT have like 30 different boards with probably thousands of cards.
Why Trello over Sheets?
I use Trello as basically a really extensible digital kanban board.
It also makes easier to associate tasks with each other add extra context (for instance if I'm keeping track of some long form context associated with a task where would you put that in sheets? A note? Can you search those? Once it gets really long a Google doc? I guess).
Also can add custom fields. I used this to allow me to add weights to cards so they automatically rearrange in priority order.
I even have boards that serve as a personal knowledge base.
I feel like Trello gives you really great free reign to discover a process for things and have it evolve over time.
Could you accomplish that with sheets? Probably but not as elegantly and definitely not with a UI
> Can anyone explain to me why Trello is so popular? I'm serious; I honestly don't get it.
It's sleek, powerful, constrained and optimized for it's single purpose, while still remain flexibel enough to give space. Also scales up nice for multiple users, from 2+, teams, 2+ departments and even whole companies or even more. And it also works on most platforms effortless.
> If I want to track tasks, I just make a Google Spreadsheet with a row for each task.
That reads horrible. How do you manage richtext with Spreadsheet? Links? Pictures? How do you collaborate with others? How does this get automated and integrate with other systems? How do you get a sane overview of the state of your tasks and projects? Sure, more or less all possible, but not on the level of quality you get from a specialized and over a long time optimized solution. And you need to invest the time to build this all first.
> So why would you use Trello when you could use a Google Spreadsheet and get things done twice as fast?
How do you find cards? That's what really gets in the way for me.
How do you manage hundreds of cards? Dragging each card one at a time takes forever. If you want to make a change to a bunch of cards, do you open each card, edit it, close it, open the next card, etc. -- doesn't that take ages? Isn't it frustrating not being able to just drag 20 rows of a spreadsheet at once, or paste/format 20 cells at once?
> How do you get a sane overview of the state of your tasks and projects?
How do you get an overview when you can't see anything? In Trello I feel like I'm blind -- all the cards are scrolling off the bottom of the screen and the columns are off to the right. Instead of a single line of text maybe 20 pixels high, every card is a stack of labels, dates, a few lines of text, little icons and profile avatars. The minimal card is 100 or more pixels high, which means that only about 5 to 8 cards will fit vertically with all the other detritus packed into the UI.
How about an objective metric: in a given column of your Trello board, what fraction of the column can you see at once? Like what percentage of the vertical scrollbar track is the draggable part? For me it's about 5 to 10%.
I would rephrase "all in one tool" to more specific like "project management tool". All in one for software teams makes me think that you also offer things like version control etc. All-in-one is a very loaded phrase. Just my 2 cents.
Hey, just noticed a small mistake, or it was just unclear from my side. Looks like the "pricing" link links to "learn" in the url, while there being nothing about pricing in the page itself.
Yeah. I googled Froost out of curiosity and I was spot on, the project barely has anything but a landing page and a post on Indie Hackers about said landing page launching a few days ago.
Funnily enough originaly the saying was "A jack of all trades is a master of none, but oftentimes better than a master of one." Seems like it got pretty skewed over time.
Yup, Notion and OneNote occupy similar scenarios for me. It's where I can gather my compiled thoughts and notes, but I've had trouble implementing any team processes on it due to it not being constrained enough in its UI.
I don't think there's any easy answer here. I respect the Notion team a lot for making a tool that is so flexible, but it's also a curse in some key scenarios.
Yeah. I see that it works great for some scenarios, like when I and my co-founder are collaborating. But if I try to teach it to a sales guy, I can see he just hates it :(
Onenote is so close as a perfect system for me but what it leaves out really hurts.
-No task Hierarchy
-No alerts for due dates (Yes you can add outlook tasks but its flakey)
-No automatic reporting
Also, the whole Emoji's thing is distracting to me. I just want to see plain text in simple san-serif fonts, with borders (which are apparently outdated in favor of massive emptiness of negative space).
Visual cognitive load is ok as far as the brain can process blocks of information. Such as a table with borders. When you have emojis, colors, effects, etc without clarity of separation, you get something that becomes tiring after a little while to look at.
Borders are timeless, they've been around before the internet and to be around forever. Literally a line in the whitespace that allows your eye balls to know that hey! that's block A and that's block B and there is a fricking line in the middle!
That's funny. One time while converting a prototype to less of a prototype, I created like 40 PRs in 40 working days. There were so many in-flight at one time that I couldn't really use normal issue trackers. Instead I created one GitHub issue with a table of items. Each item had an emoji in the first column that indicated its current status. The gear was 'in-progress', 'eyes' review, 'ship' deploying, and green check for done. I didn't know how many lines there would be, I started out with about 6 and it worked exceedingly well. If anyone ever asked me what I was working on or where I was with it, I just sent them the one issue link and they had the whole history and the near future listed.
lmao this sounds insane. I fully admit and recognize - I like reading tax forms :-|. The more old school, the better. Give me docs set in Times New Roman, all this frivolous stuff is giving me a headache. Now...where is my walnut cane and financial times set in orange paper?
Please link me the github issue so I can make use of a bottle of kerosene I've got left from 1940's gas lamp.
I've found Notion really worthwhile, but the fact it's so flexible means you need to go in with a plan so that you can really take advantage of it.
I really like how Marie Poulin's sets up her Notion process, here's a good example of how to make contextual dashboards - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YX2AJD4kx80 but there's a bunch more, just massive productivity boosts from not having to jump between so many different apps/services.
Good points. It seems you might enjoy Fibery[1], it addresses most of these problems (and has internal whiteboard as draw.io replacement as well). But I’m biased as a Fibery founder.
I really need a better index of all my notes, right now it's just too overwhelming without a better way of organizing everything, especially since it automatically collapses all my workspace trees when I close the app. Really gets in the way of using it beyond a handful of pages.
long time notion user here. I was using notion for my personal life and it was serving the purpose but when I started using it as a project management tool for my dev team I realised how crippled it is (no dependent tasks, gantt view etc). maybe I'm wrong and notion is not built for this but then again why would i use it just for wiki? recently started looking for task management+wiki tool.. reviewed more than 10+ tools and finally picked an extremely powerful but a less known tool clickup.com
I am really surprised no one has mentioned https://zenkit.com/. Kanban - Wiki - Calendar - List - Mindmap - Hierarchy etc. It does those things very well.
Probably because it seems to be less known than Notion. IIRC it's a bit more expensive and more constrainend than notion, more targeted at teams than single users.
“One platform for all my data with specialized tools to deal with different kinds of data. I can imagine tools like Tello, Jira, Hubspot, Google spreadsheets & draw.io running over it.”
This was exactly our issue. Not good at any one thing and the interface is very touch. A single mis-click and you can mess things up which reminds me Asana.
What all these platforms really need is solid APIs and interoperability so we can use the right tool while keeping everything in one place (ideally email or slack).
I feel like Dropbox Paper strikes a great balance. If you drop certain links in a Paper doc, like a Figma or Google Docs Spreadsheet, it will show either an iframe or screenshot read-only representation of the current content with a link to it.
My only beef with Dropbox Paper is their iOS apps are buggy as hell and have been for a few years. I really wish they’d invest more in their native apps.
+1 for Dropbox Paper. I am weirdly addicted to it for all my internal documentation and writeups. When you get used to (and expect) the guardrails, it's so fast to quick create a doc with multi-media.
Notion recently published "How Notion Uses Notion" [0] which I found insightful in terms of how Notion's flexibility is put to work internally.
It's interesting seeing where teams hit the limits of the tool & wish for (or move to) something else though. I wonder if "The Notion Way" will emerge at some point, which would be useful for quickly qualifying yourself in or out.
Same here. I was so overwhelmed with the million ways I could accomplish my relatively simple needs that I just gave up on it. Also everything basically bringing up a modal for a new page annoyed me. Maybe it's just my personality type but I like there just being a canonical way of doing something and then doing it, rather than spending a fair chunk of time customising and configuring the tool to do what I want.
> how it's flexibility is also a problem many times.
Flexibility is always a challenge, but in case of Notion IMHO the bigger challange is getting over it's aweful userexperience and interface. And flexibility is not always a problem. Excel proofs that flexibel solution can succeed with the laymen.
> 1. Flexibility of blocks is a cognitive overhead for most folks in my team. They would rather prefer more constrained and opinionated approaches like Trello
Is this not solved with their Template-Library? Those deliver a guided opinionated experience. Though it's not as constrained and powerful as a specialized app like Trello.
> 2. Notion is currently a jack of all trades and master of none.
It's a canvas-tool. You get a set of brushs and pencils and it's up on you to paint what you need. This has naturally advantage for some and disadvantages for some others.
> 3. Convention over configuration creates problems for other team members to follow because conventions are not documented properly
Is Notion a team-tool? Do they advertise it as such?
> But I see a lot of potential of it becoming a platform. If they can incentivize 3rd parties to build over their platform and build trust, I think it's gonna be the next big thing. "One platform for all my data" with specialized tools to deal with different kinds of data.
There are far better soltions around for this. I doubt this is a sane endgoal for notion.
Ran into the same issue. Loved the design and the demos I saw so I signed up.
What I really wanted was just a simple flexible to-do list, something that I missed from Basecamp v1 and was willing to try somewhere else.
But the flexibility made it a nightmare. Because what I wanted was very simple, the friction that I encountered, though probably not huge, felt much larger, because I felt, why can't this be easier? I just want a simple to do list, and I was messing with headings and all of this non-essential stuff that I didn't need.
I'm sure in a business setting it could be different, especially if someone goes through the trouble of setting things up so you have some sort of system of consistency that you work inside of, but as a first time user the flexibility was a bit of hinderance.
I can totally relate to this. I often feel that with all these "simplistic" products coming out they actually oversimplify it to the point where it actually takes longer to do. It is great to have the flexibility and all, but where do we draw the line from being too flexible or too simplified? Like you, I ran into the same issues with Notion, so I switched to Trello, but it has some lack of features that I really wanted. I've been searching the web to find team chats that particularly don't require too much integration, and is simple. Especially with task management. I've been seeing a lot of mentions about AirSend on twitter, and I checked out their website. They have a really simple to-do list that is built-in. My team and I just started using it last week, and so far I don't have too many complaints. Not sure if you are looking for a switch, but you might like them. I hope this helps! Their website is, AirSend.io
Can't agree more. I was using Notion from the very beta start and loved it. Then couples of months in I strated noticing that the more Notion added features the more I was spending more time "perfecting" my workspace than doing actual work.
Stopped using it and went back to old good Google Sheets, Apple Notes. Very constrained and just the right amount of "flexibility" to make it work for you workflow. No emojis encouragements.
There are major disadvantages to using something like Notion for personal work - including non discoverability of work or thoughts. Most people are better of with pen and paper.
I think Notion might actually work best in personal/small environments, and this seems like a smart move to encourage more of that kind of use. My exposure to it is at a large company, where it really does not work well.
As a user of Apple Notes for personal and OneNote for work. What are the benefits of Notion - i have the app installed, but i always default to basic apple notes.
Good news.
But I've been using Roam [1] for a couple months and I don't know if I can live without "biderectional links" and "unliked references" anymore.
You can downgrade to the free plan for which the number of blocks is not limited anymore, or keep paying paying $4/month for a bunch of extra features.
From the FAQ:
What if I'm already paying for the old Personal Plan?
You've been automatically upgraded to our new Personal Pro Plan at no extra cost!
In addition to all the features of the free Personal Plan, Personal Pro includes:
- No limit on file uploads (5MB is the limit for free)
- Unlimited guest collaborators (5 guests is the limit for free)
- Version history up to 30 days
- Priority customer support
- API access (coming soon)
You can switch back to the free Personal Plan at any time.
After Evernote started going downhill, I moved to plain markdown inside a Google Drive folder.
I use the best, native app for each platform and have zero risk of being affected by a single company cancelling, closing,, increasing the price etc..
Notion does seem pretty interesting, but if they ever shut, stop innovating, or are outshined by a competitor, I don't fancy the idea of moving everything
Agreed. I've been burned way too many times by companies being acquired (few months later product is sunset), shut down, or are forced to aggressively monetize.
Can you recommend a markdown native app for Windows? Currently switching to simple markdown notes myself but a bit annoyed always opening VS Code for a tiny note.
On Mac I use Ulysses. I hate that they switched to a subscription, but it's still the best Markdown app on the platform.
On Linux I use typora (previously caret when it basically shut down). typora and caret are built on web technologies and cross platform.
Oh Android I used to use and recommend JotterPad, but they've disgraced themselves and moved previously paid features (which I bought!) to a subscription, so I don't have an Android app anymore :(.
I've been happy with Markdown Edit. As a native app with an embedded webview, it's just a bit snappier than most of the Electron-based Markdown editors I've tried.
i like using marktext. its a single document editor instead of a note manager like notable or evernote, but it also has a sidebar where you can add a folder.
im not sure if its actually native though or whether its using electron... but i think ghostwriter is. tried that for a while. pretty much the same as marktext just without a sidebar
I'm not in love with it, but it works and I have a client everywhere I need one. It's text recognition in images is one of the killer features (I save snapshots of whiteboards), the other is searching metadata.
I had a really bad experience with Notion, used it for some time, hit some arbitrary 1000 block limit that no matter what I deleted I couldn't get rid of.
Now I rely on vimwiki and fzf. More robust and future-proof. Who knows how long Notion will be around?
(Notion here) This update gets rid of of that exact block limit for personal use. We do hope and plan to be around for awhile. We're profitable and have raised money to ensure we're able to invest in the product for the long-term (https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/01/technology/notion-startup...).
I was using vimwiki for a while, but have since switched to notational-fzf-vim[1], which is basically Notational Velocity for Vim, powered by fzf and ripgrep. So far, it's exactly what I've been looking for.
Come to think of it, I don't see why you couldn't use both vimwiki and notational-fzf-vim. That might be pretty good actually.
As an non-user and since a quick glance at the website helps little - what exactly is notions USP and what makes it different than a standard note taking app synchronous across platforms?
467 comments
[ 66.3 ms ] story [ 865 ms ] threadJust type `/math` in a Notion document to bring it up.
Disclaimer: I built it.
1: https://supernotes.app
Of course, on the one hand we do want you to opt in to tracking. This is a marketing site, after all. If you're actually interested in the product, tracking helps us understand who is interested and why, which in turn allows us to improve the product and reach more potential users. If you're not interested in the product, you don't need to click yes and there is no problem – because presumably you won't be spending very much time on the landing page for a product you're not interested in.
I think a landing page like this one is slightly different from, say, a big cookie banner on a news website, as the intent is not really for you to be spending a lot of time reading content on this site.
> Dark Patterns are tricks used in websites and apps that make you do things that you didn't mean to, like buying or signing up for something.
And here is the one used by the verge [0]:
> A dark pattern is a user interface carefully crafted to trick users into doing things they might not otherwise do, such as buying insurance with their purchase or signing up for recurring bills
Here there's no trickery and no chance that a user would unintentionally agree to cookies when they didn't mean to. It's just a little annoying thing that bugs you until you do what they want. It's not unethical, but if you don't like it you shouldn't use their site.
[0]: https://www.theverge.com/2013/8/29/4640308/dark-patterns-ins...
I'm happy to include multiple forms of coercion; the pattern here is the ratchet: https://jacquesmattheij.com/dark-patterns-the-ratchet/
> It's just a little annoying thing that bugs you until you do what they want.
That's a nice summary of a class of dark patterns, yes.
> It's not unethical, but if you don't like it you shouldn't use their site.
It absolutely is unethical, and yes as I said above I will consider this a good reason to avoid the app.
For me, this is only a dark pattern if the cookie banner makes the site unusable (as many sites do) until you click "Yes". Ours clearly does not.
Regardless, the initial accusation was:
> If you're not giving people a choice, why even pretend?
Which is clearly not true. There is a very real choice – we are not pretending. Your choice matters.
However, since a lot of people are not a fan of our banner, we've decided to add an explicit "no" option. I still disagree that our original implementation is a "dark pattern", as we very explicitly[1] will not sell your data, and tracking for the sake of improving the product seems like a square deal to me. But I understand that people are finding it annoying, so it's been changed. Sorry about that.
[1] https://supernotes.app/terms/
But for kids, older adults, and recent immigrants I feel this is borderline confusing (the right way to say no is to ignore?) and manipulative, and I would prefer more margin from the border.
The difficult conversation is to what degree do we expect rational agency from different kinds of folks, how do we think about formal or business relations with them, etc, but I don’t think the answer is “you shouldn’t let older moms or kids into the web”.
> There is a very real choice
I don't see a 'No' button... I love the app, really, but that isn't nice. Also a GDPR violation for those in the EU.
Ah, cool then.
From looking at the currency used though, it seems that you don't need to concern yourself with EU stuff soon =)
However, since a lot of people are not a fan of our banner, we've decided to add an explicit "no" option. I still disagree that our original implementation is a "dark pattern", as we very explicitly[2] will not sell your data, and tracking for the sake of improving the product seems like a square deal to me. But I can understand how people would find it annoying, so it's been changed. Sorry about that.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPrivacy_Regulation_(European_... [2] https://supernotes.app/terms/
[my setup is just markdown, really, but it's here](https://lesser.occult.institute/an-opinionated-approach-to-t...)
0 - https://joplinapp.org/
https://katex.org/
edit: apparently there's also a free upgrade to Personal Pro for EDU users, I wonder if that's been around for a while.
Which, sure, I guess I'll take it. My $4/month isn't going to make or break their business and they probably barely give a shit about getting money for personal usage. Does remind me that my usage of their app doesn't align with their business model, which makes it feel rather... tenuous? Like at any time they might say "actually we're going to only support paid enterprise usage now" or "oh we're shutting down because companies just used Confluence and Airtable instead" (I have yet to sell any employer on using Notion because it's too unstructured for them to grok the benefits of :\).
it can work well for productivity apps, slack, for example.
Recently they have been hiring aggressively and expanding their templates for specific use cases. Coming from a cynical HN perspective, this looks like another promising startup falling into the vicious cycle of using VC money to fund hyper growth.
However their founder Ivan Zhao has been outspoken about not taking more VC money than necessary, and creating sustainable growth. So for now I'm approaching this news with cautious optimism.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/01/technology/notion-startup...
Also, I find it interesting that they're working on an API. A lot of organizing products lack integrations and this might open to door to sync items between Office, GSuite, fitness applications and other services for life management.
GitHub and Notion are two recently examples, but for every one I see in the market, I can point to at least 10 that failed to take the obvious action.
https://joplinapp.org/
https://www.bookstackapp.com/
BookStack doesn't have any client apps — it's basically a PHP app like WordPress that you can self-host, but the collaboration feature set is pretty good. It's a wiki that feels a bit like Notion.
It is BSL licensed, the only restriction is that you cannot run a hosted version for other organizations to use (aka compete with the only way the project maintains itself).
https://www.getoutline.com/
https://tiddlywiki.com/
>> What if I had multiple members in my free workspace? No worries, you don’t have to remove anyone! Nothing is different for you until you hit 1,000 blocks of content. At that point, if you want to add more, you can:
Upgrade to our Team Plan. Start a new workspace for just yourself and use it for free, indefinitely. Remove members, and enjoy no content limits on your own. Note: Make sure members in your workspace have their private pages backed up before you remove them!
Another example of the SSO Tax: https://robchahin.github.io/sso-wall-of-shame/
Also curious if anyone has comments on how it compares to similar apps like Dropbox Paper (which Notion seems like a direct clone of) or Quip.
Have you ever used Confluence? If not, have you ever used any Atlassian products? Atlassian is all over corp structures, and everything they make is painful to use without a training course or the desire to immerse yourself in boring-as-shit documentation. A lot of corps jumping onto Notion are jumping off of Confluence.
Yes. Is Notion a Confluence competitor?
I guess I'm struggling to understand it because my aforementioned friend talks about how he uses Notion for basically every possible use case under the sun (probably even some where it's not meant for that but he found some way to finagle it). Based on that knowledge, I still don't really know what Notion is meant for other than being just-another-note-taking-app-that-supports-markdown-and-embedded-pics.
https://www.notion.so/
"With Notion, all your work is in one place" is a terrible descriptor of a product.
> Write better. Think more clearly. Get organized.
Totally useless in terms of explaining what the product is.
>A simple, beautiful writing experience, with 30+ types of content to add.
Great, so I can... write things in it? What are these 30 types of content? It doesn't even give examples.
> Turn your tribal knowledge into easy-to-find answers.
How does it do this? No explanation given.
> Kanban boards, tables, lists, and more.
"and more"? And more what? This is what I'm trying to get information on.
> Lightweight and flexible.
Flexible how? This phrase is meaningless to me.
This is one of the more marketing speak ridden websites I've encountered.
If someone made a post on HN asking people to compare and contrast, say, AWS vs Azure, would your response be "just go read the AWS website duh"?
Take a look at the other comments in this thread and ask yourself if the Notion website conveys even half of the insight that the other commenters have provided. Those comments are the entire point of HN, not "just go read the website".
It's great to have these questions and insightful answers. The thing is you've said your friend is nuts about it, but apparently haven't bothered to ask them the same questions you're asking here. Not only that, you do seem to be fairly interested in knowing what it's about, but you don't seem to have read anything about it at all, so maybe you could have at least followed the hacker spirit and... I don't know, scanned for the links on the top of the page... and formed a basic opinion?
https://www.notion.so/product
https://www.notion.so/wikis (I've just seen you can even try a live demo without signing up)
https://www.notion.so/projects
https://www.notion.so/notes
(There are more, but I believe you get the idea)
or I could ask about it on a forum that is dedicated to discussing topics exactly like this? As you can see, other commenters have given some great insight that is infinitely more helpful than "just go read the website", and is definitely more insightful than the website itself could ever be. I thank them greatly for their insight.
I'm not sure why you would expect the main page to list, individually, 30+ types of content. Do you similarly complain that the homepage for Lightroom doesn't say that you can edit the following parameters on an image:
* Lens Correction - Chromatic Aberration, Profile Corrections, Distortion, Vignetting
* Basic - Color Profile, White Balance, Temperature, Tint, Tone, Exposure, Contrast, Highlights, Shadows, Whites, Blacks, Texture, Clarity, Dehaze, Vibrance, Saturation
* Transform - Auto, Guided, Level, Vertical, Full, Rotation, Aspect, Scale, X Offset, Y Offset
* Tone Curve - Regional and Global Highlights, Lights, Darks, Shadows, Point Curves
* HSL / Color - Change hue for Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Aqua, Blue, Purple, Magenta. Change saturation for same. Change Luminance for same.
* Split Toning, Highlights (Hue, Saturation), Shadows (same), balance between two.
* Details: Sharpening (amount, radius, detail, masking), Noise Reduction (luminance, detail, contrast)
... and so on.
Or do you settle for "Wide ranging, comprehensive non-destructive image editing"?
> What are these 30 types of content? It doesn't even give examples.
There are, just off the main page.
I'm just not sure what you're expecting is at all reasonable of any product. The main page draws you in, and the Product page breaks it down by use context. You're certainly entitled to "I don't want to have to go to any additional pages", but that doesn't work for anything more than the simplest products.
The love for it makes more sense if you think of it as a really simple website builder. You can have a database of pages with structured data, unstructured data, and nice layout. That sounds simple, but it covers a lot of use cases.
If you check out communities talking about Notion, you'll see the layout stuff is huge. You might even think it's overboard, to the point of productivity porn. But if you're the kind of person who cares about that (think the girl in middle school who took notes with 6 colored pens) or you want to make something pleasing to use for a tiny organization, you can end up falling in love with it.
I think this is what's mostly caused some confusion for me, so thanks for taking the time to explain it a bit. I've seen tons of stuff about how to customize Notion to fit personal preferences and specific layouts, and that kind of drowns out the actual discussion about what those customizations/layouts are used to accomplish.
Yes. I don't know why you're getting such convoluted answers from others.
I'd stopped using it because it was too easy to outgrow the free plan. Now with unlimited pages I'll give it another shot but I'm still not sold on its benefits vs storing all my notes locally in plain markdown files.
We used it for our company wiki. Wanted to use Notion but for 500 users the Notion quote came out 15x more expensive so it was a no-brainer!
- Implementing GTD, when I move a task to "waiting" I add a date when I want to be reminded to check on it.
- I create a new table quarterly with a row for each week with columns for goals (e.g. practice Spanish or get out running 3x), then embed date reminders for each one so I don't forget to keep it updated.
- I keep a table of annual subscriptions I pay for, with the date the payment occurs, and a reminder a few weeks earlier. This way I can decide whether I want to renew (this alone has paid for the cost of Notion).
I've been using Notion for 3+ years now and I've been happily paying for it. The main reason I went away from Dropbox for organizing and writing is b/c each Paper document felt like a separate piece of work. In Notion, documents are easily linked, workspaces are a starting point and there's child documents and sibling documents that can help keep things organized. I have over 200+ documents and about 3 months ago the search started to feel sluggish and they updated their search code and it now feels pretty fast again.
It's not all perfect though, with 3+ years of use, I can tell you their mobile apps have come a long way but still don't feel as native as some other writing apps (iA Writer).
My final thoughts are that if you're hearing good things about it and haven't given it a shot, try it for a 1-2 week period and see how it works for you. Some people like the way it does 90% of the things and others hate the same things ️
IMO the biggest issue with these sorts of better-mousetrap documents/business tools is that they add another application to your organization. They're almost all slightly better than Confluence/GSuite (and I say that as a GSuite fan), but my team already runs our SSO/Email etc through GSuite and our issue tracking through Jira. Even with better functionality, maintaining another tool can turn the value proposition negative for scaling companies due to time spent on enablement, vendor negotiation, change management, wrangling of docs, security, etc.
Of course, these products like to sell/market via guerrilla, bottoms-up strategies propelled by their great design and natural appeal: the people introducing them to organizations are typically insulated from the negative logistical externalities. This allows them to dodge a top-down procurement process that would have much higher requirements. There's a whole organizational question of whether it's best for your company to accept new bottoms-up tools that incrementally improve efficiency, or accepting "worse" tools that simplify the overall logistics of running a team.
Fwiw my team also used Dropbox Paper in the early days of the product, and the story then was quite similar to Notion (we weren't customers of Dropbox's storage product).
While it's a good product (and now totally free), I don't really get why people are absolutely nuts about it all over Twitter. There is also like a Notion community, organizing Notion meetups and events. That's kinda beyond me. At the end of the day, it's just a note taking app.
The way you can display these cards is also very flexible (views): kanban, a table, list, gallery, etc with easy to setup filtering and sorting options. You can have multiple views attached to each collection (e.g. a KanBan board for team project managment and a separate "my TODOs" list)
The most powerful part is when you start to setup relations (foreign keys) between tables, which allows you to use all the power of relational data using GUI point and click. Anyone familiar with SQL (or Django ORM) will feel right at home with Foreign key, and reverse relationships.
The reason people are so excited about notion is that it "democratizes" the power of database — to non-technical people.
There isn't one.
Notion blasted the Youtube Selfhelp/Productivity space with sponsored videos to get a buzz going and now are moving to continue their growth story by offering a free tier.
It's designed to convert your productivity into minuscule parts to convince you that you are achieving goals. Akin to playing a game.
That being said, having clear-text data would allow features like an API on publicly shared pages/blocks, to use Notion as a CMS. I have seen some attempts [1] at reverse-engineering their internal API, but an official one on a paid plan could be a nice addition.
[1] https://github.com/splitbee/notion-api-worker
I certainly agree that that's the point, but such a system needs some potential usability affordances. For instance, a key stored in the browser rather than a password the user has to remember, and ideally a key synced between multiple devices controlled by the user so that the loss or failure of one device does not mean loss of the account.
For example, imagine having the browser generate an asymmetric key for the user, and making sure browsers store such keys (encrypted) in Firefox Sync or equivalent, so that the keys are safe even if the user moves to a new device or an existing device fails or gets lost.
https://francoisbest.com/posts/2020/password-reset-for-e2ee-...
https://cryptpad.fr
https://github.com/xwiki-labs/cryptpad
https://1password.com/files/1Password-White-Paper.pdf
Don't work for Agile Bits, but have used 1P for a long time and couldn't live without it.
right now i'm trying out Outline [1] which has an option for self hosting.
[1] https://github.com/outline/outline
Outline also has an RPC-style API for the entire project btw, the documentation needs a little work but it's there: https://getoutline.com/developers
We're considering the self-hosted option too - that's the big draw.
* unlike Notion, it's one workspace per instance. makes sense, but worth noting as using workspaces as for organisational purposes won't work so well here.
* for personal instances, Slack doesn't make all that much sense. i see a PR for LDAP support on GitHub, so i will play around with that
* supports embeds just like Notion - paste the link and it just works. supports codepen, figma, gsuite, youtube and others. this was the feature that made me take notice of notion, so it's good to see it here.
* even better, the embed API seems pretty easily extensible, so the sky's the limit here. i can't wait to make some sweet dashboards based on entirely self-hosted data!
* no mobile app is a bit of a bummer, but the PWA experience works pretty well. considering i'll be authoring predominantly on desktop and only reading on iPhone, this isn't so much of a big deal for my use case
* no auto-save :(
* you can share a read-only, fully public link of any page you want. pretty damn cool.
all in all i'm pretty impressed. it seems pretty robust! i mean, it's definitely not as full-fat as Notion, but perhaps that's a good thing - and OSS means it's easily extensible for whatever you need to use it for. who knows which way my opinion will change after some more extensive use, but this definitely shows promise.
[1] https://stripe.com/docs/webhooks#what-are-webhooks
Currently everything happens client side, however we believe homomorphic encryption is at a level of sophistication that should support most users and their needs.
[1] https://emvi.com/
[2] https://github.com/emvi
My guess is that all these apps are salivating over the data to be able to train their NLP models which they can sell to an acquirer. I can't wait for Obsidian or some other app to reach feature parity (including wide, stable platform support). Would happily pay $$$ per year for it.
Not that you are using it for busy work.
It's a strategy used by productivity "gurus" for 100+ years to keep the $$ trickling in.
Just a few years ago it was todist...before that it was Omni.
Once notion peaks we will all move on to the next one.
(On macOS, don't know if this is the case on other OSes)
I love Notion, but the Mac client feels so sluggish, I didn’t investigative but looks like a web view or Electron or something similar.
Trello can be toggled with a global hotkey with absolutely no delay, while re-opening the Notion window or loading another Notion page takes quite a while. It is a day and night difference for note taking.
1. Flexibility of blocks is a cognitive overhead for most folks in my team. They would rather prefer more constrained and opinionated approaches like Trello
2. Notion is currently a jack of all trades and master of none. We have tried to use it as a wiki, project tracker, issue tracker, CRM & spreadsheet. Though it's good to have one tool that can do many things, we quickly reach limits of what is possible automatically and have to spend a lot of time to manually maintain it
3. Convention over configuration creates problems for other team members to follow because conventions are not documented properly.
But I see a lot of potential of it becoming a platform. If they can incentivize 3rd parties to build over their platform and build trust, I think it's gonna be the next big thing. "One platform for all my data" with specialized tools to deal with different kinds of data. I can imagine tools like Tello, Jira, Hubspot, Google spreadsheets & draw.io running over it.
Emacs has a number of collaborative editing solutions: https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/CollaborativeEditing
The nice thing about org-mode is that it automatically gets all the cool stuff that emacs has. (Although, I have never tried any of the solutions listed in that wiki page and I suspect even the "working" ones have issues).
https://org-web.org
https://github.com/DanielDe/org-web
I'm trash at vim (I use evil-mode), org mode, and org-agenda, but I'm still lightyears ahead of where I was 2 years ago before I used these tools.
Did you topped out the tool or your personal ability?
> but I'm still lightyears ahead of where I was 2 years ago before I used these tools.
But is this because of the tools, the gain of new experiences or the 2 years difference?
And how do you know whether you are really moved forward, and not just run in circles appearing busy without being more productive? Do you have some objective metric for this?
Both, I'd say.
> Do you have some objective metric for this?
Well my happiness, for one. My sense of accomplishment. How much more I can fit in a day. But no, I don't KPI myself.
There's just enough flexibility to slow you down, but not enough flexibility to make it down exactly what I need without jumping through a lot of hoops.
My favorite productivity tools blend into the background. I can get down to doing the work without mental overhead of managing the tool. Notion, on the other hand, feels like I'm spending half of my energy fighting with Notion, and only half of my energy doing the work I'm trying to accomplish.
This reads as if you except Notion to give you meaningful work to do, a workflow you can follow? Or do you just don't know how to implement the workflows you envision yourself?
1. GP isn't doing this. You misunderstood. 2. Even if they were(they weren't), how would this be something exclusive to HN?
https://help.github.com/en/github/managing-your-work-on-gith...
Pro:
- Integrated with GitHub issues
Con:
- Can not move card to other board
- No import/export
- No themes
- No change background image
- Only basic automation of moving cards to Done list etc
Trello
Pro:
- Can move card/list to other boards
- Export to JSON
- GitHub Power-Up for GitHub integration
- Butler for automating, in English
- Themes
- Change background image
- API
Con:
- Only SaaS, can not self-host, not Open Source
- No Swimlanes
- Export to CSV needs paid account
- No Import from JSON/CSV on free version web UI
Wekan https://wekan.github.io
Pro:
- Open Source, can self-host on x64, RasPi3/4 etc
- Import from Trello JSON cards/lists/checlists/attachments/labels/votes
- Import CSV, currently importing custom fields in progress of being added
- Import from Wekan JSON including attachments
- Export CSV, currently exporting custom fields in progress of being added
- Export Wekan JSON including attachments
- IFTTT Rules wizard has translations, but less rules than similar Trello Butler
- Swimlanes
- Themes
- Gogs integration https://github.com/wekan/wekan-gogs
- API, Outgoing Webhooks per board, Global Webhooks at admin panel of (nearly) all board actions
Con:
- Not integrated with GitHub yet
- No move list to other board yet
- No change background image yet
If I want to track tasks, I just make a Google Spreadsheet with a row for each task. This scales up easily to a hundred tasks or so, and it's straightforward to filter on a column to focus on particular categories or statuses. In Trello, I can see maybe 30 cards max before my screen space is all used up, and I spend so much time hunting around for cards. If a card has moved, I have to just read linearly through all the cards to find the one I'm looking for. I could use the search box, but that only pops up the detail window for the card; it doesn't show me where the card is in context.
Trello is like a task spreadsheet where you can only see a small amount of information at once, it's really hard to find tasks, you can't add custom columns, you can't colour-code things the way you want, you can't add tabs, you can't add formulas to do simple things like addition, you can't see previous versions, and on and on.
So why would you use Trello when you could use a Google Spreadsheet and get things done twice as fast? Does the whole product exist only because people like the cute little animation of picking up the tilty little cards and dragging them to other columns?
I've often used it with clients to let them know which high-level features are in progress, which are done, etc. It has also worked really well for collaborative trip planning. Both of these workflows benefit from cards with cover images too.
It's not a replacement for a company-wide knowledge base or an issue tracker for hundreds of tickets.
Why Trello over Sheets?
I use Trello as basically a really extensible digital kanban board.
It also makes easier to associate tasks with each other add extra context (for instance if I'm keeping track of some long form context associated with a task where would you put that in sheets? A note? Can you search those? Once it gets really long a Google doc? I guess).
Also can add custom fields. I used this to allow me to add weights to cards so they automatically rearrange in priority order.
I even have boards that serve as a personal knowledge base.
I feel like Trello gives you really great free reign to discover a process for things and have it evolve over time.
Could you accomplish that with sheets? Probably but not as elegantly and definitely not with a UI
Just because you don’t understand why people use Trello does not mean everyone’s a frivolous idiot.
What do you guys do for a living? Not a joke question.
It's sleek, powerful, constrained and optimized for it's single purpose, while still remain flexibel enough to give space. Also scales up nice for multiple users, from 2+, teams, 2+ departments and even whole companies or even more. And it also works on most platforms effortless.
> If I want to track tasks, I just make a Google Spreadsheet with a row for each task.
That reads horrible. How do you manage richtext with Spreadsheet? Links? Pictures? How do you collaborate with others? How does this get automated and integrate with other systems? How do you get a sane overview of the state of your tasks and projects? Sure, more or less all possible, but not on the level of quality you get from a specialized and over a long time optimized solution. And you need to invest the time to build this all first.
> So why would you use Trello when you could use a Google Spreadsheet and get things done twice as fast?
More like ten times slower.
How do you manage hundreds of cards? Dragging each card one at a time takes forever. If you want to make a change to a bunch of cards, do you open each card, edit it, close it, open the next card, etc. -- doesn't that take ages? Isn't it frustrating not being able to just drag 20 rows of a spreadsheet at once, or paste/format 20 cells at once?
> How do you get a sane overview of the state of your tasks and projects?
How do you get an overview when you can't see anything? In Trello I feel like I'm blind -- all the cards are scrolling off the bottom of the screen and the columns are off to the right. Instead of a single line of text maybe 20 pixels high, every card is a stack of labels, dates, a few lines of text, little icons and profile avatars. The minimal card is 100 or more pixels high, which means that only about 5 to 8 cards will fit vertically with all the other detritus packed into the UI.
How about an objective metric: in a given column of your Trello board, what fraction of the column can you see at once? Like what percentage of the vertical scrollbar track is the draggable part? For me it's about 5 to 10%.
This lead me to my latest startup https://froosthq.com/ which is Notion inspired and aimed solely at software teams.
https://wiki.c2.com/?SpecializationIsForInsects
I don't think there's any easy answer here. I respect the Notion team a lot for making a tool that is so flexible, but it's also a curse in some key scenarios.
Visual cognitive load is ok as far as the brain can process blocks of information. Such as a table with borders. When you have emojis, colors, effects, etc without clarity of separation, you get something that becomes tiring after a little while to look at.
I called it Emoji-Driven-Development.
Please link me the github issue so I can make use of a bottle of kerosene I've got left from 1940's gas lamp.
I really like how Marie Poulin's sets up her Notion process, here's a good example of how to make contextual dashboards - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YX2AJD4kx80 but there's a bunch more, just massive productivity boosts from not having to jump between so many different apps/services.
[1] https://fibery.io
But... even after looking at all the four separate landing pages I have no idea what exactly fibery could do for me
[1] https://medium.com/fibery/fibery-vs-notion-66019dd91846
https://fibery.io/anxiety
I want to use notion, it's such a nice UI/UX. Problem is, it's just too complicated.
Trello is basic, but gets the job done.
-> https://qatalog.com
What all these platforms really need is solid APIs and interoperability so we can use the right tool while keeping everything in one place (ideally email or slack).
My only beef with Dropbox Paper is their iOS apps are buggy as hell and have been for a few years. I really wish they’d invest more in their native apps.
My only pain point is the damn file system
That, and the fact that new files are world-readable by default. (With unguessable URLs, but still...)
It's interesting seeing where teams hit the limits of the tool & wish for (or move to) something else though. I wonder if "The Notion Way" will emerge at some point, which would be useful for quickly qualifying yourself in or out.
[0] https://www.notion.so/How-Notion-Uses-Notion-616f41d2f5124f3...
Flexibility is always a challenge, but in case of Notion IMHO the bigger challange is getting over it's aweful userexperience and interface. And flexibility is not always a problem. Excel proofs that flexibel solution can succeed with the laymen.
> 1. Flexibility of blocks is a cognitive overhead for most folks in my team. They would rather prefer more constrained and opinionated approaches like Trello
Is this not solved with their Template-Library? Those deliver a guided opinionated experience. Though it's not as constrained and powerful as a specialized app like Trello.
> 2. Notion is currently a jack of all trades and master of none.
It's a canvas-tool. You get a set of brushs and pencils and it's up on you to paint what you need. This has naturally advantage for some and disadvantages for some others.
> 3. Convention over configuration creates problems for other team members to follow because conventions are not documented properly
Is Notion a team-tool? Do they advertise it as such?
> But I see a lot of potential of it becoming a platform. If they can incentivize 3rd parties to build over their platform and build trust, I think it's gonna be the next big thing. "One platform for all my data" with specialized tools to deal with different kinds of data.
There are far better soltions around for this. I doubt this is a sane endgoal for notion.
What I really wanted was just a simple flexible to-do list, something that I missed from Basecamp v1 and was willing to try somewhere else.
But the flexibility made it a nightmare. Because what I wanted was very simple, the friction that I encountered, though probably not huge, felt much larger, because I felt, why can't this be easier? I just want a simple to do list, and I was messing with headings and all of this non-essential stuff that I didn't need.
I'm sure in a business setting it could be different, especially if someone goes through the trouble of setting things up so you have some sort of system of consistency that you work inside of, but as a first time user the flexibility was a bit of hinderance.
Stopped using it and went back to old good Google Sheets, Apple Notes. Very constrained and just the right amount of "flexibility" to make it work for you workflow. No emojis encouragements.
There are some things - like personal notes - that really don't need to live in the cloud.
I've gone into further depth here: https://usedone.today/blog/posts/davinci/
I want a ticket to be able to 'depend' on another ticket in a visually satisfying way like a dependency graph view.
Dependencies are such a huge part of ticketing systems but they don't seem to be treated with first class attention.
[1] https://roamresearch.com/
You can downgrade to the free plan for which the number of blocks is not limited anymore, or keep paying paying $4/month for a bunch of extra features.
From the FAQ:
Notion does seem pretty interesting, but if they ever shut, stop innovating, or are outshined by a competitor, I don't fancy the idea of moving everything
https://notable.md/
http://nixnote.org/NixNote-Home/
https://github.com/baumgarr/nixnote2
On Linux I use typora (previously caret when it basically shut down). typora and caret are built on web technologies and cross platform.
Oh Android I used to use and recommend JotterPad, but they've disgraced themselves and moved previously paid features (which I bought!) to a subscription, so I don't have an Android app anymore :(.
https://mike-ward.net/Markdown-Edit/
https://marktext.app
im not sure if its actually native though or whether its using electron... but i think ghostwriter is. tried that for a while. pretty much the same as marktext just without a sidebar
https://wereturtle.github.io/ghostwriter
I'm not in love with it, but it works and I have a client everywhere I need one. It's text recognition in images is one of the killer features (I save snapshots of whiteboards), the other is searching metadata.
Now I rely on vimwiki and fzf. More robust and future-proof. Who knows how long Notion will be around?
Come to think of it, I don't see why you couldn't use both vimwiki and notational-fzf-vim. That might be pretty good actually.
[1]: https://github.com/alok/notational-fzf-vim