11 ms·

I love the idea of Notion, and I love what the team is trying to do, and I love almost all of Notion. Unfortunately, it's too slow, at least for me. For a tool

• thom 6y ago
  As someone who wants to replace a bunch of stuff in Jira with Notion I have never really perceived performance problems, but I guess it isn't the snappiest.
  • crooked-v 6y ago
    Jira is so awful that almost anything is faster than it anyway.
• chpmrc 6y ago
  I've been waiting for their apps to be snappier and have better offline support for almost 2 years. I'm so glad to have found Joplin. It also supports E2E encryption so damn well. Support for plugins was also recently added and that's a big plus.
• eropple 6y ago
  First time I've seen Joplin--can it handle multiple users partying on the same pages at the same time? EDIT: apparently not, according to [ https://joplinapp.org/conflict/ https://joplinapp.org/conflict/ ] -- that's a bummer, it rules it out for my use cases :/ I really don't think a filesystem-based sync mechanism works great for a collaborative tool, which is much of the value of Notion to me. It seems really cool for single-user, never-shared stuff, though.
• jeromenerf 6y ago
  Notion is indeed slow. Slack is slow. Google drive is slow. Trello is slow. Some local/native alternatives can be snappier. Speed and snappiness don’t always come together, but when they do, there is no going back to something even a little slower or less reactive. That’s why I don’t test nor try new hardware until I actually need more than what I have. It’s too strong to resist ;)
  • dilap 6y ago
    Haven't used it in a while, but I always found Trello to be extremely snappy. Once of the things I really liked about it, and that competitors like ClickUp and (more tangentially) Notion are missing.
  • BenGosub 6y ago
    I think that Trello is pretty fast on all platforms and notifications are sent instantaneously
    • jeromenerf 6y ago
      I really appreciate trello and it’s fast enough as long as you don’t need to open multiple cards side by side. Trello is optimized for certain workflows, in board view or single card view. In a text editor, you would just have multiple windows, panes, splits ... and it’s just fast to jump, reference, copy/paste, etc. On trello, you need to reload the full board in another tab or lose context.
  • hk__2 6y ago
    Trello is very fast in my experience. Slack is fast when you’re used to slower alternatives like Mattermost.
  • cborenstein 6y ago
    Totally agree. As a software engineer, I was always excited to try new notes apps and to "really stay organized" this time. But I always ended up falling back on either Apple Notes or Sublime because everything else was too slow. Decided to build an app where it's fast to start writing but is also set up to keep your notes sane over time. The app has a built in scratchpad where you capture notes in small chunks, like texting yourself. Then you triage the notes into categories later. https://youtu.be/xRxn4iiWZUM https://youtu.be/xRxn4iiWZUM Would love the community's feedback. (https://bytebase.io https://bytebase.io)
• pwython 6y ago
  I had no doubt the top few comments would be critical of the post as usual... but Joplin? I can't wrap my head around this one. I've used Joplin for years and I can't figure out how it would replace Notion.
  • Lazare 6y ago
    I wasn't using Notion for it's collaboration features, but as a personal wiki/knowledgebase/note taking application. Basically, I want an app I can run on my desktop and phone, I can shovel every random thought, link, idea, code snippet, etc. into it, and I can find it quickly. Joplin does this. Notion does this. Notion also has a lot of other features Joplin does not, true, I just didn't care about any of them. :)
• mrlala 6y ago
  Have you ever tried using that Wiki inside of Microsoft teams? If you want to talk about slow.. dear lord, it's like every action I do is manually being forwarded to a country with cheap labor to approve my action before it's approved in the dtabase.
  • rubidium 6y ago
    Whoever is on that product team is either grossly incompetent or terribly understaffed. It’s one of the worst wikis I’ve seen. (Sorry if you’re reading this MS employee!)
    • prepend 6y ago
      I wonder about that and came up with incompetent or team bloat. Since there are so many single person passion project wikis that are OSS, I can’t understand how even if they had a single decent dev working on this it could suck so hard. I think that the wiki in Teams is not intended to be used but is rather there to tell someone in a position to buy who wants a wiki, but doesn’t use them, that the product has a wiki. I tried using it and just basic stuff like linking to the wiki from various places is so difficult. I think the (incorrect) assumption Teams makes is that users are super stupid and only use Teams and nothing else, and only use what they are explicitly trained to use.
• rattray 6y ago
  I don't use notion, so I'm curious - what kind of slow? UI lag? Page load? API responses?
  • ryanSrich 6y ago
    Page load, painting, uploading, everything. It's all very very slow. I use Notion very heavily at work, and until March of this year personally. In early 2020 I switched to Roam and I can't go back now. Roam is so amazingly fast it's like they're cheating or something. I wish every app would adopt the way Roam does it. Load everything up front. But, everything is slow these days. Aside from Roam, HN and maybe a handful of native iOS apps, I can't really name any app/site that I use on daily basis that isn't painfully slow.
    • zestyping 6y ago
      This is why I've never left Notational Velocity. Too hard to switch to something slow.
    • ksec 6y ago
      Roam as in the one linked below? Seems like a very different app to Notion. https://roamresearch.com https://roamresearch.com
      • ryanSrich 6y ago
        It solves the same problems for me. Because Roam is almost like a markup language, you can make it do a lot of what Notion does. Especially if you use Notion purely as a personal wiki + task manager. Notion is much better for businesses IMO. Like I said above, I use it for my startup. Specifically for task management, and even for our public docs site, ex: https://docs.haekka.com/ https://docs.haekka.com/
    • mvp 6y ago
      Roam takes a while to startup. Once up, it's quite fast to switch between pages. A bit like an IDE. It's still browser based I think, and there are no native apps for Android and iOS. So I feel constrained when I'm not at the desktop. Notion mobile apps are quite good, so I never have to tell myself I'll do something when I go to my desktop.
• Scarbutt 6y ago
  For a tool like that I need it to be a frictionless as possible This is way so many just try to fit their the note/task/wiki/etc.. flows to their text editors(vscode,emacs,vim)
• arnaudsm 6y ago
  I don't understand how Notion pages take 2+ seconds to load on 12-core machine with a gigabit connection. And you can't load multiple pages at once, it has to be in focus!
  • steve_adams_86 6y ago
    That suggests to me that the latency would be the network on their end
  • black_puppydog 6y ago
    > And you can't load multiple pages at once, it has to be in focus! Is that a new thing? I just noticed that bit yesterday. I often have to load multiple pages and this is such a flow breaker...
    • rickyc091 6y ago
      If you're using the Desktop app the only way is to open a new window then navigate to the other page you want.
      • black_puppydog 6y ago
        which is the prime reason I don't use the desktop app. "Come use a version of our website where you can't tabbed-browse!" Yeah, that's a hard no from me...
• philippz 6y ago
  I absolutely agree. Notion's performance is absolutely disturbing my product adoption. I'm still sticking with Apple Notes for that reason.
• crooked-v 6y ago
  I've ended up using Obsidian, since it saves its stuff as plain Markdown as opposed to Joplin's weird kitbash format... ...but the deeply ambiguous licensing info makes it a non-option for a lot of people.
  • buzzerbetrayed 6y ago
    I've never understood the draw of Obsidian. Their website makes it seem like the "graph view" is their big differentiator, but why is that useful? Why is it useful to know how various topics are vaguely related, and view a giant web of it? Or is their marketing just confusing me.. and really it's just a markdown editor with linking?
    • _alex_ 6y ago
      there’s a style of note taking called zettelkasten, recently popularized by a service called Roam Research, that is ALL ABOUT linking notes together and traversing the note graph. obsidian is targeted at that use case.
    • slightwinder 6y ago
      Linking is a big thing in knowledge-managment. There is a new hype weaving around ATM to rediscover functionality which exists in old tools for decades already. Graph-View pokes in that area. Similar reasoning for the tag-view and search. But Obsidian has more points speaking for it. It works on local files/folders with well known types. No special formats involved which lock you in. Recently it started development of it's plugin-API which already started gaining some useful plugins from the community. And overall it's quite polished and userfriendly, not many quirks and corners which stay in the users way.
    • edylemond 6y ago
      Graph view sounds ideal Zettelkasten but in practice the graph becomes chaos once you get to a certain number of notes. It's more useful to have a local view of a notes' links and backlinks, like https://traverse.link/ https://traverse.link/ does
• black_puppydog 6y ago
  Slack & notion make me close my eyes while typing, just because the delay between key press and pixels lighting up is so long that I get confused. It's like speaking with a 400ms or so echo of yourself being played back. Hugely distracting. When writing longer things on either, I find myself firing up vim to copy paste afterwards, just because it's impossible to get into any kind of flow in these apps. VS code also falls into this category by the way, albeit less severe. For notion specifically, the total lack of keyboard navigation within a page (PgUp/PgDown, Space, Shift+Space, nothing works!) as well as the fact that wherever I click I will make immediate changes to the document (even if I just want to deselect some text or so) just makes the editing hugely frustrating, slow, and anxiety-inducing. Seriously, if one day I wake up and write my boss that I'm outta here, notion and slack (and asana...) are way up there on the list of reasons.
  • deckard1 6y ago
    I feel all of this is why email is dead. It's not because Slack or anything killed email. It's because Gmail (and other web clients) killed email. They made it dreadfully slow to do anything in. Go download Thunderbird. I haven't used it in 10 years, so it could be worse today. But I remember it being a joy to use. Or the Agent usenet/email reader.
    • _alex_ 6y ago
      i’m playing with mailmate on macos and it’s making me hate email so much less.
      • boringg 6y ago
        mimestream for me.
    • prepend 6y ago
      It’s funny that I recently started using the Mac desktop mail app and outlook app and they are so quick compared to gmail (or outlook.com). I had forgotten how nice it was to quickly go through email and remember how quick gmail was when it launched. A colleague said “it’s just five seconds to open and load an email, that’s not a lot of time.” But that adds up.
• acjohnson55 6y ago
  Agreed with the slowness. I absolutely love using Notion, but my #1 complaint is that time-to-note is too slow. I wish that were a northstar metric for them. One thing Notion excels at is allowing me to refactor quick notes into increasing levels of structure, but that first step of getting information into the system from my brain is the biggest gap.
• timmattison 6y ago
  I think it is all relative. Notion feels so much faster than Quip. Quip takes forever to start, stop, search, etc. it is nearly unusable. Search in Notion is so much better too. Maybe I should avoid anything faster than Notion so I don’t get spoiled.
• jakecopp 6y ago
  If you want something: - crazy fast - saves to plain text - renders to html with links between pages - one keypress to turn a word into a link to a page with that name and create the page Try Vimwiki! https://github.com/vimwiki/vimwiki https://github.com/vimwiki/vimwiki
• pembrook 6y ago
  Joplin, obsidian, etc. and other open source note systems I've used all suffer from the same problem: bad writing experience. I can't be the only one who believes this...writing in a 2 panel markdown+preview side-by-side view is just horrible and backwards. And I like the idea of markdown! Of course I want the ability to export to markdown for portability to the web. But for the love of god, don't make me surround my words in 4 character markup to make them bold, and then show me a second panel next to it so I can "preview" what bold looks like. Didn't we already solve this with 1980s word processors? Hell, why don't we create a 3 panel writing view? On the left you can write in binary, in the middle you can see live base64, and on the right you can preview what it will look like to actual humans. Awesome! The only good implementation of writing in markdown I've seen is Typora or Bear, which abstracts/fades away the markup after you type in a single view. Notion also solves this by only allowing you to select from semantic HTML styles (ie. H1, H2, H3, etc) but you see what the final text will look like in one view. When you export, generating markdown is trivial since you're already using a markdown-esque set of options to style your text.
  • zestyping 6y ago
    Funny that we feel so different about Markdown. The whole point of Markdown (in my opinion) is that the formatting is a function of text that you can see and edit. The entire state of the document is visible, and there are no formatting operations you have to learn, just regular text editing operations like backspace, copy, paste, and so on. For example, if you press backspace, you always know exactly what the result will be: it will delete the character to the left of the cursor. This is not so in rich text editors; when you press backspace, it changes both the document and invisible internal state, and you can't easily predict what will happen simply by looking at the screen; you need to be aware of the invisible formatting structure, or perhaps a recent history of things you did, or it might be entirely impossible to tell because it depends on some invisible state that was created weeks ago and saved in the document file. For this huge advantage in predictability and simplicity, Markdown sacrifices formatting power (you can only do a limited set of things like headings, lists, bold, and italic). That's why Markdown tools that hide the markup are, in my opinion, the worst of both worlds: you sacrifice formatting power, and you sacrifice editor predictability. After the markup is gone, how do you edit it? How do you unbold something, or change the indentation of a list? If there are separate commands for all that, then there was no point in using Markdown.
• zestyping 6y ago
  I love the spirit of Notion as well, and I've tried it a few times and just can't get on board because of how sluggish it is.
• siscia 6y ago
  I created https://nostashapp.com https://nostashapp.com exactly to have a fast note-taking app with search. Is no-where close to the completeness (and complexity) of Notion, it works as WYSIWYG editor, no Markdown. But it is very fast (hosted in Europe but underneath does basically nothing), with search, free if you don't want to pay, and it will stay since I host my personal notes on it.
• zerubeus 6y ago
  It is a pain, in my very powerful Android device it literally takes more than 10s for the app to start, very poor performance. Nothing beats the writing experience of iAWriter for macOS users.
• LukeEF 6y ago
  It seems to me that we need local and sync for this to work well. Make your changes locally and either sync behind the scenes automatically or when you push 'commit'. Many applications (like notion and a bunch of the other browser based applications) go the cheap SaaS route. One central database behind a web service and every frontend only displays an instantaneous view of some part of the data. That's not collaboration - you want to be able to work offline (at high speed) and then sync when you are ready. Multiple people should be able to work on the same artifact at the same time (and deal with conflicts at the point of the commit). While the sync works well for google docs, I think the experience of working on a single shared resource is bad. (All part of the problem we are trying to solve over at https://terminusdb.com/ https://terminusdb.com/ - giving a native versioned DB so you can build collaborative apps)
  • jmnicolas 6y ago
    IMO multi user sync is extremely hard to do right. It's one of the few things I would flatly refuse to work on, I don't need the headaches.
    • LukeEF 6y ago
      agree wholeheartedly - trying to solve that problem in a general way so nobody else has to have the headache (but, as you can imagine, there is a lot of complexity and detail in getting to something general and usable)
      • jmnicolas 6y ago
        Thanks for your sacrifice, you're my hero!
    • LukeEF 6y ago
      Áed mac Bricc literally had other people's headaches - nightmare superpower.
• mvp 6y ago
  > For a tool like that I need it to be a frictionless as possible Friction can be at different levels. All text editors especially the ones we are used to are friction less when we want to quickly open a new file and jot down something. But then, many higher levels things you want to do with chunks of text are not straight forward. You'll have to use plugins or write your extensions which sort of do what's required, but then they become clunky. Doing the following things in a text editor is very clunky 1. Drop files from a file browser 2. A wiki that you'll stick to and not want to switch every month. 3. Write reasonably large documents that you'd actually also read in a text editor. 4. Have the same experience on all devices 5. Tables that are pleasing to the eye. 6. Visuals cues that enhance understanding of the content. 7. Select a bunch of text and convert them into pages or todos or tickets.