Interesting to see that its tied to gmail, which already has pieces of this and is likely working towards the same things.
Notion is vastly superior to Sharepoint, OneNote and Docs, it's a shame MS and Google abuse their position to push inferior products for the same price.
I could do search and replace for years. Notion only added that recently.
Imo notion is a fun tool. But it’s a toy.
It is slow and worse, not accurate at all, when you have any actual data (100+ items you’re actively working with), clunky interface, and is good if you’re a student taking notes and making forms, or doing something casual before you need something robust.
For anything else, Docs and Sheets are far superior and better products.
> It is slow and worse, not accurate at all, when you have any actual data (100+ items you’re actively working with), clunky interface, and is good if you’re a student taking notes and making forms, or doing something casual before you need something robust.
I wish I could convince the people I work with of the same thing. Though I don't really have a better alternative either.
Even worse, it's a toy that people build elaborate things out of and then use them for business-critical functions. It's incredibly irritating to work with a Notion power user.
It must be great if you're a control freak, though. Get leadership to recognize your Notion doc as the source of truth, and then you get absolute control because nobody else wants to touch it.
Google Docs is the clunky mess here and gets away with it because they nailed collaboration early and competed with an even bigger clunkier mess in Microsoft Word. Word at least is a full featured word processor, whereas Google Docs is a struggles with anything more than basic layout or formatting needs.
Notion isn’t a word processor, but unless you’re specifically trying to craft documents it doesn’t need to be. It also isn’t a spreadsheet, and you’re going to have a bad time if you try to make it act as such.
If we’re being dismissive, Google Sheets is also a poor tool for “actual data.” Modern spreadsheet usage is just a pile of inefficient hacks to operate them as pseduo-DBs. Unless you’re in the finance or accounting world, in which case you’re probably using Excel, anything else would be better served by using more powerful open-source data analysis formats and tools.
I have a million complaints about Notion, but holding up Google Workspace as the paradigm of elite enterprise product design is a joke. Get back to me when I can take the markdown produced by Gemini Canvas and paste it into Docs without issues.
For starters, Google suite offers substantial storage so you can actually use it for doing those things, even if they're not as good as you want, for far longer.
And if you do want actual enterprise tier, lots of startups and even public companies use Google suite for all their teams.
Eh, Notion is fine. I quickly ran into scaling problems with it and the block-style editing is only really nice/useful if you're doing a lot of live collaboration.
That being said, I do like opinionated tools better than unopinionated ones (Google Doc) because it's less mental overhead to just make something. But I reach for plain markdown instead.
I wonder how much of that is simply due to the ability to use the Gmail API vs IMAP.
I’ve been knocking around the idea of building an email client, but IMAP looks like nightmare fuel. JMAP would be perfect but adoption looks like it’s going nowhere.
[edit] Seeing a lot of people here diss on Gmail. I don’t blame you, I want out too. If you want more options, lean on your email provider to start supporting JMAP. https://jmap.io
Right now it seems to be pretty simple. It's free for most usage and has some AI features.
Edit: according to the pricing page, Notion AI can organize your inbox if you have the Notion AI add-on. Not quite sure if you can do this on free to some amount.
yes I don't like security decisions forced upon me, that's reasonable. if I want a throwaway email, I don't need MFA because I don't care if the account is compromised. but I don't get to make that decision because Google decided for me that my account will have forced MFA
>if I want a throwaway email, I don't need MFA because I don't care if the account is compromised.
But Google cares if their servers are used to send spam or worse, because it makes their email service less useful for other users who may not use it as a throwaway account.
This is not true. In some organizations I work with they only allow Security Keys on Google Workspace, you can't even use TOTP.
It's possible to disable SMS and Phone verification, but if you allow TOTP then Google Prompt is also automatically allowed.
The same people who thought that sort of thing, probably over-invested.
Once they (investors) have realized that there is no growth or anything to extract, or a lack of further fundraising, then it is written off and they move on.
Longer-term I think Notion would benefit from going straight for the Google Workspace/O365 market and start offering email/calendar/etc end-to-end, rather than their current strategy of integration. The current strategy makes sense to start building up the suite, but: Google is feeling increasingly vulnerable, Notion itself is one of those rare products that has maintained general positive vibes among its customers for many years, and I think a lot of especially smaller companies would opt for just the notion suite if it checked the major boxes.
I've also always felt that Dropbox should have went down this road, after they released Paper in 2015, but I think their time has passed. Google also wasn't nearly as vulnerable back then; they still aren't super vulnerable now, but I think they're trending that way, and if Notion times it right they could be in a great position.
Competing against that market would be extremely difficult. These are two well entrenched companies that their lock in makes switching from extremely difficult so you would be forced sell to new companies which means revenue early on would be very low. Also, if you don't have 100% compatibility, they will throw their hands up and switch to one of established vendors.
Yeah the Google/MS tier of integration is not the level Notion can play in. But being good friends to those integrations means they'll win against all the other productivity SAASs that get thrown around at any given company.
If it works, great! But their AI assistant is much to be desired. It is really pretty useless most of the time and in terms of text generation I find that I can get better results if I go straight to GPT-4. I know that this is purely down to cost but honestly I feel that bringing better, more powerful models, that can do well consistently would be a killer feature - not an email client.
It makes sense though -- Gmail has little in common with normal email besides usage of SMTP transport, and has a lot bigger market share than normal email. (Exchange also doesn't count as "normal email" - so that's the reason for my confident assertion.)
I don’t think it makes sense, per se, considering Gmail’s ubiquity comes from Google offering it as a free product, and then all the barriers to creating an email provider being raised in an attempt to combat spam.
There’s barely any point in setting up your own provider now because you have to compete both with free. All the action has been around email clients which have typically been acquired and then crushed.
Google could have stuck with the protocol or presented a spec for it, rather than leaving the competition with IMAP and SMTP.
What makes sense is they dominated the market and helped put up roadblocks afterwards. EEE.
Is there an equivalent law for "every enterprise app eventually adds product management features"? Slack, Google Sheets and Miro are all guilty of this. I just want chat, pivot tables and diagrams but every update is like "we just added a Gantt Chart and Task Workflow templates guys!"
Surely this could be addressed by putting more AI on top.
On a serious note, my team is very happy we migrated from Notion to Linear for task tracking last year, but we're still looking how to cover the wiki part.
Yeah, I totally abandoned Notion last year because it got too slow. The whole thing is pointless if it takes a minute or two just to navigate to the page I want. It takes a few seconds to do that on an archaic corporate SMB share.
Yes, I just tried using Notion again the other day after being annoyed with Obsidian Projects and even with only a couple entries on a notion database page, it took MINUTES to load, on web and on the desktop version. Uninstalled it immediately and went back to Obsidian.
I’m completely done with Notion now. It was great when it was new, worked well and did what it advertised. But now it has too many features and I feel its core functionality has really suffered.
I'm really disappointed that Notion acquired and killed a far better product (Skiff) just to release what is essentially an overdressed Gmail client.
There's no decent selling point over other competitors in the industry and Notion just missed the chance to tie customers into a alternative workspace suite.
Right now they have a weird limitation that the Gmail address has to match the Notion account, otherwise you would get an error saying “the selected Gmail does not match your Notion address”.
I use Mail.app all the time because I like a unified inbox. But is this one of those "let's build everything in rust since it's super-fast"? (I HOPE so actually).
Or is it just another electron app? For sure there are nice examples of snappy electron apps (like Linear) but which one is it?
I feel there might be a market for a fully native MODERN and OS-native looking mail client (alternative to at least Mac Mail, but actually fast with search that is actually useful).
> But is this one of those "let's build everything in rust since it's super-fast"? (I HOPE so actually).
No. It's not written in Rust. Language choice would have literally nothing to do with making IMAP/the email experience any faster. I don't want to make any firm claims as we've yet to do serious benchmarking, but what we've built is _much_ faster than Mail.app, let alone Gmail.
The tech we've chosen, and the actual app itself, essentially _feels_ like Linear for email.
> I feel there might be a market for a fully native MODERN and OS-native looking mail client (alternative to at least Mac Mail, but actually fast with search that is actually useful).
Yes, this is what we're building, but a bit beyond that. It's completely cross-platform: web, Mac, Windows, iOS, Android, Linux. Any N number of clients a user might have running will seamlessly and instantly sync, given network availability. That said, each client is also fully offline-first.
There _is_ a market for this. It's been a nasty problem to solve, but we have a massive waitlist.
Superhuman has achieved great success (although being an over-valued VC org) but only support Google + Microsoft _via_ API access.
Notion launching their product is further validation that there's a lot of space in this market.
But Marco is quite different. We're building a cross-platform IMAP-primitive email client that gets the basics right. It'll work with any email provider that supports IMAP (basically all). We're not pushing or even _building_ any "AI" stuff yet.
I wrote a blog post detailed our motivations here:
Is this integrating with Notion-Workspaces and their abilities? Because this could be really useful, but except the editor, I don't see any mention of regular notion-features.
It would be better if Notion became a full competitor to Google Workspace. If they start their own email hosting and calendar backend for Notion Calendar, it would be getting closer.
I tried out an early version when I did some work at notion last year, just tried it again and it's honestly a lot better than I expected. The design is good as expected from a notion product, but it's actually lot snappier than I thought. Faster than the notion app lol. It's probably a consequence of not having too much legacy code, but still impressive nevertheless! Esp in a world of slow nextjs apps lol.
Vibe wise, it kinda feels kinda like superhuman but 0 instead of $30/mo lol.
Tbh, I can also kinda see the vision that notion is pitching to investors now - the entire productivity suite, but redesigned and enhanced with AI. I'm not a power user of email/calendar by any means, but find myself using their calendar and mail client. I have no doubt the next generation of Tiktok girlies will eat this up like crazy. I don't use much of their AI stuff, but can also see how business can really find it useful.
I was more talking about the optimistic updates n caching as opposed the actual rendering. From my experience, the reason why most apps are slow is more so cuz of the former than the latter(like the spinner in ur notion)
When it comes to the actual rendering performance, it’s an electron app, so … whatever you make of that
Personally, I feel like often times electron apps are actually smoother than swift apps nowadays due to the way swift renders text(ie. the ChatGPT app was so laggy when it was released, unclear if they fixed it). Start up time is probably slightly slower than native too but not a hugeee issue for me.
Probably not as fast as superhuman. But I don’t want to pay $30 for a 10ms diff(might be more idk)
Like many AI-driven products, the marquee use case they show is useless. "Job offers that require my signature"?? I am going to have one of these in the air at one time and will not be too busy to keep track the relevant emails! Indicates to me that product is a solution in search of a problem.
Similarly, the first Humane AI Pin hype video showed a guy on a train asking his pin to tell him about prices of vintage photos of a solar eclipse.
Regarding the job offer example. I'll have 1 to sign every 2-5 years, I should be able to manage that myself.
That said, I'd love a better email client that wasn't feeding an advertising company. I'm planning to spend some time with this to see if it fits any of my needs.
Edit: Oh, this is just a gmail wrapper/addon. Nevermind, moving along.
maybe this isn't what you're looking for since it is paid, but I am very happy with fastmail
edit: just realized I skipped a word while reading and you said client. I know some people use it to manage all email (including from gmail accounts) but that's not actually my use case.
I also like that the first screenshot on the page shows an email from "Finance Dept" with the subject "Expense report status" as a "Cold email". That example almost definitely has some back story to it, thus not making it a cold email.
Wow, that is a bizarre example? So bizarre I feel like I must be misunderstanding it. When does someone have multiple job offers in their inbox awaiting a signature? And it’s something you’re searching for as if you have to go through your weekly slog of signing job offers? Someone tell me what I’m misunderstanding.
That actually makes a lot of sense. What little you see of the emails they look completely different though - if ”I” sent them, you’d think they would be more similar.
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[ 3.7 ms ] story [ 192 ms ] threadNotion is vastly superior to Sharepoint, OneNote and Docs, it's a shame MS and Google abuse their position to push inferior products for the same price.
I could do search and replace for years. Notion only added that recently.
Imo notion is a fun tool. But it’s a toy.
It is slow and worse, not accurate at all, when you have any actual data (100+ items you’re actively working with), clunky interface, and is good if you’re a student taking notes and making forms, or doing something casual before you need something robust.
For anything else, Docs and Sheets are far superior and better products.
I wish I could convince the people I work with of the same thing. Though I don't really have a better alternative either.
It must be great if you're a control freak, though. Get leadership to recognize your Notion doc as the source of truth, and then you get absolute control because nobody else wants to touch it.
Notion isn’t a word processor, but unless you’re specifically trying to craft documents it doesn’t need to be. It also isn’t a spreadsheet, and you’re going to have a bad time if you try to make it act as such.
If we’re being dismissive, Google Sheets is also a poor tool for “actual data.” Modern spreadsheet usage is just a pile of inefficient hacks to operate them as pseduo-DBs. Unless you’re in the finance or accounting world, in which case you’re probably using Excel, anything else would be better served by using more powerful open-source data analysis formats and tools.
I have a million complaints about Notion, but holding up Google Workspace as the paradigm of elite enterprise product design is a joke. Get back to me when I can take the markdown produced by Gemini Canvas and paste it into Docs without issues.
And if you do want actual enterprise tier, lots of startups and even public companies use Google suite for all their teams.
That being said, I do like opinionated tools better than unopinionated ones (Google Doc) because it's less mental overhead to just make something. But I reach for plain markdown instead.
I’ve been knocking around the idea of building an email client, but IMAP looks like nightmare fuel. JMAP would be perfect but adoption looks like it’s going nowhere.
[edit] Seeing a lot of people here diss on Gmail. I don’t blame you, I want out too. If you want more options, lean on your email provider to start supporting JMAP. https://jmap.io
We're building https://marcoapp.io
Edit: according to the pricing page, Notion AI can organize your inbox if you have the Notion AI add-on. Not quite sure if you can do this on free to some amount.
also, aren't 'app passwords' or whatever they call it still a thing?
But Google cares if their servers are used to send spam or worse, because it makes their email service less useful for other users who may not use it as a throwaway account.
Once they (investors) have realized that there is no growth or anything to extract, or a lack of further fundraising, then it is written off and they move on.
I know of and have seen a lot of very important founders and CEOs who still all swear by Superhuman.
I've also always felt that Dropbox should have went down this road, after they released Paper in 2015, but I think their time has passed. Google also wasn't nearly as vulnerable back then; they still aren't super vulnerable now, but I think they're trending that way, and if Notion times it right they could be in a great position.
Except for Gmail?
There’s barely any point in setting up your own provider now because you have to compete both with free. All the action has been around email clients which have typically been acquired and then crushed.
Google could have stuck with the protocol or presented a spec for it, rather than leaving the competition with IMAP and SMTP.
What makes sense is they dominated the market and helped put up roadblocks afterwards. EEE.
I have gmail for ages now and i do not switch over to iphone/apple or microsoft. I do wait for google to provide AI features on Gmail and GDrive.
If your central live tool is notion, i would want to have my emails in it too.
On a serious note, my team is very happy we migrated from Notion to Linear for task tracking last year, but we're still looking how to cover the wiki part.
I’m completely done with Notion now. It was great when it was new, worked well and did what it advertised. But now it has too many features and I feel its core functionality has really suffered.
There's no decent selling point over other competitors in the industry and Notion just missed the chance to tie customers into a alternative workspace suite.
https://marcoapp.io
I use Mail.app all the time because I like a unified inbox. But is this one of those "let's build everything in rust since it's super-fast"? (I HOPE so actually).
Or is it just another electron app? For sure there are nice examples of snappy electron apps (like Linear) but which one is it?
I feel there might be a market for a fully native MODERN and OS-native looking mail client (alternative to at least Mac Mail, but actually fast with search that is actually useful).
Is that what you're building?
> But is this one of those "let's build everything in rust since it's super-fast"? (I HOPE so actually).
No. It's not written in Rust. Language choice would have literally nothing to do with making IMAP/the email experience any faster. I don't want to make any firm claims as we've yet to do serious benchmarking, but what we've built is _much_ faster than Mail.app, let alone Gmail.
The tech we've chosen, and the actual app itself, essentially _feels_ like Linear for email.
> I feel there might be a market for a fully native MODERN and OS-native looking mail client (alternative to at least Mac Mail, but actually fast with search that is actually useful).
Yes, this is what we're building, but a bit beyond that. It's completely cross-platform: web, Mac, Windows, iOS, Android, Linux. Any N number of clients a user might have running will seamlessly and instantly sync, given network availability. That said, each client is also fully offline-first.
There _is_ a market for this. It's been a nasty problem to solve, but we have a massive waitlist.
Superhuman has achieved great success (although being an over-valued VC org) but only support Google + Microsoft _via_ API access.
Notion launching their product is further validation that there's a lot of space in this market.
But Marco is quite different. We're building a cross-platform IMAP-primitive email client that gets the basics right. It'll work with any email provider that supports IMAP (basically all). We're not pushing or even _building_ any "AI" stuff yet.
I wrote a blog post detailed our motivations here:
https://marcoapp.io/blog/marco-an-introduction
Let me know if you have any follow-up questions.
It's quite sad when a testimonial mentions, "making the switch from Gmail," as if you're not still using Gmail?
Kudos to Notion though, it looks sleek.
(Notion + Workspace would be an incredibly strong offering for startups ... if it was all integrated/owned by the same company)
Tbh, I can also kinda see the vision that notion is pitching to investors now - the entire productivity suite, but redesigned and enhanced with AI. I'm not a power user of email/calendar by any means, but find myself using their calendar and mail client. I have no doubt the next generation of Tiktok girlies will eat this up like crazy. I don't use much of their AI stuff, but can also see how business can really find it useful.
GJ Notion team!
Not exactly a high bar. How fast is it actually? Unless it's native perf (or at least as good as Superhuman) I won't bother.
When it comes to the actual rendering performance, it’s an electron app, so … whatever you make of that
Personally, I feel like often times electron apps are actually smoother than swift apps nowadays due to the way swift renders text(ie. the ChatGPT app was so laggy when it was released, unclear if they fixed it). Start up time is probably slightly slower than native too but not a hugeee issue for me.
Probably not as fast as superhuman. But I don’t want to pay $30 for a 10ms diff(might be more idk)
Similarly, the first Humane AI Pin hype video showed a guy on a train asking his pin to tell him about prices of vintage photos of a solar eclipse.
Regarding the job offer example. I'll have 1 to sign every 2-5 years, I should be able to manage that myself.
That said, I'd love a better email client that wasn't feeding an advertising company. I'm planning to spend some time with this to see if it fits any of my needs.
Edit: Oh, this is just a gmail wrapper/addon. Nevermind, moving along.
edit: just realized I skipped a word while reading and you said client. I know some people use it to manage all email (including from gmail accounts) but that's not actually my use case.