9 ms·

Appflowy – open-source Notion Alternative

304 points by lab 5y ago

infp_arborist 5y ago
I am enjoying the fact very much that there are more and more visible efforts to make modern, free and (post-)open alternatives to commercial software. What I am still not understanding is how designers and programmers can make a living when "everybody" uses cheap and decentralized (Yunohost, etc.) cloud instances.
jpgvm 5y ago
I don't know when this Notion thing took off but after recently being forced to use it at $DAY_JOB I don't get the hype. It feels like GDocs but with the directory embedded in the sidebar. Given how many people are rushing to clone it I must clearly be missing something. Also their implementation of OT or CRDTs is horseshit, it failed miserably when there was ~6-7 of us updating a bulleted list at the same time.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- PhoenixReborn 5y ago
  Rather than seeing Notion as a Google Docs alternative, it might be better to see it as an alternative to Atlassian Confluence or other wiki softwares. I can certainly say that Notion was a much better fit for us than something like Confluence was for use as a team wiki.
- rkangel 5y ago
  OneNote or Confluence is the better comparison, for just writing text in but Notion has a more powerful data model. You can link a set of pages together through their attributes and view them through a table, kanban, calendar etc. It's basically a simple relational DB, which allows you to build information tools on top of it. At our (now defunct) startup we used it to do all our initial CRM and ticket management. We had all our customers in one table, and a different table of ongoing tickets linked to the first. We had similar setups for other things. As things started to scale we moved out to dedicated tools but having that capability meant that the initial version was much more accessible and useful.
- real-dino 5y ago
  The power is in the edit and view being the same view. It's also wonderfully minimal, much faster loading, and follows basic markdown as opposed to forcing you to use BBCode or Jira specific syntax. Previously wiki like Confluence software used to force you to go to 'edit' mode to switch between the two. This also fails when multiple people are editing the same document. You can have a phone call with someone, and see each others cursors, edit simultaneously in real time. You say this fell down, but in Confluence this would be impossible. It's also super easy to share pages with external vendors using the GUID based URL. They can even comment inline if they register.
  - michaelmior 5y ago
    > It feels like GDocs but with the directory embedded in the sidebar. > The power is in the edit and view being the same view. This doesn't seem to be a distinguishing factor from Google Docs which also doesn't have a separate view. The other advantages you listed are nice, but also don't seem unique.
  - dangoor 5y ago
    > Previously wiki like Confluence software used to force you to go to 'edit' mode to switch between the two. This is actually a feature. Readers of a page/doc are seeing a consistent view until the next time "Publish" is pressed. > You can have a phone call with someone, and see each others cursors, edit simultaneously in real time. You say this fell down, but in Confluence this would be impossible. No longer true! Confluence (Cloud, at least) does this right now. If two (or more) people are in edit mode, those people get an experience much like Google Docs.
- bobbylarrybobby 5y ago
  The main difference between Notion and gdocs is that Notion is a wiki; you can easily navigate up and down the page hierarchy without leaving the current tab. Gdocs keeps docs separate, so you’re constantly bouncing back and forth between folder and docs, or more likely just keeping one massive, poorly organized doc with everything you might ever need in it
- billconan 5y ago
  as I remember they use the “last win “ strategy, instead of crdt
  - jpgvm 5y ago
    Whatever their implementation is it's bad and they should change it.
- o_____________o 5y ago
  I'll jump to whatever project has an API with features like custom link unfurling and off-site embedding. Notion doesn't let you embed its pages in other sites, and doesn't provide a programmatic way to display proprietary content. This means it's black boxed and limited insofar as integration with enterprise tooling is concerned.
joshdance 5y ago
If this has offline mode and fast search, I am in.
DeathArrow 5y ago
Does it allow easy internal linking and does it have a graph like in Obsidian or Roam?
- doofin 5y ago
  Would you like to elaborate a bit about how those graphs are useful ? I think the graphs in roam are too dense to be useful .
bodge5000 5y ago
Sorry for the tangent, but is anyone aware of any open source alternative to workflowy (quite a bit different to notion, a lot simpler, usually described as an infinite outliner)? I really got on with that whilst I was briefly using it, but it being proprietary was a bit of a concern
- disabledalpha 5y ago
  There is Logseq (https://logseq.com/ https://logseq.com/) although it is more oriented to recreate Roam.
  - bodge5000 5y ago
    Yeh logseq looks really nice, but seems to have a bit more of a steep learning curve. What really drew me to workflowy was the simplicity of just one page and a list of bullets (though I guess it might be possible to emulate that in logseq, maybe even easy)
    - pps 5y ago
      You can do that, but Logseq is definitely not optimized for longer pages and you will quite quickly start to feel that. But putting everything in one note might be a good starting point to learn new workflows with these kind of outliners.
- shruthibadri 5y ago
  Athens Research uses a workflowy like UI. It comes with a bunch of other features, but you can ignore those pretty easily. Obsidian with the Outliner plugin is also nice - although Obsidian isn't open source, it is free and all your data is stored locally as markdown files. 1. https://github.com/athensresearch/athens https://github.com/athensresearch/athens 2. https://github.com/vslinko/obsidian-outliner https://github.com/vslinko/obsidian-outliner
jayolden 5y ago
Why is the project's roadmap is located in Trello and not in the website itself?
- jitl 5y ago
  (Disclaimer: I work on Notion) It looks like desktop software built with Flutter. Their editor is based on https://github.com/singerdmx/flutter-quill https://github.com/singerdmx/flutter-quill which also has a web version, so maybe they’ll be able to target web in the future. For now I don’t think they support multi-user sharing or collaboration yet, and I didn’t see web features listed on their roadmap either.
efleurine 5y ago
Soon we will need an open source alternative to the open source.
jaden 5y ago
It looks like this is self-hosted only as opposed to a more direct alternative to Notion.
- pinusc 5y ago
  Looks like they are still in the early stages of development. I wouldn't be surprised if in future the developers/someone else decided to host a paid version of this software so that it becomes more accessible. Right now there is not much reason for end-users to pay for this, and running servers is expensive if you don't have a business model...
0des 5y ago
Ah this is great! I've been looking for something like Notion but self-hosted.
- TuringTest 5y ago
  There's also Anytype.io, though it's still in closed invitation-only alpha and the promise they will open source it in the future.
Titanous 5y ago
Outline is another (more mature) option: https://github.com/outline/outline https://github.com/outline/outline
- lab 5y ago
  Outline's rich-markdown-editor (https://github.com/outline/rich-markdown-editor https://github.com/outline/rich-markdown-editor) package is pretty nice. I have used it to make some custom MD editor/CMS experiment.
  - evolve2k 5y ago
    Are any of these options a git repo under the hood for the actual knowledge base? It’s very valuable to be able to have the double workflow of a nice web interface alongside a plain text developer git workflow and leads to a very future proof knowledge base.
    - Dangeranger 5y ago
      You are looking for a tool like NetlifyCMS, which uses Git for its data store behind a nice web UI.
    - jrudolph 5y ago
      There are quite a few options for markdown + git knowledge bases, eg. Obsidian. You can easily find more alternatives discussed here on HN by starting a search on Obsidian. If you’re looking for more of a CMS there’s quite a few options out there, most notably static site generators like docusaurus or vuepress. Plug: I’ve built a small tool to generate the markdown from notion, which allows me to use notion as my CMS editor while keeping the generated site fully under my control. https://github.com/meshcloud/notion-markdown-cms https://github.com/meshcloud/notion-markdown-cms
      - brunoqc 5y ago
        Obsidian is great, but only free for personal uses.
bdcravens 5y ago
The fact that their Roadmap is hosted on Trello rather than Appflowy itself says as much about where the project is at as the roadmap itself.
- manojlds 5y ago
  Gitlab was on Github. Doesn't mean much.
  - bdcravens 5y ago
    That's why I'm said "where the project is at" (present tense). At the moment Gitlab was still on Github, probably meant that it needed features at that moment in time that Gitlab itself couldn't offer. Any customers that needed those features would likely prefer Github to Gitlab at that moment. Ditto for Appflowy, but as things change, it'll be good to reevaluate it that time.
- vanviegen 5y ago
  What makes this especially weird is that the Trello link is right underneath the Demo Pages heading. It's the only clickable thing there. Besides that, the section only has two screenshots, one of which seems to be showing of how you can use Appflowy as a Trello-like board. Confused.
  - danmur 5y ago
    Yes! I saw that link there and thought, cool idea showing a practical use case.
- randomluck040 5y ago
  You have to start somewhere if your own system isn’t ready yet but I agree, I’d change it over to my own application before launch…
- anyfactor 5y ago
  Notion team is true to their product all the way. Even using it as their blog.
preya2k 5y ago
So, there's Focalboard (https://www.focalboard.com/ https://www.focalboard.com/), Outline (https://github.com/outline/outline https://github.com/outline/outline) and Appflowy. Has anyone compare these three Notion alternatives, yet? Would love to know, which one comes closest to the features of the original.
- prox 5y ago
  I might try focalboard, I am using Joplin now, but looking for something… more? Like that you can run it local offline. Appflowy is macOS only right now unfortunately,
  - Isthatablackgsd 5y ago
    What about Obsidian and Cherrytree?
  - square_usual 5y ago
    I can see that the appflowy repo has a build folder for Windows, so if you're using Windows you can try compiling it? Flutter is pretty easy to set up and compile. FWIW I'd be interested to see how much work it'd take to add linux support, since in my (albeit basic) experiments with Flutter it didn't take much effort at all. Good first issue?
  - jasonblais 5y ago
    If you give focalboard a try, we'd love to hear feedback! :) https://www.focalboard.com/feedback/ https://www.focalboard.com/feedback/
    - A4ET8a8uTh0 5y ago
      Not original poster, but some quick notes: - Easy setup. I was up in 5 minutes flat including reading time - Good start templates - Aesthetic quibble - dark theme seems off. I don't know if its a shade of grey that throws me off or what - It does not have pretty moving animations of various boxes ( and it is a good thing! ) I will keep playing with it.
richtext 5y ago
Another (largely unheard-of) alternative to Notion is https://www.larksuite.com/ https://www.larksuite.com/ , by ByteDance. It's quite good. (I hope I didn't just start a political / ideological debate because I mentioned ByteDance.)
- jsilence 5y ago
  Does not seem to be Open Source or offer a self host option like AppFlowy.
- nirui 5y ago
  Not sure why you would think it'll reach geopolitical level, a good product is a good product. But, based on the description in their Chinese page, the service is not self-hostable (???). If this is true then there is no real reason to use such service since there are many better alternatives (Notion for example).
- xmprt 5y ago
  This doesn't look much like Notion. I think it's a lot closer to something like Google Suite (even the name indicates that).
- approxim8ion 5y ago
  It's not like Notion's privacy policy/TOS are great to begin with, so it's a low bar.
sudosysgen 5y ago
If you're looking for a full-fledged alternative to Notion, I'd look at Anytype. It's closed beta for now.
la_fayette 5y ago
Using rust and flutter for a project like this seems to me, that the authors just searched for a project to learn/use a new skillset? Although, an interesting stack, this is definitely not boring technology, so the innovation tokens will be used probably with flutter web.
nsenifty 5y ago
Why does this sound so much like Workflowy[1]? [1] https://workflowy.com/ https://workflowy.com/
- stevenhuang 5y ago
  Because that's also a Notion alternative. Not open source though sadly.
  - manmal 5y ago
    To my understanding, Workflowy has been around for longer than Notion. I think I started using it 6 or 7 years ago.
hardwaresofton 5y ago
I guess I greatly underestimated what Notion was -- I thought it was mostly a note-taking tool ("Evernote 2.0"), but Appflowy (and a visit to the Notion site again) makes it seem like a project management tool + wiki? Notion is essentialy JIRA + Confluence + OneNote wrapped up in one (not implying anything about the quality of the products just their competencies)? [EDIT] - A possibly disturbing/pleasing thought -- is Notion Chat on the horizon?
- gjulianm 5y ago
  I had the same idea about Notion before, and after using it the best way I have to describe is that it is a database manager, and what can it do is up to you. You can use it for simple note taking (and it does have nice features for that), but also add databases in certain formats, with properties, links between them, run "queries", add reminders... In a sense, it's like coding a (very) basic application without coding. Pretty helpful, for example I use it for managing recipes and shopping lists automatically (among other things).
- mritchie712 5y ago
  You can already chat async on a page pretty well with Notion in comments.
- jitl 5y ago
  (I work at Notion) > A possibly disturbing/pleasing thought -- is Notion Chat on the horizon I don’t think Notion is interested in this outside of making our comments work better.
  - hardwaresofton 5y ago
    Appreciate the comment -- yeah the fact that comments are already in there and maybe people might want to chat live without switching to another app made me think it might be a thing. Maybe slack/mattermost/etc integrations will be good enough forever
- judge2020 5y ago
  Yes. It can be any of those, all of those, or none of those, and it's all organized in a hierarchical manner like a folder tree with emojis being the new way of identifying and codifying documents.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
polote 5y ago
Is Notion the tool with the most copycats? Slite, workflowy, loop, appflowy, outline, focalboard, ...?
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- slimneo 5y ago
  Workflowy was founded 2-3 years before notion and is more of a bullet point (tree structure) based knowledge management tool.
the100rabh 5y ago
Is there a docker image that I can use to run this off my RPi
icemelt8 5y ago
Why is their roadmap hosted on Trello?

304 points by lab 5y ago

I am enjoying the fact very much that there are more and more visible efforts to make modern, free and (post-)open alternatives to commercial software. What I am still not understanding is how designers and programmers can make a living when "everybody" uses cheap and decentralized (Yunohost, etc.) cloud instances.

jpgvm 5y ago

I don't know when this Notion thing took off but after recently being forced to use it at $DAY_JOB I don't get the hype. It feels like GDocs but with the directory embedded in the sidebar. Given how many people are rushing to clone it I must clearly be missing something. Also their implementation of OT or CRDTs is horseshit, it failed miserably when there was ~6-7 of us updating a bulleted list at the same time.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
PhoenixReborn 5y ago
Rather than seeing Notion as a Google Docs alternative, it might be better to see it as an alternative to Atlassian Confluence or other wiki softwares. I can certainly say that Notion was a much better fit for us than something like Confluence was for use as a team wiki.
rkangel 5y ago
OneNote or Confluence is the better comparison, for just writing text in but Notion has a more powerful data model. You can link a set of pages together through their attributes and view them through a table, kanban, calendar etc. It's basically a simple relational DB, which allows you to build information tools on top of it. At our (now defunct) startup we used it to do all our initial CRM and ticket management. We had all our customers in one table, and a different table of ongoing tickets linked to the first. We had similar setups for other things. As things started to scale we moved out to dedicated tools but having that capability meant that the initial version was much more accessible and useful.
real-dino 5y ago
The power is in the edit and view being the same view. It's also wonderfully minimal, much faster loading, and follows basic markdown as opposed to forcing you to use BBCode or Jira specific syntax. Previously wiki like Confluence software used to force you to go to 'edit' mode to switch between the two. This also fails when multiple people are editing the same document. You can have a phone call with someone, and see each others cursors, edit simultaneously in real time. You say this fell down, but in Confluence this would be impossible. It's also super easy to share pages with external vendors using the GUID based URL. They can even comment inline if they register.
- michaelmior 5y ago
  > It feels like GDocs but with the directory embedded in the sidebar. > The power is in the edit and view being the same view. This doesn't seem to be a distinguishing factor from Google Docs which also doesn't have a separate view. The other advantages you listed are nice, but also don't seem unique.
- dangoor 5y ago
  > Previously wiki like Confluence software used to force you to go to 'edit' mode to switch between the two. This is actually a feature. Readers of a page/doc are seeing a consistent view until the next time "Publish" is pressed. > You can have a phone call with someone, and see each others cursors, edit simultaneously in real time. You say this fell down, but in Confluence this would be impossible. No longer true! Confluence (Cloud, at least) does this right now. If two (or more) people are in edit mode, those people get an experience much like Google Docs.
bobbylarrybobby 5y ago
The main difference between Notion and gdocs is that Notion is a wiki; you can easily navigate up and down the page hierarchy without leaving the current tab. Gdocs keeps docs separate, so you’re constantly bouncing back and forth between folder and docs, or more likely just keeping one massive, poorly organized doc with everything you might ever need in it
billconan 5y ago
as I remember they use the “last win “ strategy, instead of crdt
- jpgvm 5y ago
  Whatever their implementation is it's bad and they should change it.
o_____________o 5y ago
I'll jump to whatever project has an API with features like custom link unfurling and off-site embedding. Notion doesn't let you embed its pages in other sites, and doesn't provide a programmatic way to display proprietary content. This means it's black boxed and limited insofar as integration with enterprise tooling is concerned.

joshdance 5y ago

If this has offline mode and fast search, I am in.

DeathArrow 5y ago

Does it allow easy internal linking and does it have a graph like in Obsidian or Roam?

doofin 5y ago
Would you like to elaborate a bit about how those graphs are useful ? I think the graphs in roam are too dense to be useful .

bodge5000 5y ago

Sorry for the tangent, but is anyone aware of any open source alternative to workflowy (quite a bit different to notion, a lot simpler, usually described as an infinite outliner)? I really got on with that whilst I was briefly using it, but it being proprietary was a bit of a concern

disabledalpha 5y ago
There is Logseq (https://logseq.com/ https://logseq.com/) although it is more oriented to recreate Roam.
- bodge5000 5y ago
  Yeh logseq looks really nice, but seems to have a bit more of a steep learning curve. What really drew me to workflowy was the simplicity of just one page and a list of bullets (though I guess it might be possible to emulate that in logseq, maybe even easy)
  - pps 5y ago
    You can do that, but Logseq is definitely not optimized for longer pages and you will quite quickly start to feel that. But putting everything in one note might be a good starting point to learn new workflows with these kind of outliners.
shruthibadri 5y ago
Athens Research uses a workflowy like UI. It comes with a bunch of other features, but you can ignore those pretty easily. Obsidian with the Outliner plugin is also nice - although Obsidian isn't open source, it is free and all your data is stored locally as markdown files. 1. https://github.com/athensresearch/athens https://github.com/athensresearch/athens 2. https://github.com/vslinko/obsidian-outliner https://github.com/vslinko/obsidian-outliner

jayolden 5y ago

Why is the project's roadmap is located in Trello and not in the website itself?

jitl 5y ago
(Disclaimer: I work on Notion) It looks like desktop software built with Flutter. Their editor is based on https://github.com/singerdmx/flutter-quill https://github.com/singerdmx/flutter-quill which also has a web version, so maybe they’ll be able to target web in the future. For now I don’t think they support multi-user sharing or collaboration yet, and I didn’t see web features listed on their roadmap either.

efleurine 5y ago

Soon we will need an open source alternative to the open source.

jaden 5y ago

It looks like this is self-hosted only as opposed to a more direct alternative to Notion.

pinusc 5y ago
Looks like they are still in the early stages of development. I wouldn't be surprised if in future the developers/someone else decided to host a paid version of this software so that it becomes more accessible. Right now there is not much reason for end-users to pay for this, and running servers is expensive if you don't have a business model...

0des 5y ago

Ah this is great! I've been looking for something like Notion but self-hosted.

TuringTest 5y ago
There's also Anytype.io, though it's still in closed invitation-only alpha and the promise they will open source it in the future.

Titanous 5y ago

Outline is another (more mature) option: https://github.com/outline/outline https://github.com/outline/outline

lab 5y ago
Outline's rich-markdown-editor (https://github.com/outline/rich-markdown-editor https://github.com/outline/rich-markdown-editor) package is pretty nice. I have used it to make some custom MD editor/CMS experiment.
- evolve2k 5y ago
  Are any of these options a git repo under the hood for the actual knowledge base? It’s very valuable to be able to have the double workflow of a nice web interface alongside a plain text developer git workflow and leads to a very future proof knowledge base.
  - Dangeranger 5y ago
    You are looking for a tool like NetlifyCMS, which uses Git for its data store behind a nice web UI.
  - jrudolph 5y ago
    There are quite a few options for markdown + git knowledge bases, eg. Obsidian. You can easily find more alternatives discussed here on HN by starting a search on Obsidian. If you’re looking for more of a CMS there’s quite a few options out there, most notably static site generators like docusaurus or vuepress. Plug: I’ve built a small tool to generate the markdown from notion, which allows me to use notion as my CMS editor while keeping the generated site fully under my control. https://github.com/meshcloud/notion-markdown-cms https://github.com/meshcloud/notion-markdown-cms
    - brunoqc 5y ago
      Obsidian is great, but only free for personal uses.

bdcravens 5y ago

The fact that their Roadmap is hosted on Trello rather than Appflowy itself says as much about where the project is at as the roadmap itself.

manojlds 5y ago
Gitlab was on Github. Doesn't mean much.
- bdcravens 5y ago
  That's why I'm said "where the project is at" (present tense). At the moment Gitlab was still on Github, probably meant that it needed features at that moment in time that Gitlab itself couldn't offer. Any customers that needed those features would likely prefer Github to Gitlab at that moment. Ditto for Appflowy, but as things change, it'll be good to reevaluate it that time.
vanviegen 5y ago
What makes this especially weird is that the Trello link is right underneath the Demo Pages heading. It's the only clickable thing there. Besides that, the section only has two screenshots, one of which seems to be showing of how you can use Appflowy as a Trello-like board. Confused.
- danmur 5y ago
  Yes! I saw that link there and thought, cool idea showing a practical use case.
randomluck040 5y ago
You have to start somewhere if your own system isn’t ready yet but I agree, I’d change it over to my own application before launch…
anyfactor 5y ago
Notion team is true to their product all the way. Even using it as their blog.

preya2k 5y ago

So, there's Focalboard (https://www.focalboard.com/ https://www.focalboard.com/), Outline (https://github.com/outline/outline https://github.com/outline/outline) and Appflowy. Has anyone compare these three Notion alternatives, yet? Would love to know, which one comes closest to the features of the original.

prox 5y ago
I might try focalboard, I am using Joplin now, but looking for something… more? Like that you can run it local offline. Appflowy is macOS only right now unfortunately,
- Isthatablackgsd 5y ago
  What about Obsidian and Cherrytree?
- square_usual 5y ago
  I can see that the appflowy repo has a build folder for Windows, so if you're using Windows you can try compiling it? Flutter is pretty easy to set up and compile. FWIW I'd be interested to see how much work it'd take to add linux support, since in my (albeit basic) experiments with Flutter it didn't take much effort at all. Good first issue?
- jasonblais 5y ago
  If you give focalboard a try, we'd love to hear feedback! :) https://www.focalboard.com/feedback/ https://www.focalboard.com/feedback/
  - A4ET8a8uTh0 5y ago
    Not original poster, but some quick notes: - Easy setup. I was up in 5 minutes flat including reading time - Good start templates - Aesthetic quibble - dark theme seems off. I don't know if its a shade of grey that throws me off or what - It does not have pretty moving animations of various boxes ( and it is a good thing! ) I will keep playing with it.

richtext 5y ago

Another (largely unheard-of) alternative to Notion is https://www.larksuite.com/ https://www.larksuite.com/ , by ByteDance. It's quite good. (I hope I didn't just start a political / ideological debate because I mentioned ByteDance.)

jsilence 5y ago
Does not seem to be Open Source or offer a self host option like AppFlowy.
nirui 5y ago
Not sure why you would think it'll reach geopolitical level, a good product is a good product. But, based on the description in their Chinese page, the service is not self-hostable (???). If this is true then there is no real reason to use such service since there are many better alternatives (Notion for example).
xmprt 5y ago
This doesn't look much like Notion. I think it's a lot closer to something like Google Suite (even the name indicates that).
approxim8ion 5y ago
It's not like Notion's privacy policy/TOS are great to begin with, so it's a low bar.

sudosysgen 5y ago

If you're looking for a full-fledged alternative to Notion, I'd look at Anytype. It's closed beta for now.

la_fayette 5y ago

Using rust and flutter for a project like this seems to me, that the authors just searched for a project to learn/use a new skillset? Although, an interesting stack, this is definitely not boring technology, so the innovation tokens will be used probably with flutter web.

nsenifty 5y ago

Why does this sound so much like Workflowy[1]? [1] https://workflowy.com/ https://workflowy.com/

stevenhuang 5y ago
Because that's also a Notion alternative. Not open source though sadly.
- manmal 5y ago
  To my understanding, Workflowy has been around for longer than Notion. I think I started using it 6 or 7 years ago.

hardwaresofton 5y ago

I guess I greatly underestimated what Notion was -- I thought it was mostly a note-taking tool ("Evernote 2.0"), but Appflowy (and a visit to the Notion site again) makes it seem like a project management tool + wiki? Notion is essentialy JIRA + Confluence + OneNote wrapped up in one (not implying anything about the quality of the products just their competencies)? [EDIT] - A possibly disturbing/pleasing thought -- is Notion Chat on the horizon?

gjulianm 5y ago
I had the same idea about Notion before, and after using it the best way I have to describe is that it is a database manager, and what can it do is up to you. You can use it for simple note taking (and it does have nice features for that), but also add databases in certain formats, with properties, links between them, run "queries", add reminders... In a sense, it's like coding a (very) basic application without coding. Pretty helpful, for example I use it for managing recipes and shopping lists automatically (among other things).
mritchie712 5y ago
You can already chat async on a page pretty well with Notion in comments.
jitl 5y ago
(I work at Notion) > A possibly disturbing/pleasing thought -- is Notion Chat on the horizon I don’t think Notion is interested in this outside of making our comments work better.
- hardwaresofton 5y ago
  Appreciate the comment -- yeah the fact that comments are already in there and maybe people might want to chat live without switching to another app made me think it might be a thing. Maybe slack/mattermost/etc integrations will be good enough forever
judge2020 5y ago
Yes. It can be any of those, all of those, or none of those, and it's all organized in a hierarchical manner like a folder tree with emojis being the new way of identifying and codifying documents.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

polote 5y ago

Is Notion the tool with the most copycats? Slite, workflowy, loop, appflowy, outline, focalboard, ...?

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
slimneo 5y ago
Workflowy was founded 2-3 years before notion and is more of a bullet point (tree structure) based knowledge management tool.

the100rabh 5y ago

Is there a docker image that I can use to run this off my RPi

icemelt8 5y ago

Why is their roadmap hosted on Trello?