I love using Notion, but I think the general discussion about it does not talk enough about how it's flexibility is also a problem many times.
1. Flexibility of blocks is a cognitive overhead for most folks in my team. They would rather prefer more constrained and opinionated approaches like Trello
2. Notion is currently a jack of all trades and master of none. We have tried to use it as a wiki, project tracker, issue tracker, CRM & spreadsheet. Though it's good to have one tool that can do many things, we quickly reach limits of what is possible automatically and have to spend a lot of time to manually maintain it
3. Convention over configuration creates problems for other team members to follow because conventions are not documented properly.
But I see a lot of potential of it becoming a platform. If they can incentivize 3rd parties to build over their platform and build trust, I think it's gonna be the next big thing. "One platform for all my data" with specialized tools to deal with different kinds of data. I can imagine tools like Tello, Jira, Hubspot, Google spreadsheets & draw.io running over it.
I've tried to use Notion, but my experience mirrors yours:
There's just enough flexibility to slow you down, but not enough flexibility to make it down exactly what I need without jumping through a lot of hoops.
My favorite productivity tools blend into the background. I can get down to doing the work without mental overhead of managing the tool. Notion, on the other hand, feels like I'm spending half of my energy fighting with Notion, and only half of my energy doing the work I'm trying to accomplish.
> There's just enough flexibility to slow you down, but not enough flexibility to make it down exactly what I need without jumping through a lot of hoops.
This reads as if you except Notion to give you meaningful work to do, a workflow you can follow? Or do you just don't know how to implement the workflows you envision yourself?
Funnily enough originaly the saying was "A jack of all trades is a master of none, but oftentimes better than a master of one." Seems like it got pretty skewed over time.
I would rephrase "all in one tool" to more specific like "project management tool". All in one for software teams makes me think that you also offer things like version control etc. All-in-one is a very loaded phrase. Just my 2 cents.
Hey, just noticed a small mistake, or it was just unclear from my side. Looks like the "pricing" link links to "learn" in the url, while there being nothing about pricing in the page itself.
Notion recently published "How Notion Uses Notion" [0] which I found insightful in terms of how Notion's flexibility is put to work internally.
It's interesting seeing where teams hit the limits of the tool & wish for (or move to) something else though. I wonder if "The Notion Way" will emerge at some point, which would be useful for quickly qualifying yourself in or out.
I've found Notion really worthwhile, but the fact it's so flexible means you need to go in with a plan so that you can really take advantage of it.
I really like how Marie Poulin's sets up her Notion process, here's a good example of how to make contextual dashboards - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YX2AJD4kx80 but there's a bunch more, just massive productivity boosts from not having to jump between so many different apps/services.
Also, the whole Emoji's thing is distracting to me. I just want to see plain text in simple san-serif fonts, with borders (which are apparently outdated in favor of massive emptiness of negative space).
Visual cognitive load is ok as far as the brain can process blocks of information. Such as a table with borders. When you have emojis, colors, effects, etc without clarity of separation, you get something that becomes tiring after a little while to look at.
That's funny. One time while converting a prototype to less of a prototype, I created like 40 PRs in 40 working days. There were so many in-flight at one time that I couldn't really use normal issue trackers. Instead I created one GitHub issue with a table of items. Each item had an emoji in the first column that indicated its current status. The gear was 'in-progress', 'eyes' review, 'ship' deploying, and green check for done. I didn't know how many lines there would be, I started out with about 6 and it worked exceedingly well. If anyone ever asked me what I was working on or where I was with it, I just sent them the one issue link and they had the whole history and the near future listed.
> how it's flexibility is also a problem many times.
Flexibility is always a challenge, but in case of Notion IMHO the bigger challange is getting over it's aweful userexperience and interface. And flexibility is not always a problem. Excel proofs that flexibel solution can succeed with the laymen.
> 1. Flexibility of blocks is a cognitive overhead for most folks in my team. They would rather prefer more constrained and opinionated approaches like Trello
Is this not solved with their Template-Library? Those deliver a guided opinionated experience. Though it's not as constrained and powerful as a specialized app like Trello.
> 2. Notion is currently a jack of all trades and master of none.
It's a canvas-tool. You get a set of brushs and pencils and it's up on you to paint what you need. This has naturally advantage for some and disadvantages for some others.
> 3. Convention over configuration creates problems for other team members to follow because conventions are not documented properly
Is Notion a team-tool? Do they advertise it as such?
> But I see a lot of potential of it becoming a platform. If they can incentivize 3rd parties to build over their platform and build trust, I think it's gonna be the next big thing. "One platform for all my data" with specialized tools to deal with different kinds of data.
There are far better soltions around for this. I doubt this is a sane endgoal for notion.
Good points. It seems you might enjoy Fibery[1], it addresses most of these problems (and has internal whiteboard as draw.io replacement as well). But I’m biased as a Fibery founder.
Yup, Notion and OneNote occupy similar scenarios for me. It's where I can gather my compiled thoughts and notes, but I've had trouble implementing any team processes on it due to it not being constrained enough in its UI.
I don't think there's any easy answer here. I respect the Notion team a lot for making a tool that is so flexible, but it's also a curse in some key scenarios.
Onenote is so close as a perfect system for me but what it leaves out really hurts.
-No task Hierarchy
-No alerts for due dates (Yes you can add outlook tasks but its flakey)
-No automatic reporting
Yeah. I see that it works great for some scenarios, like when I and my co-founder are collaborating. But if I try to teach it to a sales guy, I can see he just hates it :(
I am really surprised no one has mentioned https://zenkit.com/. Kanban - Wiki - Calendar - List - Mindmap - Hierarchy etc. It does those things very well.
Probably because it seems to be less known than Notion. IIRC it's a bit more expensive and more constrainend than notion, more targeted at teams than single users.
I feel like Dropbox Paper strikes a great balance. If you drop certain links in a Paper doc, like a Figma or Google Docs Spreadsheet, it will show either an iframe or screenshot read-only representation of the current content with a link to it.
My only beef with Dropbox Paper is their iOS apps are buggy as hell and have been for a few years. I really wish they’d invest more in their native apps.
+1 for Dropbox Paper. I am weirdly addicted to it for all my internal documentation and writeups. When you get used to (and expect) the guardrails, it's so fast to quick create a doc with multi-media.
Ran into the same issue. Loved the design and the demos I saw so I signed up.
What I really wanted was just a simple flexible to-do list, something that I missed from Basecamp v1 and was willing to try somewhere else.
But the flexibility made it a nightmare. Because what I wanted was very simple, the friction that I encountered, though probably not huge, felt much larger, because I felt, why can't this be easier? I just want a simple to do list, and I was messing with headings and all of this non-essential stuff that I didn't need.
I'm sure in a business setting it could be different, especially if someone goes through the trouble of setting things up so you have some sort of system of consistency that you work inside of, but as a first time user the flexibility was a bit of hinderance.
I can totally relate to this. I often feel that with all these "simplistic" products coming out they actually oversimplify it to the point where it actually takes longer to do. It is great to have the flexibility and all, but where do we draw the line from being too flexible or too simplified? Like you, I ran into the same issues with Notion, so I switched to Trello, but it has some lack of features that I really wanted. I've been searching the web to find team chats that particularly don't require too much integration, and is simple. Especially with task management. I've been seeing a lot of mentions about AirSend on twitter, and I checked out their website. They have a really simple to-do list that is built-in. My team and I just started using it last week, and so far I don't have too many complaints. Not sure if you are looking for a switch, but you might like them. I hope this helps! Their website is, AirSend.io
long time notion user here. I was using notion for my personal life and it was serving the purpose but when I started using it as a project management tool for my dev team I realised how crippled it is (no dependent tasks, gantt view etc). maybe I'm wrong and notion is not built for this but then again why would i use it just for wiki? recently started looking for task management+wiki tool.. reviewed more than 10+ tools and finally picked an extremely powerful but a less known tool clickup.com
Can't agree more. I was using Notion from the very beta start and loved it. Then couples of months in I strated noticing that the more Notion added features the more I was spending more time "perfecting" my workspace than doing actual work.
Stopped using it and went back to old good Google Sheets, Apple Notes. Very constrained and just the right amount of "flexibility" to make it work for you workflow. No emojis encouragements.
Same here. I was so overwhelmed with the million ways I could accomplish my relatively simple needs that I just gave up on it. Also everything basically bringing up a modal for a new page annoyed me. Maybe it's just my personality type but I like there just being a canonical way of doing something and then doing it, rather than spending a fair chunk of time customising and configuring the tool to do what I want.
This was exactly our issue. Not good at any one thing and the interface is very touch. A single mis-click and you can mess things up which reminds me Asana.
What all these platforms really need is solid APIs and interoperability so we can use the right tool while keeping everything in one place (ideally email or slack).
I really need a better index of all my notes, right now it's just too overwhelming without a better way of organizing everything, especially since it automatically collapses all my workspace trees when I close the app. Really gets in the way of using it beyond a handful of pages.
“One platform for all my data with specialized tools to deal with different kinds of data. I can imagine tools like Tello, Jira, Hubspot, Google spreadsheets & draw.io running over it.”
Can anyone explain to me why Trello is so popular? I'm serious; I honestly don't get it.
If I want to track tasks, I just make a Google Spreadsheet with a row for each task. This scales up easily to a hundred tasks or so, and it's straightforward to filter on a column to focus on particular categories or statuses. In Trello, I can see maybe 30 cards max before my screen space is all used up, and I spend so much time hunting around for cards. If a card has moved, I have to just read linearly through all the cards to find the one I'm looking for. I could use the search box, but that only pops up the detail window for the card; it doesn't show me where the card is in context.
Trello is like a task spreadsheet where you can only see a small amount of information at once, it's really hard to find tasks, you can't add custom columns, you can't colour-code things the way you want, you can't add tabs, you can't add formulas to do simple things like addition, you can't see previous versions, and on and on.
So why would you use Trello when you could use a Google Spreadsheet and get things done twice as fast? Does the whole product exist only because people like the cute little animation of picking up the tilty little cards and dragging them to other columns?
I am a 10yr+ Emacs user, this hit too close to home than I would like! I am seeing a lot of momentum in Emacs ecosystem for last couple of years and Spacemacs rocks! So hopefully it's gonna get better :)
Certainly is, though slowly but surely you zero in on the "best configuration" for yourself. Whereas when I was using vscode, onenote, google keep, and a bunch of other shit to manage everything, I had "topped out" at productivity.
I'm trash at vim (I use evil-mode), org mode, and org-agenda, but I'm still lightyears ahead of where I was 2 years ago before I used these tools.
I just started using orgmode to compliment notion. So far it feels to me as Notion is a bit like emacs / orgmode without API, and orgmode is a bit like notion without collaboration.
Notion is great, I used to want to build my knowledge base in it, but figured it's not future-proof enough for my needs.
And that's part of the reason we went on to build Obsidian
(https://obsidian.md/), the local-first knowledge base app. Everything is in plain text Markdown.
I switched from OneNote to Notion a while a go, one major reason being the possibility to easily export notes in Markdown format. I think it's working pretty well, or am I overlooking something?
Sounds like org-mode or vim-wiki would be up your alley. This appears to be quite similar but with a modern interface and probably better prebaked configs.
I've been using Obsidian. It's obviously still a work in progress, but it's pretty good already. The killer feature for me is that I don't need to put my data in someone else's cloud. Hoping for basic outlining features. That would make it a superapp.
I've been using Obsidian since 0.4.x and I absolutely love it. You can see the love and passion from the developers and I really want to see what it transforms into. Thanks for your commitment.
A business partner and I heavily prefer to utilize markdown for note taking (we generally use Typora) but this poses problems when we are trying to colaborate on a document together.
Does Obsidian support real time collaborative editing?
Not yet, currently most of our users bring their own sync (Dropbox etc.), so if you edit the same document in real time that might create conflict copies.
We're working on a sync service with end-to-end encryption (for convenience, completely optional), and we might improve it to support real-time collaboration in the future.
Writing my things in markdown is something I always wanted to do but found sorta difficult to manage in day to day scenarios. Obsidian got me crazy excited, just placed an request for beta access!
This is kinda weird, because I was happily giving them $4/month after running out of space in their trial plan, and now I absolutely have no reason to keep giving them money.
Which, sure, I guess I'll take it. My $4/month isn't going to make or break their business and they probably barely give a shit about getting money for personal usage. Does remind me that my usage of their app doesn't align with their business model, which makes it feel rather... tenuous? Like at any time they might say "actually we're going to only support paid enterprise usage now" or "oh we're shutting down because companies just used Confluence and Airtable instead" (I have yet to sell any employer on using Notion because it's too unstructured for them to grok the benefits of :\).
Github just did the same thing! It’s because the math works like this: They’d need 1,000 people to pay them $4 to match a single enterprise company paying them $4k/mo. So they just need one of those 1,000 people to bring Notion into their company, and they’re ahead. If they get 10, they’re way ahead. (This is slightly simplified, of course)
Don't overlook the importance of the economy. It's tough to get individual customers to pay $4/month for a service like this in a good economy. (They were already giving it away to academics, which will never be a lucrative market.) I wouldn't want to be selling Notion to individuals in an economy like this.
Recently they have been hiring aggressively and expanding their templates for specific use cases. Coming from a cynical HN perspective, this looks like another promising startup falling into the vicious cycle of using VC money to fund hyper growth.
However their founder Ivan Zhao has been outspoken about not taking more VC money than necessary, and creating sustainable growth. So for now I'm approaching this news with cautious optimism.
I share your cynicism on this. Good chance this is a play to drastically boost numbers to court a big company for an exit. Not a bad idea if that keeps the product alive since it seems to be very loved in the world of productivity apps.
Also, I find it interesting that they're working on an API. A lot of organizing products lack integrations and this might open to door to sync items between Office, GSuite, fitness applications and other services for life management.
Knowing their aversion to VC in their history, I had the opposite reaction — this feels like a play to boost raw user count in order to attract an investor.
Are there any open source Notion alternatives? This is the main benefit of open source software, in my mind: no one can "take" it from you because it doesn't belong to "them" in the same way that a product does.
Outline could be an alternative if your main usecase was internal team documentation. I understand that Notion can be used for a lot of other things too…
It is BSL licensed, the only restriction is that you cannot run a hosted version for other organizations to use (aka compete with the only way the project maintains itself).
I'm a happy user of QOwnNotes and Markor with a shared dir with a sync tool of your choice. Indeed, committing my data to a closed (source) silo is what prevents me from using tools like this (Notion does look very neat).
No. There are tools doing similar stuff of some aspects of Notion. But the main benefit of Notion is the interface and collection of ability. And there is nothing like that at the moment. But the question is what you really want. Maybe you are just care for some specific aspect, not the whole tool?
it's product as marketing: make happy individual users, in the target market, and you're likely to tell others, hopefully workmates or others like you. if you can get a workgroup using the product and happy with it, it's worth quite a bit more with their per-user subscription model for groups.
it can work well for productivity apps, slack, for example.
By keeping SSO out of personal use, they can be assured that most businesses will have to pay as thus they can more easily give this part of their service away.
Got about the same feeling, but then I noticed that this free personal plan allows only 5mb of file uploads as opposed to the unlimited uploads in the paid plan, which is one of my use cases – I store quite a lot of files there as a personal software archive, and then I felt relieved.
they might have ruined it for people paying for Notion Personal
>>
What if I had multiple members in my free workspace?
No worries, you don’t have to remove anyone! Nothing is different for you until you hit 1,000 blocks of content. At that point, if you want to add more, you can:
Upgrade to our Team Plan.
Start a new workspace for just yourself and use it for free, indefinitely.
Remove members, and enjoy no content limits on your own.
Note: Make sure members in your workspace have their private pages backed up before you remove them!
Don't feel bad, they just got a major cash infusion from a VC firm. Looks like they figured those $4 a month individual users won't move their need much long term?
I mentioned this before. Notion is great, but the fact that they use fullstory (session recording) for a note taking app is a huge problem for me. We’re talking about potentially sensitive data being available to notion and perhaps fullstory employees for the sake of improving UX. I especially dislike the fact that they don’t disclose session recording upfront. I found out by inspecting their app webpage.
Sure there’s a way to opt out of fullstory in general, but that’s not very reliable.
I should mention that we use fullstory for our saas product and quite happy with it. However, our implementation makes it possible to opt out upfront during registration and or change your session recording settings from within our app. We don’t rely on fullstory or bs workarounds, we simply don’t load fullstory when you opt out.
Hi Yabood, we actually don't use Fullstory anymore due to privacy concerns. We removed it 6-9 months ago from all platforms. If you're still seeing this somewhere please let me know so we can address it.
The one thing that bothers me about Notion (and Slack and other "everything in one place" tools), is the lack of encryption. I might have FAANGophobia, but whenever there is a free tier without a form of end-to-end encryption in place, it feels like a data puddle waiting to become a lake.
That being said, having clear-text data would allow features like an API on publicly shared pages/blocks, to use Notion as a CMS. I have seen some attempts [1] at reverse-engineering their internal API, but an official one on a paid plan could be a nice addition.
this is the only thing that stops me from using Notion, too. just downloaded it and it looks like it would change my life... except i don't own the data.
right now i'm trying out Outline [1] which has an option for self hosting.
I just checked outline out and went to try the hosted version, but looks like they don't let me sign up with my own email. I generate emails for each service I use, and am much too lazy to generate a Slack account just to use it to sign into this. I suppose I could spin up an instance and self-host, but don't want to dedicate 30 mins to just setting this up to test it out.
There is no easy way to implement client side encryption. You will have a private key or long password the you will keep safe. You lose that all your data in gone. Plus it's difficult to securely move that password to a new platform
1Password figured it out, and even wrote a paper about it. So it's a solvable problem. They even figured out a good model for helping recover lost passwords when my family members forget it.
Much more critical (imo) software such as Backblaze offers full encryption, it’s the user choice and responsibility. That’s what privacy is also about.
The idea is not to move the password, or any derived key, but the clear-text data. GDPR and other laws enforce that you give customers the right to access their data (in clear text), if possible in an interoperable form. Notion does so in CSV and Markdown, which is good enough to transfer to another service.
We've been working on Portabella (https://portabella.io) for the last four weeks in an effort to bring end-to-end encryption to everyday tasks. Currently we support basic kanban boards and lists. Like other comments have highlighted there is no reason for data not to be encrypted in this day and age.
Currently everything happens client side, however we believe homomorphic encryption is at a level of sophistication that should support most users and their needs.
Made me puke when Evernote introduced the "Context" feature, a disgusting data grab. It's a much worse option than just searching for whatever I want by myself, with the added anti-feature of losing all privacy to Evernote staff (and whomever hacks/has already hacked them).
My guess is that all these apps are salivating over the data to be able to train their NLP models which they can sell to an acquirer. I can't wait for Obsidian or some other app to reach feature parity (including wide, stable platform support). Would happily pay $$$ per year for it.
Hi there. I'm a co-founder of Emvi [1] and we have an API on our paid plan (free as we are in beta right now) that you can use as a headless CMS. Our blog is an example of it. We have (incomplete) client libraries on GitHub [2].
I'm assuming you are talking about end-to-end encryption, which in case of tools like Slack doesn't really make sense because it's the company that owns and has total control of the data, not you the end user. What happens when they need to hand over records for discovery, for example?
I’m not sure what it is, but I feel like HN seems to pick apart everything that’s posted in a negative light. Honestly I discovered Notion a few years back and used it for a while, but stopped using it when I couldn’t sync it with my teams project management software. Fast forward a few years and my SO and I were at a restaurant sitting next to a guy who’s one of the early engineers in the company, and that sparked my interest again. Since then, I’ve been using Notion to replace Google Docs and Trello, and it’s been fantastic
Yeah this is part of what makes HN what it is. I'm not sure it could be any other way if its a community comprised of people building product for a living, who see the world as a mutable, and whose products tend to mostly be rehashes of prior products (not throwing shade, most products are just new takes on the same couple dozen ideas from 30 years ago).
Most negative comments aren't mean-spirited, but they can verge on nitpicky. The worst type of comments are not those talking about product shortcomings, but are ones that veer way off topic into a commenter's pet point and kind of tank the whole discussion. Similarly, if everyone's just praising a product its not particularly constructive or helpful, except to know the product is going in the right direction. Good critique is super valuable.
I think it's universal that any time there's a comments section on a website with at the very least a sort "air of intellectualism" (independent of whether the users are smart) the comments are generally going to be critical.
This isn't necessarily because people who think they're smart are melancholic. I think it's because praise ultimately sounds the same in the end. Because it sounds the same, it doesn't sound smart, it doesn't get upvoted, you're better off just not posting it.
On the other hand, you can sound smart and original with criticism if you word it right.
Hence why I take the critical comments with a grain of salt and pay attention to the fact that the original HN post is on the front page with 256 points at the time of this writing. A lot of people clearly really like Notion.
Not my experience of HN, it highlights both the positive and negatives. There is a lot of critical feedback, often from people who have built successful products, and it can be really useful for those trying to start/grow their product. For some people, Notion will hit a sweet spot, for others, it won't. I did an evaluation of it, and found it had a bunch of shortcomings for our development team and I sent my feedback to them.
I personally like the UX more, and it’s just a smoother experience for me than trello. Also what’s cool is we’ve divided up the Kanban boards so they’re separated by team, but they merge into a master board so we can see how everyone is doing at a glance. I also use it for tech designs writing documentation so, I need more than trello by default
I think Notion is a superset of Trello and because of that it's not as good at being a task tracker as Trello is, but it does so much more than task tracking that the benefits most likely outweigh any drawbacks.
Note-taking is very similar to blogging. Many people lose so much time while searching for the best app instead of taking notes. If you want to develop a proper note-taking habit, just start writing into somewhere. md files, evernote, notion, etc. after a while, you will know your needs and you will be able to pick one of them easily. I have been using https://www.zoho.com/notebook/ for a while and I am happy with it. Since my needs are extremely simple: bullets, tags, groups, mobile app, macOS apps.
I've tried so many note/todo/productivity apps throughout the years and I always find myself coming back to one simple solution:
- keep your daily todo stuff on a sheet of paper in front of you, transfer the stuff from yesterday onto a fresh sheet before starting to work
- keep project specific tasks close to the project. If the project is physical stick a note onto it, if it is git managed code open a issue or add a todo inline, or add a todo.md in the project folder. Only put a vague line on your daily todo sheet: "work on project x" all the detailed stuff should be in the project
- if you have calls, meetings etc, just add them to your calendar with a reminder, no need to have them on the todo list
Readit News
1. Flexibility of blocks is a cognitive overhead for most folks in my team. They would rather prefer more constrained and opinionated approaches like Trello
2. Notion is currently a jack of all trades and master of none. We have tried to use it as a wiki, project tracker, issue tracker, CRM & spreadsheet. Though it's good to have one tool that can do many things, we quickly reach limits of what is possible automatically and have to spend a lot of time to manually maintain it
3. Convention over configuration creates problems for other team members to follow because conventions are not documented properly.
But I see a lot of potential of it becoming a platform. If they can incentivize 3rd parties to build over their platform and build trust, I think it's gonna be the next big thing. "One platform for all my data" with specialized tools to deal with different kinds of data. I can imagine tools like Tello, Jira, Hubspot, Google spreadsheets & draw.io running over it.
There's just enough flexibility to slow you down, but not enough flexibility to make it down exactly what I need without jumping through a lot of hoops.
My favorite productivity tools blend into the background. I can get down to doing the work without mental overhead of managing the tool. Notion, on the other hand, feels like I'm spending half of my energy fighting with Notion, and only half of my energy doing the work I'm trying to accomplish.
This reads as if you except Notion to give you meaningful work to do, a workflow you can follow? Or do you just don't know how to implement the workflows you envision yourself?
This lead me to my latest startup https://froosthq.com/ which is Notion inspired and aimed solely at software teams.
It's interesting seeing where teams hit the limits of the tool & wish for (or move to) something else though. I wonder if "The Notion Way" will emerge at some point, which would be useful for quickly qualifying yourself in or out.
[0] https://www.notion.so/How-Notion-Uses-Notion-616f41d2f5124f3...
I really like how Marie Poulin's sets up her Notion process, here's a good example of how to make contextual dashboards - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YX2AJD4kx80 but there's a bunch more, just massive productivity boosts from not having to jump between so many different apps/services.
Visual cognitive load is ok as far as the brain can process blocks of information. Such as a table with borders. When you have emojis, colors, effects, etc without clarity of separation, you get something that becomes tiring after a little while to look at.
I called it Emoji-Driven-Development.
Flexibility is always a challenge, but in case of Notion IMHO the bigger challange is getting over it's aweful userexperience and interface. And flexibility is not always a problem. Excel proofs that flexibel solution can succeed with the laymen.
> 1. Flexibility of blocks is a cognitive overhead for most folks in my team. They would rather prefer more constrained and opinionated approaches like Trello
Is this not solved with their Template-Library? Those deliver a guided opinionated experience. Though it's not as constrained and powerful as a specialized app like Trello.
> 2. Notion is currently a jack of all trades and master of none.
It's a canvas-tool. You get a set of brushs and pencils and it's up on you to paint what you need. This has naturally advantage for some and disadvantages for some others.
> 3. Convention over configuration creates problems for other team members to follow because conventions are not documented properly
Is Notion a team-tool? Do they advertise it as such?
> But I see a lot of potential of it becoming a platform. If they can incentivize 3rd parties to build over their platform and build trust, I think it's gonna be the next big thing. "One platform for all my data" with specialized tools to deal with different kinds of data.
There are far better soltions around for this. I doubt this is a sane endgoal for notion.
[1] https://fibery.io
https://fibery.io/anxiety
But... even after looking at all the four separate landing pages I have no idea what exactly fibery could do for me
[1] https://medium.com/fibery/fibery-vs-notion-66019dd91846
I don't think there's any easy answer here. I respect the Notion team a lot for making a tool that is so flexible, but it's also a curse in some key scenarios.
My only beef with Dropbox Paper is their iOS apps are buggy as hell and have been for a few years. I really wish they’d invest more in their native apps.
My only pain point is the damn file system
What I really wanted was just a simple flexible to-do list, something that I missed from Basecamp v1 and was willing to try somewhere else.
But the flexibility made it a nightmare. Because what I wanted was very simple, the friction that I encountered, though probably not huge, felt much larger, because I felt, why can't this be easier? I just want a simple to do list, and I was messing with headings and all of this non-essential stuff that I didn't need.
I'm sure in a business setting it could be different, especially if someone goes through the trouble of setting things up so you have some sort of system of consistency that you work inside of, but as a first time user the flexibility was a bit of hinderance.
Stopped using it and went back to old good Google Sheets, Apple Notes. Very constrained and just the right amount of "flexibility" to make it work for you workflow. No emojis encouragements.
I want to use notion, it's such a nice UI/UX. Problem is, it's just too complicated.
Trello is basic, but gets the job done.
What all these platforms really need is solid APIs and interoperability so we can use the right tool while keeping everything in one place (ideally email or slack).
-> https://qatalog.com
Deleted Comment
If I want to track tasks, I just make a Google Spreadsheet with a row for each task. This scales up easily to a hundred tasks or so, and it's straightforward to filter on a column to focus on particular categories or statuses. In Trello, I can see maybe 30 cards max before my screen space is all used up, and I spend so much time hunting around for cards. If a card has moved, I have to just read linearly through all the cards to find the one I'm looking for. I could use the search box, but that only pops up the detail window for the card; it doesn't show me where the card is in context.
Trello is like a task spreadsheet where you can only see a small amount of information at once, it's really hard to find tasks, you can't add custom columns, you can't colour-code things the way you want, you can't add tabs, you can't add formulas to do simple things like addition, you can't see previous versions, and on and on.
So why would you use Trello when you could use a Google Spreadsheet and get things done twice as fast? Does the whole product exist only because people like the cute little animation of picking up the tilty little cards and dragging them to other columns?
https://help.github.com/en/github/managing-your-work-on-gith...
I'm trash at vim (I use evil-mode), org mode, and org-agenda, but I'm still lightyears ahead of where I was 2 years ago before I used these tools.
And that's part of the reason we went on to build Obsidian (https://obsidian.md/), the local-first knowledge base app. Everything is in plain text Markdown.
Screenshot: https://i.imgur.com/zof4zCj.png
Just released 0.6.0 and here's a video for anyone interested: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KAkJMHg-dGw
The private beta community has built cool stuff already: https://github.com/kmaasrud/awesome-obsidian
In private beta right now, looking to launch soon.
But just keeping folders of Markdown notes is also inflexible, but on the opposite side of the scale.
Obsidian looks like a great balance! I've requested beta access as well.
Edit: Obsidian seems to make it easy to create a Zettelkasten, sort of like https://github.com/alefore/weblog/blob/master/zettelkasten.m... but with automation baked in.
I just placed in a beta request.
A business partner and I heavily prefer to utilize markdown for note taking (we generally use Typora) but this poses problems when we are trying to colaborate on a document together.
Does Obsidian support real time collaborative editing?
Not yet, currently most of our users bring their own sync (Dropbox etc.), so if you edit the same document in real time that might create conflict copies.
We're working on a sync service with end-to-end encryption (for convenience, completely optional), and we might improve it to support real-time collaboration in the future.
Which, sure, I guess I'll take it. My $4/month isn't going to make or break their business and they probably barely give a shit about getting money for personal usage. Does remind me that my usage of their app doesn't align with their business model, which makes it feel rather... tenuous? Like at any time they might say "actually we're going to only support paid enterprise usage now" or "oh we're shutting down because companies just used Confluence and Airtable instead" (I have yet to sell any employer on using Notion because it's too unstructured for them to grok the benefits of :\).
GitHub and Notion are two recently examples, but for every one I see in the market, I can point to at least 10 that failed to take the obvious action.
Recently they have been hiring aggressively and expanding their templates for specific use cases. Coming from a cynical HN perspective, this looks like another promising startup falling into the vicious cycle of using VC money to fund hyper growth.
However their founder Ivan Zhao has been outspoken about not taking more VC money than necessary, and creating sustainable growth. So for now I'm approaching this news with cautious optimism.
Also, I find it interesting that they're working on an API. A lot of organizing products lack integrations and this might open to door to sync items between Office, GSuite, fitness applications and other services for life management.
https://joplinapp.org/
https://www.bookstackapp.com/
It is BSL licensed, the only restriction is that you cannot run a hosted version for other organizations to use (aka compete with the only way the project maintains itself).
https://www.getoutline.com/
https://tiddlywiki.com/
Deleted Comment
it can work well for productivity apps, slack, for example.
Another example of the SSO Tax: https://robchahin.github.io/sso-wall-of-shame/
>> What if I had multiple members in my free workspace? No worries, you don’t have to remove anyone! Nothing is different for you until you hit 1,000 blocks of content. At that point, if you want to add more, you can:
Upgrade to our Team Plan. Start a new workspace for just yourself and use it for free, indefinitely. Remove members, and enjoy no content limits on your own. Note: Make sure members in your workspace have their private pages backed up before you remove them!
Sure there’s a way to opt out of fullstory in general, but that’s not very reliable.
I should mention that we use fullstory for our saas product and quite happy with it. However, our implementation makes it possible to opt out upfront during registration and or change your session recording settings from within our app. We don’t rely on fullstory or bs workarounds, we simply don’t load fullstory when you opt out.
Do employees have access to the content of my notes?
That being said, having clear-text data would allow features like an API on publicly shared pages/blocks, to use Notion as a CMS. I have seen some attempts [1] at reverse-engineering their internal API, but an official one on a paid plan could be a nice addition.
[1] https://github.com/splitbee/notion-api-worker
right now i'm trying out Outline [1] which has an option for self hosting.
[1] https://github.com/outline/outline
Outline also has an RPC-style API for the entire project btw, the documentation needs a little work but it's there: https://getoutline.com/developers
Deleted Comment
[1] https://stripe.com/docs/webhooks#what-are-webhooks
We're considering the self-hosted option too - that's the big draw.
https://1password.com/files/1Password-White-Paper.pdf
Don't work for Agile Bits, but have used 1P for a long time and couldn't live without it.
https://cryptpad.fr
https://github.com/xwiki-labs/cryptpad
Currently everything happens client side, however we believe homomorphic encryption is at a level of sophistication that should support most users and their needs.
My guess is that all these apps are salivating over the data to be able to train their NLP models which they can sell to an acquirer. I can't wait for Obsidian or some other app to reach feature parity (including wide, stable platform support). Would happily pay $$$ per year for it.
[1] https://emvi.com/
[2] https://github.com/emvi
Most negative comments aren't mean-spirited, but they can verge on nitpicky. The worst type of comments are not those talking about product shortcomings, but are ones that veer way off topic into a commenter's pet point and kind of tank the whole discussion. Similarly, if everyone's just praising a product its not particularly constructive or helpful, except to know the product is going in the right direction. Good critique is super valuable.
This isn't necessarily because people who think they're smart are melancholic. I think it's because praise ultimately sounds the same in the end. Because it sounds the same, it doesn't sound smart, it doesn't get upvoted, you're better off just not posting it.
On the other hand, you can sound smart and original with criticism if you word it right.
Hence why I take the critical comments with a grain of salt and pay attention to the fact that the original HN post is on the front page with 256 points at the time of this writing. A lot of people clearly really like Notion.
I'd recommend watching their office hours video for building things from scratch to see how powerful it is for personal use: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x1I3Hic0urY
- keep your daily todo stuff on a sheet of paper in front of you, transfer the stuff from yesterday onto a fresh sheet before starting to work
- keep project specific tasks close to the project. If the project is physical stick a note onto it, if it is git managed code open a issue or add a todo inline, or add a todo.md in the project folder. Only put a vague line on your daily todo sheet: "work on project x" all the detailed stuff should be in the project
- if you have calls, meetings etc, just add them to your calendar with a reminder, no need to have them on the todo list