3 ms·

I don't get the hype between Notion, Airtable, Asana... Sometimes they feel like glorified Microsoft Office!

penaazv 3y ago
Haha, yes!
nativeit 3y ago
You’re not entirely wrong, although I don’t personally know of anyone who would use Notion for any kind of serious document authoring. Notion isn’t terribly original, it’s quite opinionated, and it’s hardly a panacea of productivity—but it manages to find an acceptable middle ground in several key software categories in a way that its competitors never have that, when combined effectively, add up to something more than the sum of its parts. For a lot of people who have been longing for such a product, it can feel special even if there’s not anything particularly special about any one thing it does. I think the thing that Notion managed to do that truly sets it apart from Office, as well as a lot of its note-taking/productivity app peers, is to make a very simple and intuitive method for anyone at any skill level to create and utilize a “relational database” (I realize there are oceans of meaningful distinctions between Notion’s databases and proper ones). For me, Notion became something of a phenomenon because after years of getting excited about things like Evernote and Asana (or anything in Google Docs) only to be sorely disappointed to find that all of them could do a lot of general things fairly well, not one of them could adapt to my specific workflow in a way that made them essential. Notion’s paradigm of combining Airtable’s customizable database-lite functionality with Evernote’s note-taking/knowledge gathering wasn’t the most original recipe, but they executed it pretty well, and maintain a good pace of improvement, and it’s become the only note/task/productivity app that I have ever used consistently enough to experience value from it. I started using it during their initial public beta, and my workspace currently has over half a million blocks of information inside, with some of my early original databases for things like contacts serving continuously to this day. As a freelance IT consultant, Notion’s functionality along with years of my data makes it easily the most useful and powerful application I use today. I’m sure that probably sounds horrifying to many of HN’s users, and I 100% understand and share the concerns. I have tried dozens of alternatives, from Access to more direct OSS clones like Focalboard, and even a few attempts to roll-my-own using traditional relational databases and a variety of frontends, but none of these have come close to meeting my needs with the ease and efficacy that Notion does, and does well. All that said, there does seem to be an over-abundance of hype surrounding it in the last year or two, and it’s certainly got plenty of problem areas that are ripe for legitimate criticism (cross-compatibility/vendor lock-in, lack of data backups, questionable data security, performance issues, bloat, monumental feature creep, etc., etc.).

Haha, yes!

You’re not entirely wrong, although I don’t personally know of anyone who would use Notion for any kind of serious document authoring. Notion isn’t terribly original, it’s quite opinionated, and it’s hardly a panacea of productivity—but it manages to find an acceptable middle ground in several key software categories in a way that its competitors never have that, when combined effectively, add up to something more than the sum of its parts. For a lot of people who have been longing for such a product, it can feel special even if there’s not anything particularly special about any one thing it does. I think the thing that Notion managed to do that truly sets it apart from Office, as well as a lot of its note-taking/productivity app peers, is to make a very simple and intuitive method for anyone at any skill level to create and utilize a “relational database” (I realize there are oceans of meaningful distinctions between Notion’s databases and proper ones). For me, Notion became something of a phenomenon because after years of getting excited about things like Evernote and Asana (or anything in Google Docs) only to be sorely disappointed to find that all of them could do a lot of general things fairly well, not one of them could adapt to my specific workflow in a way that made them essential. Notion’s paradigm of combining Airtable’s customizable database-lite functionality with Evernote’s note-taking/knowledge gathering wasn’t the most original recipe, but they executed it pretty well, and maintain a good pace of improvement, and it’s become the only note/task/productivity app that I have ever used consistently enough to experience value from it. I started using it during their initial public beta, and my workspace currently has over half a million blocks of information inside, with some of my early original databases for things like contacts serving continuously to this day. As a freelance IT consultant, Notion’s functionality along with years of my data makes it easily the most useful and powerful application I use today. I’m sure that probably sounds horrifying to many of HN’s users, and I 100% understand and share the concerns. I have tried dozens of alternatives, from Access to more direct OSS clones like Focalboard, and even a few attempts to roll-my-own using traditional relational databases and a variety of frontends, but none of these have come close to meeting my needs with the ease and efficacy that Notion does, and does well. All that said, there does seem to be an over-abundance of hype surrounding it in the last year or two, and it’s certainly got plenty of problem areas that are ripe for legitimate criticism (cross-compatibility/vendor lock-in, lack of data backups, questionable data security, performance issues, bloat, monumental feature creep, etc., etc.).