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Notion – All-in-one workspace for notes, tasks, wikis, and databases
- lgregg 8y agoI love notion, been using it to collaborate with my friend on a project.
- o_____________o 8y agoWhat sets this apart from incumbents like Basecamp?
- cooperadymas 8y agoI haven't used either one in some time, but I would reframe the question: what makes you think this is similar to Basecamp? If you're familiar at all with Basecamp, 10 seconds on the page makes it clear how different it is. If you're not, I guess I don't understand why the question is asked.
- KaoruAoiShiho 8y agoI'm wondering too, I mean the interface is obviously completely different but it solves the same problems. Why is whatever this interface is better since I already enjoy basecamp? Edit: Also highly enjoy basecamp's pricing.
- cooperadymas 8y agoDoes the linked page not answer this? That's what I'm confused about I guess. In a nutshell, the biggest philosophical difference between the two is that Notion is "free form" while Basecamp has a sort of built-in workflow. (Take this with a grain of salt, I haven't used Basecamp since shortly after they rolled out the new interface and it was much more limited then than it is now. And I've only briefly used Notion.) Notion is sort of a wiki, with built in to-dos and spreadsheets. You can build your own workflow or adapt an existing template to how you work.
- KaoruAoiShiho 8y agoThe page needs to answer why freeform is better. Basically, explain benefits to the user not features.
- andyfleming 8y agoThis seems like a mash-up of Air Table and Quip. I'm curious to see how the functionality compares for day-to-day tasks.
- elcomet 8y agoIs a Linux desktop app planned? It's only available on windows / Mac OS.
- sonaltr 8y agoFrom my understanding - their windows / Mac OS apps is just a shell to their site (with one exception - offline support).
- cweagans 8y agoIt seems like they're coming around to the idea: https://twitter.com/NotionHQ/status/1080230116641300481 https://twitter.com/NotionHQ/status/1080230116641300481
- cobby 8y agoIs their web version limited in any way compared to desktop apps for MacOS / Windows?
- cweagans 8y agoYou can't alt+tab to it and offline support isn't there. Not sure if there are any global keyboard shortcuts for quick/easy note capture, but if so, those wouldn't work in the web app either.
- mxwsn 8y agoFor me, Notion replaced Evernote and I haven't looked back. Three features that have been particularly useful for personal productivity are 1) explicit support for Kanban board-ing tasks and similar to-do management 2) collapsible blocks 3) substantially smoother linking to, or embedding, notes within notes Notion is just as sleek as Evernote for small independent notes, but these two features allow Notion to scale much better for projects that require an inter-related network of notes with substantial breadth and depth.
- petra 8y agoHow's the search ? evernote's search sucks. Is this significantly better?
- mxwsn 8y agoI use search way less in Notion than Evernote due to the ability to hierarchically organize notes in a manner that better matches my mental map, to the point where it's hard for me to comment on the quality of search in Notion. I haven't had any complaints with it during the occasional times I have used search though.
- atombender 8y agoHow good is the offline support? Edit: After testing, seems not too bad. Reconciles non-conflicting edits just fine. But apparently, in the iOS app, search doesn't work in offline mode! Edit 2: It seems like "attachments" (files like PDFs, and also images) are not stored offline, either. In the iOS app, clicking on a file or image brings up an S3 URL inside an embedded web browser.
- akothari 8y agoAkshay from Notion here. Better offline support is included in the next release. Coming very soon!
- atombender 8y ago
- sonaltr 8y agoI wish they had an API to integrate with.
- rickyc091 8y agoThey do! It's just in beta.
- dawnerd 8y agoWe use it to keep track of all Of our tasks and projects. Switched to it after getting annoyed with Asana and not wanting to use something like Jira. We love how freeform it is and allowed us to create a workflow that fit us. There are some gripes I have with it, notifications are still hit or miss despite talking to support about it multiple times - they’ll be delayed or missed altogether if you’ve recently opened the iOS app or have the desktop app open on another computer. Search still needs some love. It should probably weigh recently opened pages higher. And I’d love it if the Mac app was native instead of electron based. Their team is pretty responsive when messaging them so that’s a huge plus.
- ncphillips 8y agoWe use Asana at work. What annoyances did you have with Asana that are solved with Notion?
- dawnerd 8y ago- tasks getting lost easily (still somewhat of an issue with notion but custom database views sorted by due date solves) - not showing today on top like it used to, unwilling to change or add an option (same as above, database views are awesome) - forcing us into a flow that didn't really fit the way we worked (notion lets us have a completely custom flow) - no good way to have documentation stored in - limited ability to document tasks, like images inline with the description, code blocks, etc.
- techntoke 8y agoThis isn't self-hosted? I'm interested in a self-hosted solution that uses local markdown files and directories to manage content.
- PKop 8y agoBut they're trying to run a business, so why ask the question as if it's surprising?
- egeozcan 8y agoWhy would running a business prevent them from offering a self-hosted solution? Look at Confluence, if you need examples.
- geekamongus 8y agoOr MS Office :-B
- tonyedgecombe 8y agoOr every software product before about 2005.
- frgtpsswrdlame 8y agoBusiness is not synonymous with 'subscription model.' It's good for people to express their desire for on-prem, one-time payment products. Maybe the market can find a middle rather than the utter domination of subscription services.
- Spivak 8y agoIt's surprising that I (for personal use) and my company (commercial use) would be willing to pay good money for the ability to run this app on-prem? Personal data notwithstanding we have data we put in our company wiki that is simply not allowed to be hosted on cloud services without lots of red tape and compliance certifications. Offering a on-prem option, at least for us, pushes all that responsibility onto our ops team, and Notion gets paid about the same but without the hosting costs.
- benjlang 8y agoI'm a big Notion fan. Use it for everything in my life, both work and personal. Here's a screenshot of my Notion homepage: https://twitter.com/benln/status/1034475232445181952 https://twitter.com/benln/status/1034475232445181952 I also made this site for people to share their Notion pages: http://notionpages.com http://notionpages.com You can use that to get a better sense of use cases for Notion.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- motdiem 8y agoI’ve started using notion as a kind of personal wiki a few months ago, and I really like it for that. Breaking the distinction between files and folders is one of the ways it’s way easier for me to navigate/structure than it is in google docs. My only issue with Notion is that I feel it’s hard to get stuff out of it, especially on mobile. I sometimes type draft documents with it that I really don’t want to share as notion links, and I haven’t figured out how to export them on a phone - I usually have to go to my computer and export the markdown/process it then share...
- MarkyC4 8y agoWe use them in lieu of JIRA. Overall I like the product! I wish they had ticket numbers (I like to put ticket numbers in TODOs in the code for more context; I think it leads to more TODOs being done). I had to hack them in using timestamps and hashes. The ability to see tickets assigned to you (and not in closed status) would be useful too
- k__ 8y agoA friend of mine said, Confluence is much better than JIRA. I started using Trello.
- agsilvio 8y agoI've been working on a similar project more suited to my own tastes. It's free and online and in-progress. jumproot.com. Sure, it's self-promotion, but highly pertinent.
- cyansmoker 8y agoWhile your project seems nice, at this point in time there is little overlap with the concepts found in notion. Did you publish a roadmap, that would allow us to differentiate it from something more like evernote?
- agsilvio 8y agoRespectfully, I disagree. Notion and jumproot both have the philosophy of an arbitrary node structure used for composition. I prefer my ui, that's why I'm working on it. Thanks for your feedback though. No I haven't published a roadmap. I don't liken jumproot to evernote much. To illustrate my point, see the Viewer node types in the demo. You can see that it allows composition of documents using the node structure. Was super handy in university.
- iddan 8y agoBest app in the game. Since we started using Notion we’ve documented any important procedure just because it’s fun
- nerdponx 8y agoTerms and Privacy TLDR: Notion does not own your data, nor do we sell it to others or use it for advertising. It's your data, period
- celestialcheese 8y agoNothing to say but it's a fantastic product - if the team behind notion is reading this.. keep up the great work!
- satanic_pope 8y agoLooks clean. Would love to try some time but can't imagine porting all my notes (and knowledge base) from Evernote that I've accumulated over the years. Too exhaustive.
- _____s 8y agoI've been using Notion for quite some time now. It's pretty neat although I wish it was (a) faster and (b) had a better writing experience. I find Dropbox Paper to offer the best writing experience but Notion is unbelievably flexible, so I use it instead.
- josephpmay 8y agoI use Notion for my personal productivity, and I highly recommend it. It's one of the few personal tools I'm happy to pay for. It many ways it's a personal wiki, and it is incredibly easy to use. Notion has made it much easier to keep track of and refer back to my old notes. For example, I used to draft emails in an unorganized OneNote notebook. If I needed to find an old draft, I'd have to use search and hope that I remembered the right keywords. With Notion, I make all of my email drafts a subpage of an email page, which makes them much easier to find.
- etchalon 8y agoI'm happy to see more people are realizing Filemaker is a great product.
- ksec 8y agoYes unfortunately it is not being more widely used.
- honkycat 8y agoI would love to use a product like Notion, but I cannot leave my vim/Emacs keybindings behind! Would be cool if they had the ability to import / export structured text.
- traviscline 8y agohttps://github.com/tmc/notion/tree/master/cmd https://github.com/tmc/notion/tree/master/cmd I wrote some tools to use notion from vim.
- robohoe 8y agoSo how does Notion make money? By mining your tasks/knowledge base articles? Analytics? Serving ads?
- juddlyon 8y agoThey have paid plans: https://www.notion.so/pricing https://www.notion.so/pricing
- chooseaname 8y agohttps://www.notion.so/pricing https://www.notion.so/pricing Would that not make them money?
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- methehack 8y agohttps://www.notion.so/pricing https://www.notion.so/pricing Basically it's free to start with limited data/upload and then a small ($4) monthly for a personal subscription that is unlimited. Team and Enterprise subscriptions from there.
- plexiglass 8y agoHello HN, first time long time here. I use Notion.so personally and professionally and must say its totally changed my game. Notion.so feels like a personal digi Marie Kondo.
- louis-paul 8y agoThere is something about Notion that makes it feel very well-made and coherent. It’s one of the few apps I use with this inherent feeling of quality (off the top of my head Sublime Text/Merge, Beyond Compare, Things fall into this category of intangible greatness). Every interaction is delightful, and the app scales really well from basic note-taking to decently complex databases with grouping, filters, relations, templates and permissions. It comes with really good real-time collaboration. On the flip side the software a bit slow to start and uses a lot of resources—it’s based on Electron, but I encourage everyone to try it (the demo on their website is cool!). This is as close to “painting the back of the fence” as it gets.
- jakelazaroff 8y agoI honestly never use their Electron app, even though I have it installed. One thing about Electron apps is that they also usually work great in the browser :)
- aerovistae 8y agoThe "quality" feeling of sublime app for me is majorly undermined by the constant nagging popups to pay for it. so many other services I happily pay for and somehow sublime has made me not want to pay for their services.
- roywiggins 8y agoIt's honestly the most polite nagware I've ever used.
- fastball 8y agoIf you'd happily pay for it without the popups, why didn't you pay for it the first time the popup appeared? Would've saved you a lot of annoyance, no?
- rstupek 8y agoSo pay for it? Seems like you probably have gotten your worth out of it
- 8y ago
- mjulian 8y agoI love the product, but the login workflow is awful. Why innovate on logins? We've solved that problem. Specifically, the login is a randomly-generated one-time code sent to your email address. Notion says this is more secure than them storing a username+password, but that's a dubious argument. They've also said this is two-factor auth (lolno). A side effect of this is that Notion is unusable on my mobile device since I have no email on it. I really hope they implement a more traditional login system. Until then, I'm sticking with Evernote. :(
- geekamongus 8y agoAgreed. The login scenario has me highly dubious about going all-in with Notion.
- rickyc091 8y agoI actually love their login, but it's not for the reason you would think. They expire the session very frequently which has been an annoyance for me, so log-in with the magic link has been faster than digging for the password through my manager.
- andrethegiant 8y agoDigging? Doesn't your browser autofill it for you?
- MattGrommes 8y agoYeah, Medium does this same thing and it makes me hate logging in so I'm rarely in the account I pay for. Especially since Medium makes you log in seemingly every few days.
- kjksf 8y agoThey also have a OAUTH login with google, which is the one I use. But on the merits: not storing the password is safer than storing it so it's a valid claim. And it is a 2fa mechanism to a tee (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-factor_authentication https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-factor_authentication)
- juddlyon 8y agoPro tip: copied text from Notion is pasted as Markdown in your text editor.
- hanley 8y agoDoes anyone use this with their spouse / significant other? Seems like a great tool to have shared docs, lists, todos, etc. I'm thinking things like house and car maintenance, financial planning, shopping lists, and all the other things that I normally keep in a combination of Google Docs and Apple Notes.
- pushtheenvelope 8y agoyes! we did start using it and loved it, until we realized needing to pay $20/month for it -- which was a bit out of our current budget.
- drewkett 8y agoI pay for one personal account and then just share a page with my spouse and then she can put anything she wants in it, including creating subpages. It works great for us.
- acjohnson55 8y agoA proper family plan would be nice.
- Dibes 8y agoI do and it is fantastic! My SO is not a lover of having more apps and especially loves to have todos and lists written down on paper. Curiously, she enjoys keeping those two things on Notion and actually likes organizing things in it. That feels like a big win for me personally. We haven't yet hit the limit on the free accounts but I do echo the other people's thoughts, that for 2 people $16/month doesn't feel worth it.
- nirv 8y agoI'm concerned about the privacy of this service. Do company employees have (or are able to get) access to users' private data? Is there any data mining in use?
- geekamongus 8y agoAccording to things I discovered on their privacy pages here: https://www.notion.so/willchatham/Terms-and-Privacy-28ffdd083dc3473e9c2da6ec011b58ac https://www.notion.so/willchatham/Terms-and-Privacy-28ffdd08... They encrypt your data at rest, have their stuff audited by a third party quarterly, and give the employees some amount of security training. The thing I am curious about is that to log in, you don't have a password. Rather, then send a temporary login code to your email address. Not sure how I feel about that.
- ralusek 8y agoIt's safer than email + password. Every email + password combination I'm familiar with allows you to reset password by having a link sent to your email, which means that access to email is always considered the ultimate association of identity. This just removes the email + password altogether and requires that you have explicit access to the email. So it takes the end-all-be-all access criteria of the other solution, but removes the possibility of them being able to have a weak password, and also removes the issue of them having to store and transport passwords.
- innerspirit 8y agoIt's less safe than email + password. Someone can break into your email with email + password, or you can forget it logged in and they have your Notion automatically, so it has the same problems email + password have, plus some more.
- cookingrobot 8y agoHow is it less safe than any service with an email based password reset option?
- manigandham 8y agoGlad to see this here, it's a very well-built product that finds the perfect balance between strict JIRA/PM tools and completely unstructured wikis/text files. Everything is a "block" and blocks can be nested and attached together to create pages/subpages, tables, kanban boards, calendars, etc. It's a very nice way of working and everything loads fast. The sharing links are nice too. Only feedback would be fixing some UI issues that can be a little too sensitive, with an errant keypress or misclick changing everything.
- ben7799 8y agoNot sure how this product (if it's new) isn't running afoul on Presonus' trademarks for "Notion". https://www.presonus.com/products/Notion https://www.presonus.com/products/Notion Presonus' product is for music but it is a software product, it is trademarked, and it is older than this one AFAICT.
- JeremyBanks 8y agoTrademarks only protect against competition in the same category, or where consumer confusion is possible. They may both be "software products" (what isn't, these days?), but these products seem sufficiently removed from each other -- one a music authoring tool, the other a notes and project collaboration tool -- that I don't think trademark protection would apply.
- brightball 8y agoAlright...this looks great. One question though, if it's electron based why in the world isn't there a Linux Desktop client?
- ausjke 8y agoI am uncomfortable to put all personal thoughts, diaries, etc into a non-self-hosting place. Can they dockerize this and sell that so I can self-host the docker image instead? for people that is not tech-savvy, what about they buy a docker-container-hosted-by-the-vendor-company but can encrypt the contents in a way that nobody else can peek into the content ever?
- komali2 8y agoThat sounds like a good feature - I think the app is trying to replace current jira etc functionality for now, is that something that Jira and other offer?
- deusuxmachina 8y agojira offers task linking, which I don't think notion does.
- kjksf 8y agoJira is a bug tracker. Notion is a hierarchical note-taker/wiki with some additional features like simple databases, task lists etc. They are not the same kind of software. Also, you can link notion pages. They have a block element that is a link to another page and for inline links you can use the regular link (each notion page has its unique, stable url).
- dawnerd 8y agoNotion does but it's not well implemented. If you copy a link to a notion document and paste it in another it does create a link. Wish they made it a little more well defined though (I don't want to copy a link and paste it).
- wongarsu 8y agoJira has a self hosted version at very reasonable price ($10 one time for small teams with a single server up to $500k per year for high availability setups with >50k users). The same is true for all other Atlassian products. https://www.atlassian.com/software/jira/pricing?tab=self-managed https://www.atlassian.com/software/jira/pricing?tab=self-man...
- geekamongus 8y agoThis is really, really awesome and has the crucial features I require out of a notes app, including pasting images from the system clipboard and a deep hierarchy of pages/folders. Sadly, I just poured hours of time into putting all my stuff from OneNote into a self-hosted instance of BookStack. However, I like the looks of Notion so much, I am probably going to have to move again!
- grumblestumble 8y agoThis seems like a great tool. What's the security model for this? I get that it's offline first with sync capabilities, but is notion hosting any of this content to facilitate syncing and if so is it encryped etc? Is there an easy way to export all of my content?
- grumblestumble 8y agoOn that note, regardless of what the actual answer is here, insight is sorely missing on the brochureware. Conversely, quip.io has an in-depth whitepaper @ https://quip-cdn.com/iR2bxQSxnJmpXi8KbaQ-XQ https://quip-cdn.com/iR2bxQSxnJmpXi8KbaQ-XQ which is linked to from their global page footer.
- leowoo91 8y agoLooks nice. Are we getting away from the term "ERP" by the way?
- incognita6 8y agoLike Notion a lot and we looked at a number of the modern wiki tools (cloud based). vs Confluence it is much faster. We did end up with Confluence, but that wasn't my first choice. vs Samepage it just felt a lot more modern. That might be harsh, but we only had a limited time to eval all the options. vs Quip, well, it's Salesforce. The sales was spammy and you just know how hard the sale will be if you've ever used the core SF products. Best OS with a combo of Bookstackapp and a ticket system that I forget the name of now. No integration between the two, and no support. The reason it lost in the end was it was the only one that didn't have draw.io integrated and we do a lot of diagramming. But, as I say, really nice and I would have preferred it to Confluence.
- torvald 8y agoYeah, a draw.io integration would have been great.
- sebastian 8y agoThere is an small bug that I found when trying to signup. The signup form doesn't allow signing up with .co domains [1]. [1] https://i.imgur.com/NDcd6X1.png https://i.imgur.com/NDcd6X1.png
- kjksf 8y agoI've reported your issue to Notion. In the past, they've been quite responsive about bugs (and even feature requests).
- asdf333 8y agoOnly 1000 blocks for free 1000 blocks == 1/3 of Moby Dick? that sounds like a terrible deal compared to evernote and all the other apps this promises to replace
- komali2 8y agoGorgeous UI - whiffs of web brutalism, though not so "purposefully ugly" as sometimes that can get. Appears very functional without any cruft.
- JunaidBhai 8y agoThis is one of those products that I feel I should've come across earlier.
- ranie93 8y agoTangent: How fine is it to build a business with a Somalian/International TLD? Could a rug be pulled underneath you?
- evertheylen 8y agoI too am a big Notion fan. However, I have a ton of things I would improve, two of which I kinda solved already: drawing input [0] and inline math [1]. The success of these has led me to create a small slack group to discuss other such hacks, more info at [2]. [0]: https://www.notion.so/evertheylen/Notation-e7a4f861a5ed4d14a767326062f80e89 https://www.notion.so/evertheylen/Notation-e7a4f861a5ed4d14a... [1]: https://www.notion.so/evertheylen/Notion-Inline-Math-9c5047a4e7c84643848b3630db8d5a5e https://www.notion.so/evertheylen/Notion-Inline-Math-9c5047a... [2]: https://www.notion.so/notionhacks/Notion-Hacks-27b92f71afcd4ae2ac9a4d14fef0ce47 https://www.notion.so/notionhacks/Notion-Hacks-27b92f71afcd4...
- thegabez 8y agoStopped reading after I saw emojis splattered EVERYWHERE in the UI.
- Hernanpm 8y agolooks good as an alternative to my github wiki https://github.com/hrnn/wiki/wiki https://github.com/hrnn/wiki/wiki
- lcall 8y agoAfter trying many different things over the years, I wrote this: http://onemodel.org http://onemodel.org (yes I plan to move to https sometime). You can think of it something like a personal wiki + emacs org-mode, very efficient, keyboard-oriented, using postgres, but with a much larger vision than today's features, including sharing (linking/copying securely) between instances, and computability of the info for things like anki-like features. Self-hosted now but open to hosting for others. The most current code is in github (AGPL). Comments/questions very welcome, preferably via the mailing list; be patient if my answers are slow. The lists are currently low-volume, and the announcements list should always be. (It can store files, but isn't especially smooth about it yet. For personal notes of all kinds, it is the most efficient, effective, flexible thing I know of. The FAQs link to a discussion comparing it with emacs org-mode and others. It has fulltext search, some finicky but very functional import/export, a nice numbered-outline export to text, and a journal/activity log.) I have noted to look at Notion, and Trillium, to see how much they overlap and if we can collaborate. I have been quite slow lately though, hoping to get more done sometime relatively soon.
- toshvelaga 8y agoGot a chance to meet the founder a few weeks ago. He's a really cool guy.
- owenwil 8y agoFor those just discovering Notion, it's one of the most liberating tools I've ever used, because it offers just enough complexity to configure it however you want, while still remaining simple on the surface. I just love that I can mould it around how my brain works. I wrote this guide that might be useful for anyone else in understanding its power and what you can do with it: https://medium.com/@ow/the-writers-ultimate-guide-to-notion-6bf90d1cf45b https://medium.com/@ow/the-writers-ultimate-guide-to-notion-...
- ArtWomb 8y agoNot gonna lie. That knowledge base with the collapsible menu looks like a very useful feature. Especially with integrated search. Will definitely give it a try. As far as self hosting goes. If there is a feature to export to text, csv or md. One could use the app to edit. Then archive and serve a read only copy locally.
- joelrunyon 8y agoNotion is my favorite app of 2018. It's seriously a game changer for my personal organization and how my team communicates.
- wordpressdev 8y agoI am in the process of moving my digital life to Notion. This includes my huge collection of bookmarks, 40+ browser tabs, dozen or so text files and content of some spreadsheets. Here's my work in progress: https://imgur.com/a/LKY7RlP https://imgur.com/a/LKY7RlP
- lucasfcosta 8y agoI wish I could import stuff from Evernote into Notion. Just copying and pasting would be amazing. If I could copy and paste checklists (or maybe even just copy a list and turn multiple items into checklist items at once).
- kjksf 8y agoIt's not a perfect import but they do have it: https://www.notion.so/Importing-Guides-18c37b470e8941789548b68049af750b https://www.notion.so/Importing-Guides-18c37b470e8941789548b...
- deskamess 8y agoFor any existing users, is there a provision to create alarms/due dates attached to your notes?
- akothari 8y agoYes! You can type @Remind and pick a date/time for the reminder.
- bovermyer 8y agoOh, I love this. I'm especially fond of how well the keyboard integration works! I JUST got my cofounder to regularly use Trello, though, so I'm not going to make him switch to this. Not yet.
- stevoski 8y agoWhat Slack did for chat and GitHub did for source control, Notion does for keeping information organised. My prediction: In five years time, most of us will be using Notion.
- reaperducer 8y agoHow well does this handle large file attachments? One of the problems one of my teams has is that they regularly need to trade and update files that most collaboration tools can't handle (Several hundred megs to 1GB).
- creativityland 8y agoSome good alternatives - Quip (https://quip.com https://quip.com) - Airtable (https://airtable.com https://airtable.com) - Taskade (https://taskade.com https://taskade.com)
- pknight 8y agoNuclino is also a very strong offering in this space.
- kjksf 8y agoThose are different products. Notion is primarily hierarchical note taker/wiki. The closest product is Quip but Quip is like Google docs - each page is its own thing. It's not hierarchical. Airtable is a database. Notion has similar functionality, but not as rich and their tables can be just part of the page, like a picture. Taskade is a task tracker. I use Notion for a similar purpose but it's not the primary functionality of Notion.
- Scarbutt 8y ago- Dropbox Paper
- circlesguy 8y ago- cicles (https://circles.app https://circles.app)
- thecrumb 8y ago- Notable (https://github.com/fabiospampinato/notable https://github.com/fabiospampinato/notable)
- viraptor 8y ago- Coda (https://coda.io/ https://coda.io/)
- gregwebs 8y agoNotion is now becoming a lot more like coda. I love how Coda exposes tabular data in a programmable way (but programmable as in easier than spreadsheets). It also even has API access: https://coda.io/developers/apis/v1beta1 https://coda.io/developers/apis/v1beta1
- rcarmo 8y agoI really, really want something like this as a desktop, fully native app, for personal use, and maybe with Groove-like peer to peer sync for small, closed groups.
- TheRealDunkirk 8y ago> Groove-like peer to peer sync This guy gets it. Groove is one of my favorite examples of the damage done by Microsoft in the 90's. That product would STILL be useful today, 20 years later. I still wonder: Did Ozzie make the product just to get acquihired? Is there anything that does this out there? EDIT: Now that I think about it, maybe OneNote does this in the background.
- rcarmo 8y agoOneNote is fully webservice based these days, and tied to OneDrive/SharePoint.
- torvald 8y agoI am wondering if this is just the thing for our workplace - it is remarkable how spot on their value proposition is. It is not every feature from every service - but they seem to deliver very well on core functionality. And I must say that their landing page is one of the better I have seen for a SaaS. I posted this in hopes of people posting stories and discussions about their experiences and thoughts about the product - which you very well delivered, thanks.
- Aeolun 8y agoThis was my impression of their landing page as well. One of the few that made me go ‘I want this’ right when reading it.
- atombender 8y agoNotion looks great, and I've been hoping to migrate it. There are two big problems. One is the migration path from Evernote. If you look at all the current notetaking apps, none of them seem to have capitalized on the fact that there are lots of unhappy Evernote users out there who would kill for a smooth, painless migration path. Instead, these apps ask you to export your Evernote notes as HTML, something which Evernote only lets you do for a single notebook at a time. I have lots of individual notebooks, so this would take forever. Plus, you lose folders and images this way. Why not just write a small app that scrapes the whole Evernote database? Last I checked, it's an SQLite database! The other is the lack of offline search. This isn't a dealbreaker, but it seems pretty suspect for an app like this. Losing cell service completely is one thing, but shouldn't it be "offline indexing first" anyway? Obviously it has all my notes synced at all times. I want the search to be lightning fast even if I'm on a slow connection. It seems like "attachments" (files like PDFs, and also images) are not stored offline, either. In the iOS app, clicking on a file or image brings up an S3 URL inside an embedded web browser.
- humanbeinc 8y agoI am 100% with you here. The fact that I can't 1-click migrate keeps them from getting my money
- satanic_pope 8y agoSeconded!
- PurpleRamen 8y agoThe database is evernotes internal structure, and can change. The HTML at least is their official export and somewhat stable. I bet when you search on github you will find some scripts converting the database into html. But for a company it might be to much hassle to maintain such a tool.
- atombender 8y agoThis should be the bread and butter of a company like this, no matter how much hassle the technical implementation details are. In today's world, getting people to bootstrap a completely new app with content is a very hard ask. Want customers? Have great onboarding.
- asadkn 8y agoNotion is just awesome and I have been using it for 6 months now. It's the only app I have used so far that feels like a text editor and despite covering so many use-cases, excels at each of them and outdoes individual apps made for that specific purpose. Tools I have replaced with Notion: - Todos & Planning: Evernote, Workflowy, Text Files. - Notes: Google Keep, Text Files. - Work Wiki: MediaWiki. - Collaboration/Project Management: Confluence, Trello, Asana. I also use it for pros and cons lists, inspirations and moodboards for design and so on. One thing that would be quite helpful in Notion is to have some sort of "marketplace" where users can share pre-made templates. I am not sure if they have an API for extensions yet, but that would be awesome.
- MarsAscendant 8y agoWhat about the jittery performance?
- asadkn 8y agoI haven't really experienced that but if I had, that would make me quit on the product. I use it on my MacBook and Hackintosh Desktop, and perhaps there's lag on other platforms but I haven't used them.
- MarsAscendant 8y agoIn this case, you don't want to downgrade.
- NikolaNovak 8y agoHmm, I cannot seem to create an account without sharing my Google contacts; which I see no need to do and it's needless friction. I get into a loop of clicking checkbox "I don't want to share my Google contacts", then being rerouted back to login page and requested approval to share my contacts. Pricing wise, I wish these types of apps didn't have such a steep escalation as soon as I want to share. $4 for individual, but $8/team member, which means wanting to share this with my wife is four times as expensive as just using it myself, with limited to no appreciable improvement.
- atombender 8y agoNote: Notion's free plan actually provides unlimited users. But it only allows 1000 "blocks" (a heading, paragraph, file etc. counts as a block), so I imagine two users sharing notes would run out of space fast.
- 3dfan 8y agoIf you install a native app, doesn't it completely have you by the balls anyhow?
- woolvalley 8y agoThe world is not android ;) Permissions and proxies exist. Notion is a web app to AFAIK
- yellowapple 8y agoAndroid would actually leave you in a much better position than Windows or macOS here, since the app has to at least go to the trouble of enumerating and requesting the permissions it wants. PC operating systems don't typically sandbox desktop apps by default, so the Windows/macOS versions of this would have free reign over anything accessible by your user.
- woadwarrior01 8y agoOn the latest version of macOS (Mojave), applications need to request the users’ permission before accessing photos, emails, webcam, microphone, calendars, and contacts, like how they do on iOS.
- bg0 8y agoWe use this for our companies sprints and it's been working out pretty well for the last few months. Give's us a LOT of flexibility in the way we want to do things.
- crooked-v 8y agoI've pretty much immediately fallen in love with this service. For me, the killer feature is that the 'share' functionality lets me share a public link to that page and subpages with no personal info included, so it can double as a pastebin/Dropbox-share replacement. If they just had a way to associate shared pages with a custom domain, this could be a Medium replacement too.
- pbowyer 8y agoI've tried Notion (I've tried most PIMs since 2003) but it didn't fit my brain / what I wanted to do with it. Not enough structure yet too constraining. The closest I've found is Workflowy, but it's just that bit too basic. I store all web clippings in Evernote and hope to find what I want one day. I bookmark heavily into an online service, and wish my tag vocabulary was better constrained (but full text search helps). And finally I mind map on paper; none of the digital ones have quite cut it. One day there will be a PIM to rule them all. One day.
- vinceguidry 8y agoThis appears to be aimed at the small / medium organization. I think individuals should probably just stick with Emacs / Workflowy depending on whether they're already using Emacs or not. Personally I think individuals need to just accommodate to shifting every now and again to new tools as they become available.
- Jimpulse 8y agoCould you try taking a stab at explaining how your mind maps work?
- pbowyer 8y agoI'll start by saying they're not strict mind maps; they're a cross between mind maps and spider diagrams. If I'm listening to a talk, I'll be jotting down the key concepts in the map, just like anyone else would do with bullet points. But I'm then linking them together, where their talk jumps between ideas. Connections are the vital part. The closest software to what my brain thinks like is https://www.literatureandlatte.com/scapple/overview https://www.literatureandlatte.com/scapple/overview. A key thing missing is representing the same information in multiple views; that's something virtually all tools miss (Coda.io et al are starting to add it - but multiple types of list-view of the same info, nothing more wild) Realtimeboard works well for me, but ends up lacking organisation because it is totally visual and nothing structured beneath the surface.
- 8y ago
- mosselman 8y agoNotion is great in features, but it is just so slow and I find the editor hard to work with. Text doesn't flow nicely and it is clumsy to navigate between blocks. Some blocks are editable, some are stuck, etc. It is pretty hard. The speed gets me the most though. Maybe the website is actually better than the electron app, I always use the electron app.
- kevinlou 8y agoBlock navigation is definitely clumsy (maddeningly so), but I haven't had any issues with it being slow. Are you working with a lot of data on a single page?
- tapsboy 8y agoBeen a paid user for a while. I love all the UI elements, markdown support, cross-platform compatibility etc. I have used Evernote, Simple Note and Boostnote previously. Some problems however: Desktop app takes a while to load. I understand it's electron, but so are Slack and VSCode. I am ready to keep it open on Mac. But on pressing Cmd+W, it closes the app, though not quit. Re-opening from that state is still slow. No other electron apps do that. Offline experience on mobile isn't good. When I am in subway and want to jot down something quickly, it searches for internet for a while before allowing me to do anything
- cobby 8y agoHave they added tags support? Last time I checked there were no tags in Notion.
- spraak 8y agoCheck out Dynalist for a more minimal (and slightly different paradigm) offering
- patcon 8y agoThis whole all-in-one thing has near-zero appeal to me :/ I have an urge to willfully resist entering monopoly scenarios. I prefer the ability to evolve process through a non-linear opportunity space (though I of course want to insulate the majority of others in my communities from being forced to grapple with that full infinite opportunity space :)
- tzhong 8y agoI use Notion for everything now - work and personal. The blocks are super smart. I crowdsourced a bunch of workflows and product suggestions on Twitter: https://twitter.com/TZhongg/status/1067234359915163648 https://twitter.com/TZhongg/status/1067234359915163648 all I do is talk about Notion with my friends tbh. if anyone wants free $10 credit, here ya go: https://www.notion.so/?r=02c3100209a54c48b22e19771ba4c916 https://www.notion.so/?r=02c3100209a54c48b22e19771ba4c916
- Timothee 8y agoI expect posting a referral link on Hacker News to be frowned upon.
- ahuth 8y agoThe product looks really really nice. Wish it had better accessibility, though - from what I can tell, everything is a div :/ No links, buttons, or anything (that I saw in my 5 min of checking it out).
- perfunctory 8y agoHas anybody compared it with coda.io?
- kjksf 8y agoI have. Don't get me wrong: Coda looks like a fantastic product. It also has features that Notion doesn't have, like built-in support for charts inside the document. If there was no Notion, I would give it a serious try. But Notion just fits my use case better. The biggest difference is that Code is like Google docs on steroids: the UI is structured as a collection of separate documents. Which makes perfect sense in an enterprise scenario. Notion is hierarchical. It's just an infinitely nested collection of pages. It makes for a different (and for me vastly superior) user experience. But ultimately both products have free tiers so you should try them both to see which fits your use cases better.
- crixlet 8y agoIMO coda is closer to airtable than it is to notion.
- tommoor 8y agoIf you like Notion but are looking for something open source, similarly polished and more wiki-focused then this will be up your street - http://getoutline.com http://getoutline.com We've been building it for 2 years, happy to answer questions.
- spatz 8y agoLooks awesome! Any plans for mobile apps?
- tommoor 8y agoNot just yet, but we'll get there. Also there is a full, documented, API so perhaps a community member will start something first
- lymitshn 8y agoLooks great, would be nice to have syntax highlight support for more languages and maybe MathJax support.
- tommoor 8y agoDefinitely, with the syntax support it's just a matter of balancing bundle size – need to figure out a way to dynamically load the language syntax and then we can add all of the languages
- dawidd6 8y agoIs there a way to sign up without Slack or G+?
- chooseaname 8y agoI love this. Slightly OT, but does anyone have some links to open source apps / tutorials from creating pages that are fairly free form like this? I'm a backend kind of entity, so the front end is a mystery. Edit: I'm not asking in an "I'm going to make my own" kind of way. I'm asking in an "I've always been curious how other devs solve problems / create things" kind of way.
- e12e 8y agoDo you mean like the notion service? I'm not a notion user, but from the description here, it sounds a lot like Google wave with less hype and more "product focus"... Wave is now dead(?) and Free: http://incubator.apache.org/projects/wave.html http://incubator.apache.org/projects/wave.html https://github.com/apache/incubator-wave https://github.com/apache/incubator-wave
- lazyant 8y agoWe've been using Notion for a year or two now (a lot of people didn't like Confluence) and it's been working pretty well. I particularly like how they construct URLs for documents; it always keep its ID regardless of title changes, but it also shows the title in the URL.
- atschantz 8y agoI used Notion for a significant period but ended up switching to Nuclino [1] - which is identical in many respects, but without the various add-ons that are unnecessary if you're working with text/images. I've found it to be more responsive, and to my tastes, it has a better UI. I'm not a big fan of the emoji/blank file image that is necessary with every Notion entry. [1] - https://www.nuclino.com/ https://www.nuclino.com/
- keybits 8y agoI love Nuclino too. Their editor uses the wonderful ProseMirror (https://discuss.prosemirror.net/t/nuclino-a-lightweight-real-time-wiki-built-on-top-of-prosemirror/146 https://discuss.prosemirror.net/t/nuclino-a-lightweight-real...) by Marijn Haverbeke (https://marijnhaverbeke.nl/ https://marijnhaverbeke.nl/) of CodeMirror and Tern fame.
- kjksf 8y agoJust in case someone might need it: I reverse engineered their API and wrote (an unofficial) client for accessing the data: https://github.com/kjk/notionapi https://github.com/kjk/notionapi It's for Go but one could easily port it to any other language. It's just HTTP requests and some light processing of JSON responses. I use it so that I can have my blog content in Notion. In a daily cron job I download the data from Notion, convert it to HTML and publish on Netlify as a static website. This script is open source: https://github.com/kjk/blog https://github.com/kjk/blog Basically I use Notion as CMS. I described my reverse-engineering process in https://blog.kowalczyk.info/article/88aee8f43620471aa9dbcad28368174c/how-i-reverse-engineered-notion-api.html https://blog.kowalczyk.info/article/88aee8f43620471aa9dbcad2...
- deckar01 8y agoNotion is synonym of inkling, Matt Macinnis invested, and it has drag and drop composition... I wonder if some people from Inkling are working on this.
- synaesthesisx 8y agoUnfortunately due to privacy concerns we have issues using this - I would be very interested if they offered a self-hosted option. Notion looks great and I might try it out for side projects.
- djhworld 8y agoThe amount of times note taking apps and products appear on the HN front page is quite amusing. Has anyone ever cracked this nut? I've been using Joplin for about a year, it works. Could be better, but does the job
- acutesoftware 8y agoI think the problem is that it isn't a single nut to crack - everyone works slightly differently, some like a clean interface, others like all the info laid for them. With Notes and tasks, it is quite personal, so any issues in the interface are seen as worse, eg we are more likely to accept a slightly shitty interface when paying a bill or logging on to a corporate system than a product we use daily.
- favadi 8y agoOnly thing I can complaint about Joplin is slow syncing. Although, it is still good enough for my needs.
- bauerd 8y agoOnly partly on topic, but I wish there was a Confluence/Notion-inspired knowledge management software that's embedded in Git, like git-bug: https://github.com/MichaelMure/git-bug https://github.com/MichaelMure/git-bug
- travisluis 8y agoCan Notion do infinitely zoomable lists, a la workflowy? As far as I can tell, it cannot.
- thecoppinger 8y agoI've been using Notion on and off for the past year, and have to say it's exceptionally well made and thought-out. If you haven't yet, give it a try.
- camerondoll 8y agoWhat about privacy? I read through their pages and found nothing. Is it end to end encrypted? I don't want some disgruntled employee to leak my life plans. How is this protected against such event?
- patrickxie 8y agodoes this work over in china?
- andischo 8y agoIn case anyone is interested in a similar open source solution that can be self hosted I can recommend Trilium (https://github.com/zadam/trilium https://github.com/zadam/trilium). It was also recently featured on HN. I since host it on my private server and it works like a charm.
- asdkhadsj 8y agoCan anyone compare this to Dynalist? I've been experimenting with Dynalist as more of an information / brain dump tracker. A notepad, for people who can't write -_-. Yet, I'm not super happy with Dynalist. Thoughts?
- edjroot 8y agoIt depends on what makes you "not super happy", but as someone who uses Dynalist all the time for everything, I must say the only reason I haven't switched to Notion is that their free plan has a hard limit of 1000 "blocks" (vs. unlimited in Dynalist). I actually haven't used it that much, but Dynalist doesn't have many features so it's easy to compare them and come to a conclusion. From what I've seen, there are only two things I still prefer Dynalist for: Zooming into nodes (minor issue, since in Notion you can quickly turn a node into a page and "zoom into" it) and contextual search (major one, global search is a real pain if you have lots of data - but you can still make up for it by being more organized than I am). As for everything else, Notion is a clear winner to me.
- Sholmesy 8y agoReally satisfied (free) user that will likely pay the monthly fee at some point. It's friction-less, but with some rules/ideas in place to help you. Well done Notion team, 100% satisfied
- agumonkey 8y agoI had visions of Google Wave watching their screenshots :)
- killjoywashere 8y agoThese "I will organize all your world" apps pop up at a non-trivial rate. Seems like they're mostly designing some database tables and then serving a front-end. Am I missing something? Is there something deeper than database design that I'm missing?
- copperx 8y agoNo. But I wouldn't dismiss them on the basis of being trivial to implement. The added value is in the UX.
- zabana 8y ago> Seems like they're mostly designing some database tables and then serving a front-end. Am I missing something? Isn't it how all SaaS web apps are developed ? I sense from your tone that it shouldn't be taken seriously on the basis of it being trivial to implement.
- thiago_lira 8y agoDoes someone who uses Notion has a working pipeline to automatically import notes from Kindle Highligths?
- nofunsir 8y agoSo... like Lotus Notes, reinvented/respun?
- drsh0 8y agoIt's great to see Notion get continued exposure. I feel it truly is a great step towards productivity online. I made a list earlier (using Notion) of some next-get productivity platforms that caught my eye if anyone is interested: https://www.notion.so/Next-gen-Productivity-Platform-Research-6ba8df8c007c4e2881957270c3a815b2 https://www.notion.so/Next-gen-Productivity-Platform-Researc... It includes both these all-in-one type of tools along with nice project management and spreadsheet/db tools like airtable.
- safanycom 8y agoThanks!
- warpsprung 8y agoYou might wanna add codeBeamer from http://www.Intland.com http://www.Intland.com to your list. This one can be self hosted and probably has the largest capabilities of any of the mentioned tools. It’s web based and has a good UI that you can get familiar with in 10 minutes while easy to configure and administrate. Think: Agile team planning + Project Management + Dashboard + Wiki + Documents Management + Requirements Engineering + Workflow Engine + Database
- jlgaddis 8y agoAnd you'll only need to spend five figures to use it.
- ajflores1604 8y ago+1 for having a native linux client. I'm not sure what the process would be, but being electron based I can't imagine it being extremely hard. Right now I'm using https://github.com/sysdrum/notion-app https://github.com/sysdrum/notion-app to basically wrap a browser instance. But there's a very noticeable performance difference between this hacky solution and my friends native electron client on MacOS. Especially on my heavier pages with lots of photos. Notion has completely changed my life and workflow, but I feel like I'm starting to run up against the limits of what I can do on the operating system I'm on. I even considered reaching out to CodeWeavers the makers of Crossover to see what it would take to make a linux port, but it seems like I actually have to be the owner of the app being ported for that to be an option.
- evertheylen 8y agoI'm curious, why don't you use a 'normal' browser? I use Notion quite heavily myself, and have never had any performance issues in Firefox (on Linux).
- ajflores1604 8y agoI haven't tried it in firefox, I'll definitely give it a look. Using it in chrome however, the performance feels the same as the hacky electron wrapped version. I notice it the most when switching between two heavy pages or trying to get to the bottom of a page I have 50+ pictures saved to. But it's useful for me to still have it register as a separate application in case I ever need to kill chrome for some reason. Or for organizing it across my different desktops.
- alphagrep12345 8y agoOne more todo and notes app. Why does the world need so many such apps? I always find myself changing from one such app to another, porting all the existing notes. Currently I'm using onenote and am very content with it. But there's always this feeling that something's not quite right. I tried evernote, onenote, and several other notes apps. I don't understand why I try so many note taking apps. I think others too feel the same way. Any ideas why?
- davidhehehe 8y agoI had the same feeling for as long as I can remember: just when I thought I was content with some apps, I find a new one on Product Hunt or Hacker News that promise something that I don’t know I want but after some thought think I need esp. for note taking/organization/productivity combo apps. Still coping with it with a better clue as to how to deal with it. The antidote for me is to figure out this (with the help of pen and paper): a list of what are the absolute basic needs I want out of productivity apps. For example, I tried to find the best tools for my personal knowledge management. My criteria (or deal breaker): cross device (iOS and MacOS); easy to export and share in common formats to others; no need for collaboration features; I can throw in any file without worrying that I need to import or convert format. Upon examining the list, I figured out that I want a tool that’s more like a file management system with full text search ability. A bigger and prior than “basic needs for productivity tools” question that took me some time to figure out last year between October and November is what my workflows are, what kind of communication I need between different apps. For example, I need a central tool to search all my files (preferably full text) in a project, yet I need editing features in specific apps (Photoshop, Mindnode, Numbers). Last point is to be content. I was on a constant quest for finding the holy grail of all-in-one app to no avail (I experimented with Notion on and off for almost a year but ultimately decided that it’s not for me). And when I look back, my real need disguised as “finding the perfect tool” is actually to master the knowledge that I picked up from life and work, and the best way is really just to routinely index, review and edit my knowledge scattered around in the files (adding and deleting) and write reviews of what I learned whenever possible. P.S. I grow more skeptical of tools that need internet connection to function (i.e., beyond syncing) because: can’t cope with my need to take down notes fast (therefore I went with Drafts for times like this); files cannot be loaded in places where internet connections are not great (surprisingly a lot of places when you’re on the road a lot); you can’t control which features they add or take down (for their own reasons).
- tequila_shot 8y agoSorry, how is this different from Quip? Looks exactly same?
- tomglynch 8y agoAfter downloading the mac app and signing up with google I got an email from google saying Security Alert: New device signed in to my@email.com This is a concern. How are they doing the signup that google is not recognising my computer? When signing up as there is no redirect to a google sign in page, for all I know they have just created a fake google sign in page and stolen my credentials.
- uvu 8y agoGreat app. We use notion as a team. Happy to see on HN front page.
- dirtylowprofile 8y agoI’m using iOS default Notes and Things 3. Why should I migrate all my notes and tasks here and pay to sync? It can’t even cache online
- raz32dust 8y agoDoes it allow exporting data to human readable form like csv? I am very wary of exposing myself to the risk of losing all this information and history if the company goes under or if I want to change to something else.
- traviscline 8y agohttps://github.com/tmc/notion/tree/master/cmd https://github.com/tmc/notion/tree/master/cmd Has some tools
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- ernsheong 8y agoA great deal of comments here want self-hosted capability, understandably given the HN crowd. But really, Notion is (probably) not in a position to do that, given their code being proprietary from Day 1. I run PageDash [1], a personal web archive service, and that is also the No. 1 ask. While I can understand it, for any startup to focus on self-hosting from Day 1 is probably a shot in the foot, unless I have an open-source model from Day 1. Just a cautionary note. [1] https://www.pagedash.com https://www.pagedash.com
- exitcode00 8y agoAnother electron toy saves the day complete with flat buttons and hamburgers - I wonder how reliable and fast it is? Is it that hard to make something in QT that doesn't eat up a gig of RAM?
- anigbrowl 8y agoEh...this is nice, I really like it, but it's just solving the same problems that some of the things it offers to replace were solving. Call it Lessware.
- zoom6628 8y agoAs a product manager I have to say the UI is great. Simple, clean, easy to navigate. If only Enterprise apps could be made to look this good (yes its possible but usually politics get in the way). On Android also works smoothly even on my low capacity line at home. Security aspects raised by others is a concern - there is enough secure storage solutions out there it should be high on the roadmap to address that so there is encryption at rest (and at REST :-D ) . Data should only be accesible to team or public. Nobody else, ever. My 2c.
- traviscline 8y agoSome cli tools here: https://github.com/tmc/notion/tree/master/cmd https://github.com/tmc/notion/tree/master/cmd I use these plus some vim recordings to do bidi synchronization of buffers
- alinspired 8y agoLooks a lot like OneNote, how this is different?
- kemitchell 8y agoSomalia?
- urlwolf 8y agoThis looks very close to quip.
- bjeanes 8y agoI've been using Notion for a couple of years now and it has consistently gotten better, faster, more useable, and more exciting. I cannot recommend this product and the team behind it enough.
- jgamman 8y agoWhat's with the playboy bunnies as the team avatars on your homepage?
- peterwwillis 8y agoIf somebody could develop some products like this that either create or extend open standards so we have the freedom to use any client or service provider we want, I'd throw my money at them so fast.
- MasakiTAKANO 8y agoSupport plantuml !!
- sidcool 8y agoThis is so well made. I love the concept and the ambition of the idea. Good luck!
- coleifer 8y agoLooks nice, but I am uneasy putting this kind of information into an opaque platform. Google, Salesforce, a self-hosted wiki...not going anywhere plus options to export and move. If it were a desktop app with a local sqlite DB then, yes, definitely (for single user). If I could run a network security and host it on my company intranet, absolutely.
- itaysk 8y agoIf they added mind map as a progression, that would be the perfect tool. I really need a hybrid text editor/ list editor / mind map
- jvican 8y agoAgreed, this would be excellent, would use it myself all the time.
- username3 8y agoLet us know when you find the perfect tool.
- PurpleRamen 8y agoWhenever the perfect tool manifests, another demand appears to make it unperfect.
- ohadron 8y agoUsed notion for about 6 months, but stopped for two main reasons: 1. It's extremely slow on even a new iPhone - about 6-7 seconds until I can start typing a note. By then I forget what I wanted to write. It's basically a webview of a very heavy web app, so it's not snappy at all. 2. No offline support whatsoever. In addition it feels like they have abandoned development or are busy being acquired (~bi-weekly updates until about three months ago: https://www.notion.so/What-s-New-157765353f2c4705bd45474e5ba8b46c https://www.notion.so/What-s-New-157765353f2c4705bd45474e5ba...) I migrated back to Bear (https://bear.app/ https://bear.app/) which was a pain - exporting from Notion is also not one of their best features.
- setgree 8y ago> In addition it feels like they have abandoned development or are busy being acquired (~bi-weekly updates until about three months ago: https://www.notion.so/What-s-New-157765353f2c4705bd45474e5ba... https://www.notion.so/What-s-New-157765353f2c4705bd45474e5ba...) Notion founders, do you care to comment on this? My company recently started a paid account on Notion and I'd love to know more.
- allwynpfr 8y agoI also plan to buy a pro plan in the coming months, don't wanna buy a ticket on a sinking ship... A response would be appreciated
- danols 8y agoThe founder (ivanzhao) has made an appearance and only made one comment to so far to thank for some praise. Hasn't addressed a single question or replied to any concerns/feedback. Not a great sign and makes me reluctant to give it another try.
- lazzlazzlazz 8y agoThis lack of interaction and response to put a hold on my excited trial run.
- Uhrheber 8y agoWhy would I put my most important data on someone else's computer?
- methou 8y agoI really like the make and structure of the notion, but lack of encryption beyond tls is a deal breaker to me. Also, their developer has no intention to implement encryption whatsoever, just like the Evernote.
- vijayrawatsan 8y agoOverall UI is nice but it takes a lot of time to create a new template.
- vijayrawatsan 8y agoI like the app but it is too slow to create new items.
- jatins 8y agoI think Notion tries to do too much (a database? really?) and because of that it's not _great_ at any. Yes, at the end of it you can end up with pretty looking pages but the process is not fun. For example, you _can_ use Notion as Trello, but it always feels like fitting a square peg in a round hole. (a path which Slite and Quip also took) Apps like Bear on the other hand, don't try be a smarter paper and end up being great at their limited use case. Maybe, for enterprise customers it has some value, but as a personal user I didn't find much utility in it.
- thomasfl 8y agoLotus Notes was not dead, it just got reinvented as Notion.
- rcdwealth 8y agoWho is so stupid to give up all contact information to anonymous people over website...
- PurpleRamen 8y agoLooks like a sleek and powerful interface, but at end seems to be just another kitchensink for manual input. No scripting or other automation and service-API is still in work. Im always a bit surprised that programmer invest such an amount of time into recreating the same software again and again. Notes&Task-Manager are all more or less the same, and most of them are not something which a programmer really should use. Those people are handling code and data for other people as natural as a cook his knife. And yet when it comes to their own data they always go for the stale and static, the dumb solution which can is so different from their normal self. Why is that?
- danols 8y ago400 comments and now one mentions the missing web clipper feature, which is a deal breaker for me. I guess that answers the question why this feature has been 'in development' for close to 2 years now.
- KuroSaru 8y agoNotion looks polished, the mobile app on the other hand is clunky, simple tasks like adding a member to a worspace is a hard task and if you don't close the android app completely it wont always update. Like many others id like a version I could host myself locally, id happy pay for a licence to do so, and no id not expect any support at all. granted i'd expect yearly or monthly licences that had user limits, 10,50,100,enterprise. Sadly i suspect that the reason there is no own-hosted version, be it paid or free open source is the fact that notion has been built around services like AWS/DO/RS for scalability and was never designed to be able to run in a single container and use a local datastore be it a MongoDB or (Ms/My)SQL(lite) database. I may consider paying but not knowing where my data is stored, in what country, if it is encrypted or not or truly who has access is always an issue for me, as I'm sure it is for others. Still a great service well worth checking out.
- thatthatis 8y agoNotion feels like SVN. The implementation that is workable and delivers enough value to tolerate, but isn’t quite there. Somebody please take what they’ve done, fix the annoyances, and turn it into Git. A single central source of truth is long long overdue
- lunchables 8y agoWhy is anyone using this? From reading the comments: >Requires Google contacts to be shared to sign up >Can't export my data >Extremely slow on mobile (iPhone) >Updates stalled, seems abandoned >No Linux electron app And I'm only half way through the comments.
- mshanks 8y agoWe're are developing an open source offering in this space: https://budibase.com https://budibase.com . Planning to have an MVP in the summer - at which stage we will also make the source public. We are more focussed around a tool for building SaaS products, fast. However, we are planning to build a Notion-like app using BudiBase, for management of the project & business. Sign up for updates if you're interested! Website is a bit vague on detail right now... a few features: - Design your own data model: create typed fields, data validation rules, object relationships, indexing & scaling options - HTTP Api for all CRUD operations, based on your data model - User Management & User Role definitions - Generated UI, with the ability to drop in your own UI wherever suits - Fully pluginable backend, for integrations - Output is a Single Page Web application, with an HTTP Api & data storage. Web app will be mobile ready (PWA).
- arjunbajaj 8y agoLooks interesting!
- joejohnston1989 8y agoLooks awesome. When will it be ready? Is it a LCDP?
- lardissone 8y agoOh, looks really interesting.
- amai 8y agoDoes it support math formulas in LaTeX notation?
- amai 8y agoCan I send emails to notion and it will store them as notes?
- kbos87 8y agoHaving switched from Evernote about 6 months ago, here are some of the biggest positives and negatives to me - Biggest positive: The variety of formats & integrations. I use “toggles” and tables a ton. This was the main reason I switched and it’s enough of a differentiator to keep me around. Biggest negative: Notion doesn’t handle a large volume of notes well. There is no easily accessible metadata, no tagging, no way to see a table of notes sorted by create date as far as I can tell. Other observations: It’s terrifyingly easy to delete a note and not realize it. Notes show up as a line item in their parent note; a simple press of the delete button and a note is gone with no warning Sharing is also a little funny. Shared notes show up in a separate workspace and are easy to forget about. Also, no offline support at all... if you aren’t connected, you can’t do anything on the desktop or iOS app.
- amai 8y agoWhat are the advantages over Atlassian Confluence?
- amai 8y agoSee a nice comparison here: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/fabiospampinato/notable/master/resources/comparison/table.png https://raw.githubusercontent.com/fabiospampinato/notable/ma... from https://github.com/fabiospampinato/notable https://github.com/fabiospampinato/notable
- homakov 8y agoWhy use anything that's not end to end encrypted this day? Why share you data with a server that has no actual reason to have your data in plain?
- bg0 8y agoMy only hope for Notion is that the Calendar gets updated so we can view different pages into one calendar view.
- jamalex 8y agoI made a Python API wrapper in case annoying would find it useful: https://learningequality.org/r/notion-py-an-unofficial-python-api-wrapper-for-notion-so https://learningequality.org/r/notion-py-an-unofficial-pytho... It has full read/write support for Notion data, with a local data store that live-updates async when data changes on Notion, including callbacks. And you can manipulate database entries using classes with columns mapped to slugified attributes.