I guess for a lot of users like myself using Notion ship has sailed. Most of them have moved to Obsidian, with the new database feature of Obsidian, and it being free, I do not see why users would choose Notion over Obsidian.
Well this is good I suppose, but what I find rather alarming is how bad Notion used to (recently, maybe not after this?) behave when there was a connectivity or server issue. I figured with OTs and CRDTs, collaborative editing of rich text documents with intermittent connectivity was a solved problem. However, with Notion I've actually lost data, sometimes a lot of it. (Once when Notion was having some kind of outage, I silently lost an entire page I was working on.)
Personally, I don't really like Notion very much. Not silently losing data is a low bar to clear for an application that edits rich text. Notion didn't clear it.
That's cool. I typically don't use multiple or linked pages too often when I'm mobile, but there was always some kind of local cache for a page I had been reading or working on. This plugs one of the few annoyances I had.
Apparently in contrast to many of you, I think Notion is a better product for what I want, which is collaborative notes++. Personal info repo, shared project pages with people, and I straddle work and personal life using it everywhere. Tinkering with the backend is not a goal of mine, but I wonder if that's what people like about Obsidian.
I'm a Notion fan but the lack of a native Linux app has me shopping for a replacement. Obsidian seems, from what I've seen, focused on the ability to graph notes, which I don't really care about. I want note-taking, list-making, and markdown friendly.
I do want to keep Notion's ability to work in a browser and to maintain a single, accessible store of my notes.
Although I’m sure implementing this into a big codebase is a technical headache I hope this encourages other big Electron apps like Figma (or even Tana, a direct competitor) to support an offline mode of sorts.
Just use obsidian instead. Don't trust 3rd parties with your sensitive data if you dont have to - especially ones who've to IPO and delivet returns to investors
For me one of the biggest issues with Notion (and to a smaller extent with Obsidian as well) is its ever present UI. When I write (or read) something, I don't want to see 20+ buttons scattered around distracting me from the content.
IA writer got this right, but it's too local and doesn't have colab or better online sync features. Shameless plug – I'm building https://kraa.io/about that's trying to be a writing app with a minimal, yet feature-rich, UI. (better offline and local-files functionality planned)
Offline mode is one of those features that sounds simple enough, but in reality gets pretty complex pretty fast, particularly if you want to do more meaningful capabilities or operations esp at scale.
https://notesnook.com is better than Notion and Obsidian. The cross-platform apps are fast and smooth, and it have sync, which Obsidian requires a subscription for.
The headline made me excited, the article left me disappointed. An offline mode that requires me to individually download the pages and database rows I’m expecting to need beforehand is not the kind of “offline mode” that meets my needs.
Been trying out [SiYuan](https://github.com/siyuan-note/siyuan) as a local alternative and love it so far. The files are single-line JSONs so not as ideal as Obsidian .md files, but it seems to be trivial to export to various human-friendly formats.
This is pretty impressive. A lot of people underestimate the amount of work required to make something available offline. Planning the syncing architecture alone is a monumental task, especially at the scale Notion operates. I built a custom sync solution for my own app, Brisqi (https://brisqi.com), and it took me weeks to get it right, albeit with some trade-offs.
Kudos to the Notion engineering team for achieving this milestone.
While we're here; as a long time zim-wiki user, and as someone who dabbled in org-mode for a year; Obsidian never felt compelling enough to switch.
For me, this year, Logseq did. The killer concept for me is that it does org-mode hierarchy and outline collapsing, but easier; being able to "zero in" on a block, regardless of whether its its own page is excellent.
Finally!
The main aspect of this for me that is important is the ping. It seems like Notion hosts all their services in the US, and since i'm in Australia it somewhat annoys me the time it takes for pages to load. Just downloaded the update and it feels amazing.
34 comments
[ 4.6 ms ] story [ 41.8 ms ] threadNerdy devs are a niche.
HN is a tiny tiny bubble. Most users don’t know and wouldn’t care for obsidian or markdown etc.
I think is not a feature to appease the nerd community but for business users who are on the go.
What database features?
Personally, I don't really like Notion very much. Not silently losing data is a low bar to clear for an application that edits rich text. Notion didn't clear it.
Apparently in contrast to many of you, I think Notion is a better product for what I want, which is collaborative notes++. Personal info repo, shared project pages with people, and I straddle work and personal life using it everywhere. Tinkering with the backend is not a goal of mine, but I wonder if that's what people like about Obsidian.
Speed and local-first was originally the main differentiator, but over time Steph Ango's "file over app" philosophy has become my favorite feature.
Yesterday I used Claude Code to automate some Obsidian cleanup and it was trivial because everything's just a file.
I do want to keep Notion's ability to work in a browser and to maintain a single, accessible store of my notes.
What are my options?
"Let's get you to bed, grandma..."
IA writer got this right, but it's too local and doesn't have colab or better online sync features. Shameless plug – I'm building https://kraa.io/about that's trying to be a writing app with a minimal, yet feature-rich, UI. (better offline and local-files functionality planned)
Even published a very cool article last July about all the (considerable) challenges one runs into when going after making wasm-sqlite work: https://www.notion.com/blog/how-we-sped-up-notion-in-the-bro...
I had to leave Notion far too many years ago and life is elsewhere.
Kudos to the Notion engineering team for achieving this milestone.
For me, this year, Logseq did. The killer concept for me is that it does org-mode hierarchy and outline collapsing, but easier; being able to "zero in" on a block, regardless of whether its its own page is excellent.