Big fan of notion. Not a fan of the data lock-in or haphazard security. For tools like this, SaaS will almost always beat open source just by virtue of elbow grease and a product direction. So I’m willing to forego the open source alternatives. But I really wish Notion gave me more options for how to host my data. AFAICT they offer no “dedicated storage” or “on premise” plan, even if you want to pay for it.
In fact I heard a rumor that the entirety of Notion runs on a single unsharded database. If true, combined with the fact that this API took so long to ship, I have to assume that there is a crippling amount of tech debt in their stack. Hopefully it’s growing pains and they’re sorting it out, but it doesn’t make me feel confident about the security of my (most sensitive) data.
It’s maybe also a cautionary tale about what happens when you dismiss too many early decisions as “premature optimization.” You ship fast in the beginning but a few years later you’re buried in all the debt you generated.
Granted, it’s a good problem to have. If the choice is between a profitable, popular company buried in tech debt, or the perfect stack with no customers, I’ll take the debt.
We shared a bit more in the past about how most of our user content was stored in a single database instance (see more here: https://www.notion.so/notion/Focus-on-performance-reliabilit...). That is no longer true and we recently re-architected this database to scale horizontally.
Totally understand that you want more options for how to host your data. Unfortunately, we don't have any plans on that front at the moment.
My company had Notion hit us up for an Enterprise contract. When we asked if they offered enhanced security, single tenancy, or even they’d accept some sort of liability if they had a breach … the answer was no, no, and no.
We ultimately decided to not go enterprise since it offers little value over their existing plan and keep sensitive data out of Notion.
I hope Notion gets to a point where they can offer stronger guarantees to their customers. If they pull it off they’ll easily be mission critical software.
Thanks for being upfront about “don’t have any plans for that”, instead of a vague “we’re looking into it” which sounds better but effectively means the same thing.
>Totally understand that you want more options for how to host your data. Unfortunately, we don't have any plans on that front at the moment.
This is unfortunate. I tried Notion a few months back, and almost loved it enough to pay for a subscription. Once I saw that, I refunded the subscription and went back to markdown and git. I love your software, but the lock-in is frustrating.
Even pretty established players like Asana don't offer on prem.
Curious what you'd be willing to pay for this, as it's exclusively an enterprise feature. My guess is an absolute minimum of $50k/year contract value, or 250-350 users at an enterprise per-seat price (just guessing).
Aside from going fully on prem, the idea of strictly dedicated storage is interesting -- like "bring your own S3 bucket" simplicity. I don't see that often outside of $10 desktop apps.
Even if the offer is appealing, this is unlikely to happen. Confluence who used to offer it, has stopped and soon everyone would need to use the cloud version. The thing is that for a collaborative tool like Notion (and others) being Saas, and in the cloud is kind of mandatory. As you need your tool to integrate with other services and thus, can't be static.
The only possibility left is "dedicated storage". That works for static ressources. But the `page` content itself is dynamic and changes often, so you will need more than "bring your own S3" and something like "bring your rds" but that starts to be pretty complicated. Quip though still offer on prem AFAIK.
At the end of the day, the issue with collaborative tools, is that you can't e2e encrypt easily, and almost impossible if you offer full text search. The best solution is to trust your provider for data security. And use maybe some daily backups in your own network.
You're right about Asana -- but it's worth noting that RoamResearch ($100/yr) offers private, offline dbs, and Roam's OSS "vassal" app (ie, clone) AthensResearch is self-hosted and free-as-in-beer.
> Even pretty established players like Asana don't offer on prem.
Sounds like an opportunity ;)
Starting or rearchitecting a project gives you the rare chance to make decisions that your competitors never even had available to them. You can leverage new tech to move faster, and you can learn from their mistakes to avoid their most costly traps.
“Bring your own S3 bucket” actually sounds pretty awesome and I wish more companies would do this. Everybody wants to be a middleman controlling the transaction, but they’re missing a whole class of customers by not offering self-directed storage options.
This is a great example of a decision Notion could make now, that Asana would have a hard time adapting to. As long as they’re rearchitecting, they should keep an eye out for opportunities like that.
As for how much I’d pay – if I’m the only party with access to my raw data, and I can run the software locally even if Notion goes out of business – for a team of 5-10, I would pay $50-75 per user per month.
(I work at Notion, but not on the Infrastructure team)
We completed our sharding migration almost a month ago (https://twitter.com/jitl/status/1383235281457876993?s=21), and are now using >1 primaries. The project took a long time and really made the “changing the engine while the car is doing 200MPH” analogy true for me.
I hope I didn’t come off as too critical. I do love Notion as a product and my org is a paid member. I just wish there were more options around data hosting.
None of these problems are the mark of bad engineers, either. It’s just what happens when you ship fast and grow fast. Like I said, good problem to have :)
I absolutely love Obsidian except for one crucial flaw: no tabs. They've made every editor view a "pane", which means that on a laptop you can effectively only work on one or two files at a time. There's a plugin that adds tabs, but it's pretty awkward and not what you normally think of when you think of tabs. Otherwise, Obsidian is truly incredible.
Obsidian is not a replacement for Notion tho, no databases, a lot of custom configuration, no nice templates, etc... I can't take how slow Notion is, and I'm looking for a self-hosted replacement, but Obsidian is just not there yet, except for the note taking part, that I dont care about.
I'd imagine the HN crowd cares less than executives at large organisations and government departments. There's a requirements for industries and businesses to either own their own data or keep that data onshored in their jurisdictions.
I'm actually working on launching a self-serve on-prem version of Retool over the next few weeks. Would love your feedback on whether the way we're thinking about it resonates with how you feel about on-prem/self-hosted tools. If you're open to it, let's connect jamie at retool.com
Do they still not support things like 2FA? At my previous company, we couldn't get buy-in from our security team due to them not supporting 2FA. The team loved Notion, but that was a deal breaker. Also, if I remember correctly, magic email links could not be disabled. There is no excuse for not implementing 2FA w/ an authenticator app -- it took me a couple days to implement it into my product. They've had people asking for 2FA for literal years (just search Twitter!)
As a consumer, I want my software on-prem. But as a producer, I want to deploy as frequently as possible, so that I could iterate without friction, and I would try to avoid platforms/techs that are not hot upgradable.
As a consumer, I want no data tracking. But as a producer, I want data-driven growth, so that I could understand where I did wrong and how to improve it. And data comes from tracking.
This paradox is not just limited to the software industry: For example as a consumer, I prefer reading texts. But as a producer, I found videos are easier to monetize because of the attractive/addictive nature.
More often than not, the formers which benefit consumers are not justifiable in pure economic senses compared to the latters, thus the reality we are living in nowadays.
It’s possible to make self-hostable software that auto updates. Besides, managed deployment and single tenancy are not mutually exclusive.
In this case I’m not even asking for self-hostable. I mostly want single tenant. Yes, self-hostable or “bring your own storage” would be cool, but provider-managed single-tenancy at least eliminates a whole class of data security bugs. This way, even if an application-layer dumps all the rows in the database to the client, at least they’re only my rows.
I have more respect for and trust in a product that I know is keeping things simple and straightforward vs. fucking around with Big Data consistency problems prematurely.
I’m curious: notion lets you export everything as markdown and CSV. If you had a sync/backup job running, that, say, imported the csv to a Postgres database every night, how would you feel about your concern?
When I initially signed up for Notion, I did so thinking the API was already usable. It was used as a selling point for their premium service even though it wasn't implemented. This was a year and a half ago or so.
I felt pretty burned by it and killed my subscription. Hopefully this turns out well for the people who've been waiting for it, but that experience left a terrible taste in my mouth.
For those like myself ignorant about the company, Notion appears to be a project management tool with integrated wiki and docs support. With at least a claimed strong user focus.
Yup, that’s how they present it, though in reality it’s pretty clunky as a project management tool, and you’d almost always be better off using a purpose-built solution.
Notion makes a decent tool for a personal/organizational wiki but it’s too slow/unresponsive/janky to use for many other purposes IMO.
I’ve been using it for a couple years and I used to hold out hope that the performance could be optimized, but at this point I think it must be some fundamental issue with their tech stack (or some other organizational issue). It just feels bad to use. The pages take forever to load, the search is slow, and the actual page editing feels sluggish.
It’s a shame because otherwise I really like the core ideas of how Notion works. If someone released a tool that was “Notion but fast”, I’d switch in an instant.
I set up Notion as an intranet for my wife's company and it has been enormously useful for posting company documents, policies, handbooks, announcements, etc. Employees are invited as "guests" at no additional charge.
We also use a Notion database with various views for tracking customers, sales pipeline, rewards, and a lot more.
When we bring on a new customer, we quickly create (from a template) a personalized welcome page for them with an embedded copy of their service agreement and a few other things. Notion can generate a public link so we send this right away and it makes a nice impression.
Performance isn't great but it is so useful for us that I don't mind. I do hope they provide an offline version soon as that is my biggest wish right for it right now.
* I'm not affiliated with the company, just a pleased customer.
The opposite is true, its a WYSIWYG wiki which you can abuse for project management. The project management capabilities are similar to Github Project boards which means that it is very basic.
It’s weird that that’s (still) how they market Notion. I use it as sort of a combination of google docs and google sheets — I can write long-form documents and include attachments, link to other pages, etc, and also create databases (and every row is its own page).
You’d have to shoehorn project management into their database paradigm, which definitely seems subpar compared to a purpose-built task/project manager. But the “personal wiki” aspect of it is fantastic.
I didn't quite have the impression you had, but I did sign up for a "early access beta", that mostly resulted in me receiving a bunch of spam from the company telling me how almost ready the api was.
Happy the thing is released finally, it is a big improvement on Google docs.
Isn't that the whole point of Agile MVP development? Sell something that doesn't exist and hope someone buys it? Personally, I don't expect much from it, after working with Airtable's API and hating every second of it.
There's some validity to the criticism, but that's more the intersection of short-cycle methods and American "hustle" culture than anything to do with an MVP approach itself. People with more integrity can take an MVP-centered approach and just be honest with customers about where they are.
Indeed, I think that honesty works better; underpromising and overdelivering is a great way to build trust among your initial customer base. Trust that you need to carry people through the inevitable bumps and anticipations of an early-adopter experience.
I've recently started using Notion and I'm surprised at few things that I find incredibly annoying with it so far. Since it seems there are some Notion staff here I'll take this as a change to give some feedback to hopefully improve the product.
* No read-only mode. I like to have documents default to a read-only mode so I don't accidentally typo random characters, or delete something when try copying. etc.
* No floating table of contents. There is a ToC block but it's at a fixed position, where it's not terribly usable especially for long documents having a giant ToC at the top isn't great. I've tried using columns but it just squishes the rest of the document way too much
* Floating heads. When you have multiple collaborators the avatars zooming up and down the left side of the document is incredibly distracting. I'd love a way to disable this completely. I don't care where in a document other people are reading.
* Database/Table horizontal scrollbar. Almost every database in our documents end up with this giant scrollbar that spans edge to edge, looking like a horizontal rule, breaking up the visual flow of the page significantly. I keep thinking it's some kind of page break.
These are just some of my initial impressions. I do think it's a very visually nice product and has a lot of neat features but I'm pretty surprised by some basic QoL stuff missing and hope to see it further refined.
While we’re making a wish list, the biggest thing for me would be permissions on database tables. It’s very hard to centralise info using tables when you need multiple versions for multiple people (e.g. if I’m tracking job applicants in Notion, I want to be able to store some personal information but not necessarily show that to everyone).
Full Disclosure - I have been lucky enough to have closed BETA access to the Notion API and here are some things I have noticed. BTW I do not work for Notion, im totally indie :P
- The team building the API has been super responsive and respectful, very good collaboration on their Dev slack and I had a great time testing things
- The documentation has been updated with the feedback from the community who had access, it's in a MUCH better status now than when it started
- The API speed has increased, it was really slow, now its a bit faster :)
Looking forward to see how other companies are using the Notion API, whether natively or through other integrations, I've seen a lot of activity from the folks at Integromat and Typeform :) (which are awesome tools btw!)
I've also found them to be pretty responsive (I've messaged them a number of times with bug reports and feature requests). That really contributes to my overall appreciation of the product!
It has the same basic trigger (new item), actions (create/update item), and search (find item) as every other CRM integration. It is missing a trigger for item getting updated - still excited to see how folks are using it though.
I have to give a shoutout to the dev who wrote Nishan, a wrapper around Notion's internal API used by their webapp. I've been using it for a while and it will be a long time before the public API catches up. Getting users to find the api token from cookies has been a pain though, so I'll be looking into migrating asap. https://github.com/Devorein/Nishan
I was a huge Notion fan. However, the long sync times were driving me nuts. I have since moved to inkdrop (https://www.inkdrop.app/) because it's much better for my use case:
* I can write Markdown notes. I've only wanted to write markdown notes.
* The syncing is incredibly fast because it's using an existing technology purpose-built for syncing (CouchDB)
* I can bring my own CouchDB and not have my data locked in
The big attractor to Notion for me is the All-in-on workspace idea. It's a table-database, it's a wiki, it's a kanban board, it's a team calendar, it's a project gallery, it's a blog.
Tables can have wiki notes, which can have tables. The recursive nature works very well for organizing your knowledgebase and having an entire org work together.
The things I hate about notion.
1) pressing / anywhere opens the menu. So annoying.
2) It's live collaboration on code is awful. We end up using codesandbox and then copy-pasting back.
3) It looses and new edits every now and then. Their sync needs work.
4) No way to proper version control documents and have a pull-request/suggestion like model for editing authoritative docs.
The other player in the same market is https://coda.io. They go quite a bit further than notion in terms of formulas and reference tables.
With both Coda and Notion, I feel I seldom have to use google docs.
> It's a table-database, it's a wiki, it's a kanban board, it's a team calendar, it's a project gallery, it's a blog.
So what does it do that something like gitlab or phabricator cannot do ?
And if you are willing to consider different products for different things then you have dokuwiki/xwiki/wikijs/bookstack for wiki and multiple popular project management tools like kanboard/focalboard.
Readit News
In fact I heard a rumor that the entirety of Notion runs on a single unsharded database. If true, combined with the fact that this API took so long to ship, I have to assume that there is a crippling amount of tech debt in their stack. Hopefully it’s growing pains and they’re sorting it out, but it doesn’t make me feel confident about the security of my (most sensitive) data.
It’s maybe also a cautionary tale about what happens when you dismiss too many early decisions as “premature optimization.” You ship fast in the beginning but a few years later you’re buried in all the debt you generated.
Granted, it’s a good problem to have. If the choice is between a profitable, popular company buried in tech debt, or the perfect stack with no customers, I’ll take the debt.
We shared a bit more in the past about how most of our user content was stored in a single database instance (see more here: https://www.notion.so/notion/Focus-on-performance-reliabilit...). That is no longer true and we recently re-architected this database to scale horizontally.
Totally understand that you want more options for how to host your data. Unfortunately, we don't have any plans on that front at the moment.
We ultimately decided to not go enterprise since it offers little value over their existing plan and keep sensitive data out of Notion.
I hope Notion gets to a point where they can offer stronger guarantees to their customers. If they pull it off they’ll easily be mission critical software.
This is unfortunate. I tried Notion a few months back, and almost loved it enough to pay for a subscription. Once I saw that, I refunded the subscription and went back to markdown and git. I love your software, but the lock-in is frustrating.
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Curious what you'd be willing to pay for this, as it's exclusively an enterprise feature. My guess is an absolute minimum of $50k/year contract value, or 250-350 users at an enterprise per-seat price (just guessing).
Aside from going fully on prem, the idea of strictly dedicated storage is interesting -- like "bring your own S3 bucket" simplicity. I don't see that often outside of $10 desktop apps.
The only possibility left is "dedicated storage". That works for static ressources. But the `page` content itself is dynamic and changes often, so you will need more than "bring your own S3" and something like "bring your rds" but that starts to be pretty complicated. Quip though still offer on prem AFAIK.
At the end of the day, the issue with collaborative tools, is that you can't e2e encrypt easily, and almost impossible if you offer full text search. The best solution is to trust your provider for data security. And use maybe some daily backups in your own network.
Are you suggesting privacy and data ownership concerns are only limited to enterprises?
Sounds like an opportunity ;)
Starting or rearchitecting a project gives you the rare chance to make decisions that your competitors never even had available to them. You can leverage new tech to move faster, and you can learn from their mistakes to avoid their most costly traps.
“Bring your own S3 bucket” actually sounds pretty awesome and I wish more companies would do this. Everybody wants to be a middleman controlling the transaction, but they’re missing a whole class of customers by not offering self-directed storage options.
This is a great example of a decision Notion could make now, that Asana would have a hard time adapting to. As long as they’re rearchitecting, they should keep an eye out for opportunities like that.
As for how much I’d pay – if I’m the only party with access to my raw data, and I can run the software locally even if Notion goes out of business – for a team of 5-10, I would pay $50-75 per user per month.
We completed our sharding migration almost a month ago (https://twitter.com/jitl/status/1383235281457876993?s=21), and are now using >1 primaries. The project took a long time and really made the “changing the engine while the car is doing 200MPH” analogy true for me.
I hope I didn’t come off as too critical. I do love Notion as a product and my org is a paid member. I just wish there were more options around data hosting.
None of these problems are the mark of bad engineers, either. It’s just what happens when you ship fast and grow fast. Like I said, good problem to have :)
All of your data is locally stored markdown text files with no lock in.
All of the amazing benefits of linked note taking without the downsides.
[0] https://joplinapp.org
Single reason we didn't adopt notion is lack of ability to self host.
I’d be curious to read more about what their architecture looks like now and how they’re planning to evolve it to fit their priorities.
For example, https://www.authelia.com/ is open-source.
As a consumer, I want my software on-prem. But as a producer, I want to deploy as frequently as possible, so that I could iterate without friction, and I would try to avoid platforms/techs that are not hot upgradable.
As a consumer, I want no data tracking. But as a producer, I want data-driven growth, so that I could understand where I did wrong and how to improve it. And data comes from tracking.
This paradox is not just limited to the software industry: For example as a consumer, I prefer reading texts. But as a producer, I found videos are easier to monetize because of the attractive/addictive nature.
More often than not, the formers which benefit consumers are not justifiable in pure economic senses compared to the latters, thus the reality we are living in nowadays.
Compared to you, they don't care about tracking, don't want the hassle to set-up on-prem and don't mind or prefer videos over text.
In this case I’m not even asking for self-hostable. I mostly want single tenant. Yes, self-hostable or “bring your own storage” would be cool, but provider-managed single-tenancy at least eliminates a whole class of data security bugs. This way, even if an application-layer dumps all the rows in the database to the client, at least they’re only my rows.
https://museapp.com/podcast/26-no-data-moat/
I'm keeping an eye on AnyType
https://AnyType.io
You mean a broken wiki and slow project management tool is better than specialized open source tools which are way better at the same thing
I felt pretty burned by it and killed my subscription. Hopefully this turns out well for the people who've been waiting for it, but that experience left a terrible taste in my mouth.
Notion makes a decent tool for a personal/organizational wiki but it’s too slow/unresponsive/janky to use for many other purposes IMO.
I’ve been using it for a couple years and I used to hold out hope that the performance could be optimized, but at this point I think it must be some fundamental issue with their tech stack (or some other organizational issue). It just feels bad to use. The pages take forever to load, the search is slow, and the actual page editing feels sluggish.
It’s a shame because otherwise I really like the core ideas of how Notion works. If someone released a tool that was “Notion but fast”, I’d switch in an instant.
We also use a Notion database with various views for tracking customers, sales pipeline, rewards, and a lot more.
When we bring on a new customer, we quickly create (from a template) a personalized welcome page for them with an embedded copy of their service agreement and a few other things. Notion can generate a public link so we send this right away and it makes a nice impression.
Performance isn't great but it is so useful for us that I don't mind. I do hope they provide an offline version soon as that is my biggest wish right for it right now.
* I'm not affiliated with the company, just a pleased customer.
You’d have to shoehorn project management into their database paradigm, which definitely seems subpar compared to a purpose-built task/project manager. But the “personal wiki” aspect of it is fantastic.
Happy the thing is released finally, it is a big improvement on Google docs.
That said, Notion is a really good product.
Indeed, I think that honesty works better; underpromising and overdelivering is a great way to build trust among your initial customer base. Trust that you need to carry people through the inevitable bumps and anticipations of an early-adopter experience.
* No read-only mode. I like to have documents default to a read-only mode so I don't accidentally typo random characters, or delete something when try copying. etc.
* No floating table of contents. There is a ToC block but it's at a fixed position, where it's not terribly usable especially for long documents having a giant ToC at the top isn't great. I've tried using columns but it just squishes the rest of the document way too much
* Floating heads. When you have multiple collaborators the avatars zooming up and down the left side of the document is incredibly distracting. I'd love a way to disable this completely. I don't care where in a document other people are reading.
* Database/Table horizontal scrollbar. Almost every database in our documents end up with this giant scrollbar that spans edge to edge, looking like a horizontal rule, breaking up the visual flow of the page significantly. I keep thinking it's some kind of page break.
These are just some of my initial impressions. I do think it's a very visually nice product and has a lot of neat features but I'm pretty surprised by some basic QoL stuff missing and hope to see it further refined.
I built a browser extension which does this plus many more customizations like full width for all pages, scroll to top button etc.
Notion Boost: https://gourav.io/notion-boost
I can't remember which, but either making the page full width or locking the page gets rid of them.
- The team building the API has been super responsive and respectful, very good collaboration on their Dev slack and I had a great time testing things
- The documentation has been updated with the feedback from the community who had access, it's in a MUCH better status now than when it started
- The API speed has increased, it was really slow, now its a bit faster :)
Looking forward to see how other companies are using the Notion API, whether natively or through other integrations, I've seen a lot of activity from the folks at Integromat and Typeform :) (which are awesome tools btw!)
It has the same basic trigger (new item), actions (create/update item), and search (find item) as every other CRM integration. It is missing a trigger for item getting updated - still excited to see how folks are using it though.
* I can write Markdown notes. I've only wanted to write markdown notes.
* The syncing is incredibly fast because it's using an existing technology purpose-built for syncing (CouchDB)
* I can bring my own CouchDB and not have my data locked in
* Has a mobile app that works well
* There is a "vim mode" and that makes me happy.
Tables can have wiki notes, which can have tables. The recursive nature works very well for organizing your knowledgebase and having an entire org work together.
The things I hate about notion.
1) pressing / anywhere opens the menu. So annoying.
2) It's live collaboration on code is awful. We end up using codesandbox and then copy-pasting back.
3) It looses and new edits every now and then. Their sync needs work.
4) No way to proper version control documents and have a pull-request/suggestion like model for editing authoritative docs.
The other player in the same market is https://coda.io. They go quite a bit further than notion in terms of formulas and reference tables.
With both Coda and Notion, I feel I seldom have to use google docs.
So what does it do that something like gitlab or phabricator cannot do ?
And if you are willing to consider different products for different things then you have dokuwiki/xwiki/wikijs/bookstack for wiki and multiple popular project management tools like kanboard/focalboard.
For example, Vercel reverse-engineered the internal API and made a super awesome demo here when introducing "Serverless Pre-Rendering". [1]
There's a video demo and code of how they did it.
[1] https://vercel.com/blog/serverless-pre-rendering