Notion – All-in-one workspace for notes, tasks, wikis, and databases | Hacker News Reader

Notion – All-in-one workspace for notes, tasks, wikis, and databases

notion.so

970 pointstorvald479 comments

Just in case someone might need it: I reverse engineered their API and wrote (an unofficial) client for accessing the data: https://github.com/kjk/notionapi

It's for Go but one could easily port it to any other language. It's just HTTP requests and some light processing of JSON responses.

I use it so that I can have my blog content in Notion. In a daily cron job I download the data from Notion, convert it to HTML and publish on Netlify as a static website. This script is open source: https://github.com/kjk/blog

Basically I use Notion as CMS.

I described my reverse-engineering process in https://blog.kowalczyk.info/article/88aee8f43620471aa9dbcad2...

Yikes, they don't have an official API? Hardly interested in making a closed system my "central source of truth"

Official API is on their roadmap: https://www.notion.so/What-s-New-157765353f2c4705bd45474e5ba...

The data is the "source of truth" and those can be exported, backed up, etc, easily.

Whether there's a programmatic API or not, that's another matter entirely.

That is because few people really care and aware of it.

I used this library for inspiration and extended to write some cli tools for use from vim: https://github.com/tmc/notion/tree/master/cmd

Aw this is perfect! I've been using notion and have always wished they had an api for this exact purpose! Thanks for sharing this!

Are you sure you want to invest into something that requires you to depend on some third party hack to do what you want it to do?

Nice job! How do you keep your login token fresh?

I don't.

When used on publicly visible pages, there's no need for login token.

For private pages, the user would have to provide a new login token when it expired.

It only happened once in several months for me.

I'm hoping that my library will become obsolete when they have an official API.

I talked with them and gave them my wishlist for what capabilities the official API should have.

Used notion for about 6 months, but stopped for two main reasons:

1. It's extremely slow on even a new iPhone - about 6-7 seconds until I can start typing a note. By then I forget what I wanted to write. It's basically a webview of a very heavy web app, so it's not snappy at all.

2. No offline support whatsoever.

In addition it feels like they have abandoned development or are busy being acquired (~bi-weekly updates until about three months ago: https://www.notion.so/What-s-New-157765353f2c4705bd45474e5ba...)

I migrated back to Bear (https://bear.app/) which was a pain - exporting from Notion is also not one of their best features.

> In addition it feels like they have abandoned development or are busy being acquired (~bi-weekly updates until about three months ago: https://www.notion.so/What-s-New-157765353f2c4705bd45474e5ba...)

Notion founders, do you care to comment on this? My company recently started a paid account on Notion and I'd love to know more.

Lillie from Notion here! We're working on a big release, hence the cadence has slowed down some. But we have definitely not abandoned development, nor are we being acquired :)

Thank you, glad to hear it! I use Notion everyday and am a big fan.

The founder (ivanzhao) has made an appearance and only made one comment to so far to thank for some praise.

Hasn't addressed a single question or replied to any concerns/feedback. Not a great sign and makes me reluctant to give it another try.

This lack of interaction and response to put a hold on my excited trial run.

Sorry about that. Heads down on the release at the moment and haven't checked this thread much. Will do better.

Ivan

I also plan to buy a pro plan in the coming months, don't wanna buy a ticket on a sinking ship... A response would be appreciated

Bear is pretty good, but not really comparable.

Bear is "just" a personal Markdown note app. No folders, no support for anything other than text/images, no collaborative editing, no support for multiple workspaces. The tag model is nice, but pretty limited.

Notion's raison d'être is collaborative, structured text: Workspaces for sharing and editing documents, with a rich set of embeddable objects (for example, you can embed Github gists and CodePens). It also has some pretty powerful Airtable-type database support where you can treat pages as records, and then view/sort/filter them in different presentation modes (gallery, board, etc.). Like Airtable, this lets you build mini apps such as task boards inside pages.

Bear's in the same space as iA Writer, Apple's Notes, etc. Notion's closest competitors are probably Google Docs, Dropbox Paper and possibly Quip and Milanote.

There’s also another competitor to those mentioned, called Coda (https://coda.io) The biggest downside they have compared to Notion is that docs are separate from each other. There’s no structured workspace. Dropbox Paper also has this problem.

I didn't know about Bear. Just had a look on their website and the application and user experience looks pretty stunning.

However, I am not quite sure it justifies paying for this service when Apple Notes has got a lot better in the past few years (I also feel confident in the privacy approach of Apple).

Out of curiosity, what features make you use Bear and not Notes? I take a lot of notes, and if something can make my life easier, I would seriously consider making the move.

Main difference to Notes is that Bear uses Markdown as the data format. It has a rare capability of converting webpages to Markdown when you save them as a note using a sharing extension on iOS. The conversion is decent.

But as mentioned above it also lacks important organisation features: no folders, no dated notes, etc.

I use notes for every bit of random stuff, things to quickly remember, et al. I keep Bear for serious writing -- researching for a blog post, documenting for a Design Sprint. I love Bear's export to multiple formats.

So, I scribble on Notes and write on Bear.

I used Bear too but switched to Agenda recently. Check that out - IMO better organisation than Bear but feature parity is there.

Bear uses CloudKit for the backend so should be just as private as Apple Notes.

Lillie from Notion here again - this upcoming release is going to seriously help with speed as well as improve usage offline and on unstable connections. This is one of the reasons we've been working on it for so long!

I've tried using Notion on iOS and it feels so slow and I know it is not native because swiping back should get me back to the current page but it just refreshed the whole page. Are there plans migrating iOS to a more native one?

FYI, Bear does not support markdown table syntax

They recently announced that table support is coming: https://mailchi.mp/shinyfrog/bear-sneak-peek-2019?e=61b84ce0...

There is something about Notion that makes it feel very well-made and coherent. It’s one of the few apps I use with this inherent feeling of quality (off the top of my head Sublime Text/Merge, Beyond Compare, Things fall into this category of intangible greatness). Every interaction is delightful, and the app scales really well from basic note-taking to decently complex databases with grouping, filters, relations, templates and permissions. It comes with really good real-time collaboration.

On the flip side the software a bit slow to start and uses a lot of resources—it’s based on Electron, but I encourage everyone to try it (the demo on their website is cool!).

This is as close to “painting the back of the fence” as it gets.

Notion's founder here. Thank you for the kind words - we are honored :-)

To be honest, nothing we are doing is that new. Most of the ideas came from the 70s-80s (Alan Kay, Doug Engelbart, Ted Nelson...) We are just applying a fresh coat of paint.

Of course, there's still a lot more to be done to fully realize these pioneers' dreams of computing as a medium for everyone – not just programmers like us. If you are interested to learn more or work with us, feel free to message me directly at ivan at makenotion.com, or link below. We are happy to host you for lunch: https://www.notion.so/notion/Join-Us-e7aeb157238a4603a2964b2...

Have a good one! Ivan

Say what you will about Electron apps that use excessive resources and lack native touches, but they are definitely not “as close to painting the back of the fence as it gets.”

That Jobs-ism was specifically about caring about the internals of a product that nobody looks at, but you know are there.

They use Electron, but don't have a build for Linux. Why.

I honestly never use their Electron app, even though I have it installed. One thing about Electron apps is that they also usually work great in the browser :)

Notion is all about manipulating 'content', which is what browsers excel at.a

Were it not in Electron, it would most likely still have a big web widget occupying most of its frame.

I really like Notion and have this same feeling. The app being Electron is a really big bummer for me, though. Performance is terrible on my Android phone. I really want to ditch Evernote but nothing seems to compare still.

I am a paying customer and it has always stand out for me in terms of UX. The only problem I see is that sometimes when I am editing a page I need to use the mouse because the keyboard just does not work in the way I am used to. This is a huge UX pain and I don't understand how didn't they fix it yet.

Can you link to the Merge software you mention? It's a difficult name to google.

The "quality" feeling of sublime app for me is majorly undermined by the constant nagging popups to pay for it. so many other services I happily pay for and somehow sublime has made me not want to pay for their services.

Hmm, I cannot seem to create an account without sharing my Google contacts; which I see no need to do and it's needless friction. I get into a loop of clicking checkbox "I don't want to share my Google contacts", then being rerouted back to login page and requested approval to share my contacts.

Pricing wise, I wish these types of apps didn't have such a steep escalation as soon as I want to share. $4 for individual, but $8/team member, which means wanting to share this with my wife is four times as expensive as just using it myself, with limited to no appreciable improvement.

Same here — I cannot create an account with a password. If you try to go in and do an email signup, they will punish you for it by emailing you every time with a new password, until you suffered enough that you'll relent and give them access to your Google account.

Not a great first impression — especially not after their support tells me that this is for my own security.

Wow. Thanks for the warning. Why the fuck would anyone be so user-hostile?

I use Notion with a non google e-mail and don't mind the password being e-mailed to me. I have to re-auth maybe once a month, tops, and it's one less password to manage.

> wanting to share this with my wife is four times as expensive as just using it myself, with limited to no appreciable improvement.

I would hardly say "no appreciable improvement". IMHO it's appropriate to price products based on the value derived, not the effort to implement each incremental "feature". And the ability to share is the most human feature. We are social creatures. To share and collaborate and be relational is to be human :)

So the price jump feels fair to me. We can get near full-knowledge of the product at a reduced price point, but to be human with the tool, we get hit with the real cost :)

EDIT: I also don't like the actual pricing structure, but that's only because I would rather participate in co-operative systems, and dislike capitalist ones. The above comment is my putting myself in their shoes :)

I absolutely agree with your general principle, as I read it: price is not necessarily determined by your cost (which goes up only incrementally with added users), but by the value (what the customer is willing to pay, which may go up more significantly).

Specifically, however, I am indicating by my post that I'm not willing to pay 4x the price, for privilege of sharing - it does not have that value to me and it's not where my expectations were level-set :). [I currently use ToDoist which makes it easier to start (no privileges/contact sharing required) and add guest-editors/share]

My post is meant to provide feedback: I'm currently not trying their product (and I've explicitly provided why - the seemingly minor request to share my contacts), and I may not become paying customer once I figure out a way to try it (because the jump to my desired level of service is too high). It is up to the developers, if they read it, to gauge how representative I am of the target audience and therefore how relevant my concerns are; I'm assuming somebody like Pateo11 would quickly setup A/B switch - signup with and without asking for contact permissions, and see the impact :)

Are there examples of co-operative apps or pricing? I'm interested in that as well, but don't know of any!

Note: Notion's free plan actually provides unlimited users. But it only allows 1000 "blocks" (a heading, paragraph, file etc. counts as a block), so I imagine two users sharing notes would run out of space fast.

Where do you see it asking for contacts? It didn't ask me when I signed up and when I check my Google Security settings it only says it has access to:

* View your basic profile info (per Google: name, email address, and profile picture)

* View your email address

Hi Weizilla; that's interesting!

At approximately 14:00EST, clicking on "Get Started", then inputting a gmail address, offered ability to login via Google; then, request for contact permission. There was no way to avoid it.

As of right now, 16:22EST, that behaviour is different and I'm no longer seeing the prompt. I've tried different computers & laptops/browsers, to ensure it's not some cached/cookied experience, but it _appears_ the actual request is no longer being sent. Not sure!

There is a way around that. First of all, if you and your wife have two free accounts and share workspace subtrees with each other, you can double the free content limit.

And if you pay for just one personal account, you can still share content with a free account. This is very close to having two people sharing one paid account, feature-wise.

Its really easy to sign up for a Google account for stuff like this, and I have multiple accounts on gmail anyways in case I dont want to share my important personal email.

Thanks Danvayn! :)

Agreed, but -- Ironically, one of the reasons I don't want to share my contacts is that I did use the Google Account I use for commercial tryouts... so there'd be no value in Notion.so having access to the contacts, let alone spamming me with any potential "helpful" tips or contacts or recommendations based on such contacts :P

If you install a native app, doesn't it completely have you by the balls anyhow?

The world is not android ;) Permissions and proxies exist.

Notion is a web app to AFAIK

I'm trying to create an account via desktop web interface, FWIW.

I am uncomfortable to put all personal thoughts, diaries, etc into a non-self-hosting place.

Can they dockerize this and sell that so I can self-host the docker image instead?

for people that is not tech-savvy, what about they buy a docker-container-hosted-by-the-vendor-company but can encrypt the contents in a way that nobody else can peek into the content ever?

It looks like they use FullStory, so employees can probably see everything you're doing. I'd be surprised if they were recording without ever watching the recordings.

(FullStory records what you do in your browser. It records all DOM elements, so all your data is being recorded and sent to a 3rd party.)

You can opt out of Fullstory tracking here > https://www.fullstory.com/optout/

There's a reason nobody really does this: there's just no money in it. Nylas mail is a good example of this: it offered the ability to self-run it and pay them for the license, but nobody really did. I wonder what they would need to charge to make it feasible? $1000 a year? It makes me pretty sad, but it's just such a distraction for a company of Notion's size and stage.

On-prem enterprise software does make money. You still charge money for it either way. A few examples: Github Enterpise, JIRA, etc.

And notion doesn't need to see their users data to charge money for a service. They could engineer it to be E2E encrypted for the group and not have the ability to see their customers data even with a subpoena.

Well, then we should create open-source analog of notion. I actually was itching wondering what could I create in OSS realm. Probably will have a look at this task :)

Bitwarden offers self-hosting as one of their paid perks (Docker image and documentation included), in addition to a free tier. It may not be viable as the only business model, but I appreciate that they cater to the small number of people that will make use of it and I imagine the token of goodwill does something for the product as a whole.

As of last May, you can apparently export all of your data:

https://mobile.twitter.com/notionhq/status/99643620080931635...

Just shipped: export your entire workspace with one-click.

I miss the days when you could buy a piece of software -- like, physically buy a license that allows you to use it in perpetuity on your own terms. Then, if you want to pay for some hosted features, it makes sense to have a subscription. But the default cloud subscription dependency business plan immediately turns me off to any product. I've got too many damn subscriptions, and I can't take on any more.

Couldn't help it.

> For a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem. From Windows or Mac, this FTP account could be accessed through built-in software.

With https://collect-app.com I'm indeed trying to build such a tool that is not requiring any service and giving you back 100% of privacy and data control, right now. But it is in a very early state yet. But I would love to get some feedback on the idea.

I'm developing an ipfs-based personal knowledge manager that works on similar principles.

For Diary/Journal use only: If you are mac/ios user i've created app which uses iCloud as backend, but you can export all entries to markdown.

https://pureformstudio.com/diarly

Think the reason for non-self-hosting is price really. One time purchase is.. well it's one time.

That sounds like a good feature - I think the app is trying to replace current jira etc functionality for now, is that something that Jira and other offer?

That is like so not worth their time and energy

I love the product, but the login workflow is awful. Why innovate on logins? We've solved that problem.

Specifically, the login is a randomly-generated one-time code sent to your email address. Notion says this is more secure than them storing a username+password, but that's a dubious argument. They've also said this is two-factor auth (lolno). A side effect of this is that Notion is unusable on my mobile device since I have no email on it.

I really hope they implement a more traditional login system. Until then, I'm sticking with Evernote. :(

They imply that the login is 2FA-protected because your email or Google account can be 2FA-protected, and they're piggybacking off that...

Having passwords means storing them correctly and still implementing some form of reset -- and if email is a weak point, they would have to 2FA prompt you to reset your password, or not use magic links, or handle such issues out-of-band. They're probably trying to avoid auth/password support by outsourcing this function to Google for the time being.

I agree though, the user experience that is hardest-hit by this is mobile, where iOS now supports much better integration with password managers than was allowed previously...

Thanks for telling me this. I will definitely avoid Notion now. I want a username/password combo at the very least, both different for every site I use, and preferably with TOTP as well. I never want my email to be used for security purposes as it is among the most hackable target out there.

Ugh you reminded me why I never went all-in with Notion. Having to remember what email I signed up with every time I need to log in is super annoying (as it doesn't seem to trigger my browser's autofill dialogue).

Yeah, Medium does this same thing and it makes me hate logging in so I'm rarely in the account I pay for. Especially since Medium makes you log in seemingly every few days.

They also have a OAUTH login with google, which is the one I use.

But on the merits: not storing the password is safer than storing it so it's a valid claim.

And it is a 2fa mechanism to a tee (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-factor_authentication)

> A side effect of this is that Notion is unusable on my mobile device since I have no email on it.

It’s unusable for me as well, but for a similar reason on the computer. When I’m on a computer, the last thing I want is to be forced to login to email for a code since I use web based email (which I don’t keep open all the time). Even if I were to use a desktop client, I wouldn’t have it kept open all the time.

These are “chores” added to the user experience.

Agreed. The login scenario has me highly dubious about going all-in with Notion.

Slack tries to do this too. You have to click a few buttons to get the app to let you type in your username and password.

I'm a big Notion fan. Use it for everything in my life, both work and personal. Here's a screenshot of my Notion homepage: https://twitter.com/benln/status/1034475232445181952

I also made this site for people to share their Notion pages: http://notionpages.com You can use that to get a better sense of use cases for Notion.

I see that your site only includes screenshots of Notion pages. Have you considered asking people to share Markdown exports of their pages as well?

If you like Notion but are looking for something open source, similarly polished and more wiki-focused then this will be up your street - http://getoutline.com

We've been building it for 2 years, happy to answer questions.

Looks great, except I cannot use it because, I don't have a google company account nor a slack account. It seems that self-hosting solution requires those accounts too.

I previously tried to sign up via a Google account but it required a 'company Google account' - I was slightly confused about the reasoning behind this.

Is there a way to sign up without Slack or G+?

I've been looking for something similar for a while now, and I love the fact that it can be self-hosted. Is there any way to easily disable the Google / Slack auth integration in favour of something local, for small self-hosted installs? I'm trying to reduce external dependencies (and specifically dependencies on Google).

Looks very nice!

On the integration side of things I'd wish for GitLab and other chats (don't like slack).

I'm afraid it's not easy to test your app without Slack/G+ Account and would be grateful if the project could "open to the free software world" a little more.

Thank you either way for sharing and keep up the good work!

Looks awesome! Any plans for mobile apps?

Looks great, would be nice to have syntax highlight support for more languages and maybe MathJax support.

For me, Notion replaced Evernote and I haven't looked back. Three features that have been particularly useful for personal productivity are

1) explicit support for Kanban board-ing tasks and similar to-do management

2) collapsible blocks

3) substantially smoother linking to, or embedding, notes within notes

Notion is just as sleek as Evernote for small independent notes, but these two features allow Notion to scale much better for projects that require an inter-related network of notes with substantial breadth and depth.

I hard-swapped to Notion from Evernote about a ~month ago. The Markdown support is excellent, and I really like:

- The "database" type that give a table view over child pages has been great for organizing recipes. I can quickly filter by {protein, core ingredients, cooking time, etc}

- The same again for blog posts

- Free-form writing for talks & other notes

- Shared to-do lists, which I used for organizing an apartment move w/ my partner

- Search works great - across titles, labels and document content - with a quick Ctrl+P.

- The web-app is fantastic. The Electron app on Windows is solid, although sometimes takes a while to sync after being minimized for a while.

Being able to export everything into a reasonable format was a requirement for me, and they've had that for a while. I'm OK with having "some" element of lock-in for the convenience, provided I can get my data out in a structured format. There's _always_ a risk something might be deprecated or shutdown.

Evernote's killer feature for me is the automatic OCR on images, included in the search. Any way to rig that in Notion?

How good is the offline support?

Edit: After testing, seems not too bad. Reconciles non-conflicting edits just fine. But apparently, in the iOS app, search doesn't work in offline mode!

Edit 2: It seems like "attachments" (files like PDFs, and also images) are not stored offline, either. In the iOS app, clicking on a file or image brings up an S3 URL inside an embedded web browser.

How's the search ? evernote's search sucks. Is this significantly better?

Some good alternatives

- Quip (https://quip.com)

- Airtable (https://airtable.com)

- Taskade (https://taskade.com)

- Notable (https://github.com/fabiospampinato/notable)

Those are different products.

Notion is primarily hierarchical note taker/wiki.

The closest product is Quip but Quip is like Google docs - each page is its own thing. It's not hierarchical.

Airtable is a database. Notion has similar functionality, but not as rich and their tables can be just part of the page, like a picture.

Taskade is a task tracker. I use Notion for a similar purpose but it's not the primary functionality of Notion.

- Coda (https://coda.io/)

Nuclino is also a very strong offering in this space.

Here is a deep comparison of Notion, Coda, Airtable and Zenkit

The Next Wave of Work Management Software https://hackernoon.com/the-next-wave-of-work-management-soft...

- Dropbox Paper

Airtable was really bad for me compared to Notion. The rich text support is the primary but not only problem. I can't speak to the others, but Airtable is a really bad alternative.

- cicles (https://circles.app)

- Zenkit (https://zenkit.com)

- Lanes (https://lanes.io)

This isn't self-hosted? I'm interested in a self-hosted solution that uses local markdown files and directories to manage content.

Same, I tinkered around a bit and so far really like the semi-free form nature of how this looks and feels, plus the dirt simple, out of your way/distraction free interface is something that could easily line up with how I scribble down notes in my pocket journal, but am averse to signing up to another account somewhere for my obsessive checklisting and note-taking.

I'd gladly pay for a desktop application of this where I kept all of my notes and todos with local persistence that I could backup, migrate and move (similar to something like Notational Velocity), I like this, but I guess so far OneNote remains my personal champ in this regard-even though I have to tie it to OneDrive across my pc and surface.

Edit:

Although feverishly refreshing the thread and looking at all the praise...maybe I'll give it a more thorough shot for a couple of weeks.

This is one thing I've wanted. A local app that lets me store all my data with markdown syntax, syntax highlighting, in local files and directories, specifically for macOS although a cross platform app would be fine. One that doesn't require an account or the internet at all for it to work. I've wanted this kind of app for many years (and wouldn't be opposed to making it if no existing solution is all that great at it).

I'm pretty happy with Gollum (https://github.com/gollum/gollum/wiki) for this. Your data is just a Git repository containing a hierarchy of files. You run Gollum to fire up a local web server, which gives you a wiki interface to view and edit any Markdown files in the hierarchy. You can use a local Markdown editor if you prefer, as long as you commit your changes. You can choose whether to run Gollum all the time and expose the server to others, or just launch it locally when you want to browse your own repository. And you can use Git to create, push and pull branches.

Gollum also seems to have powerful customisation features like macros and YAML front matter, but I have yet to make use of them. For now, Gollum suits me as a simple, free alternative to Confluence. Notion is obviously a far more powerful product.

https://github.com/fabiospampinato/notable

(disclaimer: I'm building something similar)

Why is it every time something like Notion is mentioned, there is always someone who wants "local, self-hosted, Markdown"? Just build it yourself.

This clearly shows you have no understanding of the product at hand. Notion is so incredibly powerful that Markdown doesn't even scratch the surface here.

But they're trying to run a business, so why ask the question as if it's surprising?

what about a self-hosted gitlab instance? I can see it would fall short on a few elements but it has a great API that can be integrated with.

Check out Fossil-scm.org which supports Markdown, Fossil's variant of Markdown and plain text.

For those just discovering Notion, it's one of the most liberating tools I've ever used, because it offers just enough complexity to configure it however you want, while still remaining simple on the surface. I just love that I can mould it around how my brain works. I wrote this guide that might be useful for anyone else in understanding its power and what you can do with it: https://medium.com/@ow/the-writers-ultimate-guide-to-notion-...

After trying many different things over the years, I wrote this: http://onemodel.org (yes I plan to move to https sometime). You can think of it something like a personal wiki + emacs org-mode, very efficient, keyboard-oriented, using postgres, but with a much larger vision than today's features, including sharing (linking/copying securely) between instances, and computability of the info for things like anki-like features. Self-hosted now but open to hosting for others. The most current code is in github (AGPL). Comments/questions very welcome, preferably via the mailing list; be patient if my answers are slow. The lists are currently low-volume, and the announcements list should always be.

(It can store files, but isn't especially smooth about it yet. For personal notes of all kinds, it is the most efficient, effective, flexible thing I know of. The FAQs link to a discussion comparing it with emacs org-mode and others. It has fulltext search, some finicky but very functional import/export, a nice numbered-outline export to text, and a journal/activity log.)

I have noted to look at Notion, and Trillium, to see how much they overlap and if we can collaborate. I have been quite slow lately though, hoping to get more done sometime relatively soon.

I used Notion for a significant period but ended up switching to Nuclino [1] - which is identical in many respects, but without the various add-ons that are unnecessary if you're working with text/images.

I've found it to be more responsive, and to my tastes, it has a better UI. I'm not a big fan of the emoji/blank file image that is necessary with every Notion entry.

[1] - https://www.nuclino.com/

I love Nuclino too. Their editor uses the wonderful ProseMirror (https://discuss.prosemirror.net/t/nuclino-a-lightweight-real...) by Marijn Haverbeke (https://marijnhaverbeke.nl/) of CodeMirror and Tern fame.

Notion looks great, and I've been hoping to migrate it. There are two big problems.

One is the migration path from Evernote. If you look at all the current notetaking apps, none of them seem to have capitalized on the fact that there are lots of unhappy Evernote users out there who would kill for a smooth, painless migration path. Instead, these apps ask you to export your Evernote notes as HTML, something which Evernote only lets you do for a single notebook at a time. I have lots of individual notebooks, so this would take forever. Plus, you lose folders and images this way. Why not just write a small app that scrapes the whole Evernote database? Last I checked, it's an SQLite database!

The other is the lack of offline search. This isn't a dealbreaker, but it seems pretty suspect for an app like this. Losing cell service completely is one thing, but shouldn't it be "offline indexing first" anyway? Obviously it has all my notes synced at all times. I want the search to be lightning fast even if I'm on a slow connection.

It seems like "attachments" (files like PDFs, and also images) are not stored offline, either. In the iOS app, clicking on a file or image brings up an S3 URL inside an embedded web browser.

The database is evernotes internal structure, and can change. The HTML at least is their official export and somewhat stable. I bet when you search on github you will find some scripts converting the database into html. But for a company it might be to much hassle to maintain such a tool.

I am 100% with you here. The fact that I can't 1-click migrate keeps them from getting my money

Seconded!

I'm happy to see more people are realizing Filemaker is a great product.

Yes unfortunately it is not being more widely used.

Notion is just awesome and I have been using it for 6 months now. It's the only app I have used so far that feels like a text editor and despite covering so many use-cases, excels at each of them and outdoes individual apps made for that specific purpose.

Tools I have replaced with Notion:

- Todos & Planning: Evernote, Workflowy, Text Files.

- Notes: Google Keep, Text Files.

- Work Wiki: MediaWiki.

- Collaboration/Project Management: Confluence, Trello, Asana.

I also use it for pros and cons lists, inspirations and moodboards for design and so on.

One thing that would be quite helpful in Notion is to have some sort of "marketplace" where users can share pre-made templates. I am not sure if they have an API for extensions yet, but that would be awesome.

What about the jittery performance?

It's great to see Notion get continued exposure. I feel it truly is a great step towards productivity online.

I made a list earlier (using Notion) of some next-get productivity platforms that caught my eye if anyone is interested:

https://www.notion.so/Next-gen-Productivity-Platform-Researc...

It includes both these all-in-one type of tools along with nice project management and spreadsheet/db tools like airtable.

You might wanna add codeBeamer from http://www.Intland.com to your list. This one can be self hosted and probably has the largest capabilities of any of the mentioned tools. It’s web based and has a good UI that you can get familiar with in 10 minutes while easy to configure and administrate. Think: Agile team planning + Project Management + Dashboard + Wiki + Documents Management + Requirements Engineering + Workflow Engine + Database

Thanks!

+1 for having a native linux client. I'm not sure what the process would be, but being electron based I can't imagine it being extremely hard. Right now I'm using https://github.com/sysdrum/notion-app to basically wrap a browser instance. But there's a very noticeable performance difference between this hacky solution and my friends native electron client on MacOS. Especially on my heavier pages with lots of photos. Notion has completely changed my life and workflow, but I feel like I'm starting to run up against the limits of what I can do on the operating system I'm on. I even considered reaching out to CodeWeavers the makers of Crossover to see what it would take to make a linux port, but it seems like I actually have to be the owner of the app being ported for that to be an option.

I'm curious, why don't you use a 'normal' browser? I use Notion quite heavily myself, and have never had any performance issues in Firefox (on Linux).

We use it to keep track of all Of our tasks and projects. Switched to it after getting annoyed with Asana and not wanting to use something like Jira. We love how freeform it is and allowed us to create a workflow that fit us.

There are some gripes I have with it, notifications are still hit or miss despite talking to support about it multiple times - they’ll be delayed or missed altogether if you’ve recently opened the iOS app or have the desktop app open on another computer. Search still needs some love. It should probably weigh recently opened pages higher. And I’d love it if the Mac app was native instead of electron based.

Their team is pretty responsive when messaging them so that’s a huge plus.

We use Asana at work. What annoyances did you have with Asana that are solved with Notion?

After downloading the mac app and signing up with google I got an email from google saying

Security Alert: New device signed in to my@email.com

This is a concern. How are they doing the signup that google is not recognising my computer? When signing up as there is no redirect to a google sign in page, for all I know they have just created a fake google sign in page and stolen my credentials.

I'm concerned about the privacy of this service. Do company employees have (or are able to get) access to users' private data? Is there any data mining in use?

They use FullStory, which probably means all employees can see your data if they wanted to. There's no option to remove it, as far as I can tell.

According to things I discovered on their privacy pages here:

https://www.notion.so/willchatham/Terms-and-Privacy-28ffdd08...

They encrypt your data at rest, have their stuff audited by a third party quarterly, and give the employees some amount of security training.

The thing I am curious about is that to log in, you don't have a password. Rather, then send a temporary login code to your email address. Not sure how I feel about that.

In case anyone is interested in a similar open source solution that can be self hosted I can recommend Trilium (https://github.com/zadam/trilium). It was also recently featured on HN. I since host it on my private server and it works like a charm.

I’ve started using notion as a kind of personal wiki a few months ago, and I really like it for that. Breaking the distinction between files and folders is one of the ways it’s way easier for me to navigate/structure than it is in google docs.

My only issue with Notion is that I feel it’s hard to get stuff out of it, especially on mobile. I sometimes type draft documents with it that I really don’t want to share as notion links, and I haven’t figured out how to export them on a phone - I usually have to go to my computer and export the markdown/process it then share...

I think Notion tries to do too much (a database? really?) and because of that it's not _great_ at any. Yes, at the end of it you can end up with pretty looking pages but the process is not fun. For example, you _can_ use Notion as Trello, but it always feels like fitting a square peg in a round hole. (a path which Slite and Quip also took)

Apps like Bear on the other hand, don't try be a smarter paper and end up being great at their limited use case.

Maybe, for enterprise customers it has some value, but as a personal user I didn't find much utility in it.

I am wondering if this is just the thing for our workplace - it is remarkable how spot on their value proposition is. It is not every feature from every service - but they seem to deliver very well on core functionality. And I must say that their landing page is one of the better I have seen for a SaaS.

I posted this in hopes of people posting stories and discussions about their experiences and thoughts about the product - which you very well delivered, thanks.

This was my impression of their landing page as well. One of the few that made me go ‘I want this’ right when reading it.

Pro tip: copied text from Notion is pasted as Markdown in your text editor.

This seems like a mash-up of Air Table and Quip. I'm curious to see how the functionality compares for day-to-day tasks.

And Coda.io

I too am a big Notion fan. However, I have a ton of things I would improve, two of which I kinda solved already: drawing input [0] and inline math [1]. The success of these has led me to create a small slack group to discuss other such hacks, more info at [2].

[0]: https://www.notion.so/evertheylen/Notation-e7a4f861a5ed4d14a... [1]: https://www.notion.so/evertheylen/Notion-Inline-Math-9c5047a... [2]: https://www.notion.so/notionhacks/Notion-Hacks-27b92f71afcd4...

Not gonna lie. That knowledge base with the collapsible menu looks like a very useful feature. Especially with integrated search. Will definitely give it a try. As far as self hosting goes. If there is a feature to export to text, csv or md. One could use the app to edit. Then archive and serve a read only copy locally.

Nothing to say but it's a fantastic product - if the team behind notion is reading this.. keep up the great work!

We're are developing an open source offering in this space: https://budibase.com . Planning to have an MVP in the summer - at which stage we will also make the source public.

We are more focussed around a tool for building SaaS products, fast. However, we are planning to build a Notion-like app using BudiBase, for management of the project & business.

Website is a bit vague on detail right now... a few features:

- Design your own data model: create typed fields, data validation rules, object relationships, indexing & scaling options

- HTTP Api for all CRUD operations, based on your data model

- User Management & User Role definitions

- Generated UI, with the ability to drop in your own UI wherever suits

- Fully pluginable backend, for integrations

- Output is a Single Page Web application, with an HTTP Api & data storage. Web app will be mobile ready (PWA).

Looks awesome. When will it be ready? Is it a LCDP?

Oh, looks really interesting.

Looks interesting!

Having switched from Evernote about 6 months ago, here are some of the biggest positives and negatives to me -

Biggest positive: The variety of formats & integrations. I use “toggles” and tables a ton. This was the main reason I switched and it’s enough of a differentiator to keep me around.

Biggest negative: Notion doesn’t handle a large volume of notes well. There is no easily accessible metadata, no tagging, no way to see a table of notes sorted by create date as far as I can tell.

Other observations:

It’s terrifyingly easy to delete a note and not realize it. Notes show up as a line item in their parent note; a simple press of the delete button and a note is gone with no warning

Sharing is also a little funny. Shared notes show up in a separate workspace and are easy to forget about.

Also, no offline support at all... if you aren’t connected, you can’t do anything on the desktop or iOS app.

This seems like a great tool. What's the security model for this? I get that it's offline first with sync capabilities, but is notion hosting any of this content to facilitate syncing and if so is it encryped etc? Is there an easy way to export all of my content?

On that note, regardless of what the actual answer is here, insight is sorely missing on the brochureware. Conversely, quip.io has an in-depth whitepaper @ https://quip-cdn.com/iR2bxQSxnJmpXi8KbaQ-XQ which is linked to from their global page footer.

Like Notion a lot and we looked at a number of the modern wiki tools (cloud based).

vs Confluence it is much faster. We did end up with Confluence, but that wasn't my first choice.

vs Samepage it just felt a lot more modern. That might be harsh, but we only had a limited time to eval all the options.

vs Quip, well, it's Salesforce. The sales was spammy and you just know how hard the sale will be if you've ever used the core SF products.

Best OS with a combo of Bookstackapp and a ticket system that I forget the name of now. No integration between the two, and no support.

The reason it lost in the end was it was the only one that didn't have draw.io integrated and we do a lot of diagramming. But, as I say, really nice and I would have preferred it to Confluence.

Yeah, a draw.io integration would have been great.

I wish they had an API to integrate with.

They do! It's just in beta.

I use Notion for my personal productivity, and I highly recommend it. It's one of the few personal tools I'm happy to pay for. It many ways it's a personal wiki, and it is incredibly easy to use.

Notion has made it much easier to keep track of and refer back to my old notes. For example, I used to draft emails in an unorganized OneNote notebook. If I needed to find an old draft, I'd have to use search and hope that I remembered the right keywords. With Notion, I make all of my email drafts a subpage of an email page, which makes them much easier to find.

The amount of times note taking apps and products appear on the HN front page is quite amusing. Has anyone ever cracked this nut?

I've been using Joplin for about a year, it works. Could be better, but does the job

I think the problem is that it isn't a single nut to crack - everyone works slightly differently, some like a clean interface, others like all the info laid for them.

With Notes and tasks, it is quite personal, so any issues in the interface are seen as worse, eg we are more likely to accept a slightly shitty interface when paying a bill or logging on to a corporate system than a product we use daily.

Only thing I can complaint about Joplin is slow syncing. Although, it is still good enough for my needs.

Glad to see this here, it's a very well-built product that finds the perfect balance between strict JIRA/PM tools and completely unstructured wikis/text files.

Everything is a "block" and blocks can be nested and attached together to create pages/subpages, tables, kanban boards, calendars, etc. It's a very nice way of working and everything loads fast. The sharing links are nice too.

Only feedback would be fixing some UI issues that can be a little too sensitive, with an errant keypress or misclick changing everything.

I made a Python API wrapper in case annoying would find it useful: https://learningequality.org/r/notion-py-an-unofficial-pytho...

It has full read/write support for Notion data, with a local data store that live-updates async when data changes on Notion, including callbacks. And you can manipulate database entries using classes with columns mapped to slugified attributes.

I've tried Notion (I've tried most PIMs since 2003) but it didn't fit my brain / what I wanted to do with it. Not enough structure yet too constraining.

The closest I've found is Workflowy, but it's just that bit too basic.

I store all web clippings in Evernote and hope to find what I want one day.

I bookmark heavily into an online service, and wish my tag vocabulary was better constrained (but full text search helps).

And finally I mind map on paper; none of the digital ones have quite cut it.

One day there will be a PIM to rule them all. One day.

I'm in the same boat. I have a vision in mind for how a perfect PIM could look like: a mind-map like structure to organize everything. A pintrest-like UI to list all "cards"/"pages".

I'd love to create an ipad app with pencil support to just draw the mind-map and allow unlimited nested depth.

zenkit.com tries to combine a table/kanban/mind-map visualization, but it's not quite what I want.

It seems like we are all on a quest for a Holy Grail.

This appears to be aimed at the small / medium organization. I think individuals should probably just stick with Emacs / Workflowy depending on whether they're already using Emacs or not.

Personally I think individuals need to just accommodate to shifting every now and again to new tools as they become available.

I've used Workflowy since its inception (2010), but recently switched over to Notion. For my use case, it's worked perfectly and I haven't looked back.

Could you try taking a stab at explaining how your mind maps work?

As a product manager I have to say the UI is great. Simple, clean, easy to navigate. If only Enterprise apps could be made to look this good (yes its possible but usually politics get in the way).

On Android also works smoothly even on my low capacity line at home.

Security aspects raised by others is a concern - there is enough secure storage solutions out there it should be high on the roadmap to address that so there is encryption at rest (and at REST :-D ) . Data should only be accesible to team or public. Nobody else, ever.

My 2c.

One more todo and notes app. Why does the world need so many such apps? I always find myself changing from one such app to another, porting all the existing notes. Currently I'm using onenote and am very content with it. But there's always this feeling that something's not quite right. I tried evernote, onenote, and several other notes apps. I don't understand why I try so many note taking apps. I think others too feel the same way. Any ideas why?

I had the same feeling for as long as I can remember: just when I thought I was content with some apps, I find a new one on Product Hunt or Hacker News that promise something that I don’t know I want but after some thought think I need esp. for note taking/organization/productivity combo apps.

Still coping with it with a better clue as to how to deal with it.

The antidote for me is to figure out this (with the help of pen and paper): a list of what are the absolute basic needs I want out of productivity apps. For example, I tried to find the best tools for my personal knowledge management. My criteria (or deal breaker): cross device (iOS and MacOS); easy to export and share in common formats to others; no need for collaboration features; I can throw in any file without worrying that I need to import or convert format. Upon examining the list, I figured out that I want a tool that’s more like a file management system with full text search ability.

A bigger and prior than “basic needs for productivity tools” question that took me some time to figure out last year between October and November is what my workflows are, what kind of communication I need between different apps. For example, I need a central tool to search all my files (preferably full text) in a project, yet I need editing features in specific apps (Photoshop, Mindnode, Numbers).

Last point is to be content. I was on a constant quest for finding the holy grail of all-in-one app to no avail (I experimented with Notion on and off for almost a year but ultimately decided that it’s not for me). And when I look back, my real need disguised as “finding the perfect tool” is actually to master the knowledge that I picked up from life and work, and the best way is really just to routinely index, review and edit my knowledge scattered around in the files (adding and deleting) and write reviews of what I learned whenever possible.

P.S. I grow more skeptical of tools that need internet connection to function (i.e., beyond syncing) because: can’t cope with my need to take down notes fast (therefore I went with Drafts for times like this); files cannot be loaded in places where internet connections are not great (surprisingly a lot of places when you’re on the road a lot); you can’t control which features they add or take down (for their own reasons).

Hello HN, first time long time here.

I use Notion.so personally and professionally and must say its totally changed my game. Notion.so feels like a personal digi Marie Kondo.

What Slack did for chat and GitHub did for source control, Notion does for keeping information organised.

My prediction: In five years time, most of us will be using Notion.

Is a Linux desktop app planned? It's only available on windows / Mac OS.

It seems like they're coming around to the idea: https://twitter.com/NotionHQ/status/1080230116641300481

From my understanding - their windows / Mac OS apps is just a shell to their site (with one exception - offline support).

If they added mind map as a progression, that would be the perfect tool. I really need a hybrid text editor/ list editor / mind map

Agreed, this would be excellent, would use it myself all the time.

Let us know when you find the perfect tool.

Notion is great in features, but it is just so slow and I find the editor hard to work with. Text doesn't flow nicely and it is clumsy to navigate between blocks. Some blocks are editable, some are stuck, etc. It is pretty hard. The speed gets me the most though. Maybe the website is actually better than the electron app, I always use the electron app.

Block navigation is definitely clumsy (maddeningly so), but I haven't had any issues with it being slow. Are you working with a lot of data on a single page?

Notion looks polished, the mobile app on the other hand is clunky, simple tasks like adding a member to a worspace is a hard task and if you don't close the android app completely it wont always update.

Like many others id like a version I could host myself locally, id happy pay for a licence to do so, and no id not expect any support at all. granted i'd expect yearly or monthly licences that had user limits, 10,50,100,enterprise.

Sadly i suspect that the reason there is no own-hosted version, be it paid or free open source is the fact that notion has been built around services like AWS/DO/RS for scalability and was never designed to be able to run in a single container and use a local datastore be it a MongoDB or (Ms/My)SQL(lite) database.

I may consider paying but not knowing where my data is stored, in what country, if it is encrypted or not or truly who has access is always an issue for me, as I'm sure it is for others.

Still a great service well worth checking out.

This whole all-in-one thing has near-zero appeal to me :/

I have an urge to willfully resist entering monopoly scenarios. I prefer the ability to evolve process through a non-linear opportunity space (though I of course want to insulate the majority of others in my communities from being forced to grapple with that full infinite opportunity space :)

I am in the process of moving my digital life to Notion. This includes my huge collection of bookmarks, 40+ browser tabs, dozen or so text files and content of some spreadsheets.

Here's my work in progress: https://imgur.com/a/LKY7RlP

Does anyone use this with their spouse / significant other? Seems like a great tool to have shared docs, lists, todos, etc. I'm thinking things like house and car maintenance, financial planning, shopping lists, and all the other things that I normally keep in a combination of Google Docs and Apple Notes.

I do and it is fantastic! My SO is not a lover of having more apps and especially loves to have todos and lists written down on paper. Curiously, she enjoys keeping those two things on Notion and actually likes organizing things in it. That feels like a big win for me personally. We haven't yet hit the limit on the free accounts but I do echo the other people's thoughts, that for 2 people $16/month doesn't feel worth it.

yes! we did start using it and loved it, until we realized needing to pay $20/month for it -- which was a bit out of our current budget.

We use them in lieu of JIRA. Overall I like the product!

I wish they had ticket numbers (I like to put ticket numbers in TODOs in the code for more context; I think it leads to more TODOs being done). I had to hack them in using timestamps and hashes.

The ability to see tickets assigned to you (and not in closed status) would be useful too

A friend of mine said, Confluence is much better than JIRA.

I started using Trello.

Only partly on topic, but I wish there was a Confluence/Notion-inspired knowledge management software that's embedded in Git, like git-bug: https://github.com/MichaelMure/git-bug

Looks like a sleek and powerful interface, but at end seems to be just another kitchensink for manual input. No scripting or other automation and service-API is still in work.

Im always a bit surprised that programmer invest such an amount of time into recreating the same software again and again. Notes&Task-Manager are all more or less the same, and most of them are not something which a programmer really should use. Those people are handling code and data for other people as natural as a cook his knife. And yet when it comes to their own data they always go for the stale and static, the dumb solution which can is so different from their normal self. Why is that?

How well does this handle large file attachments? One of the problems one of my teams has is that they regularly need to trade and update files that most collaboration tools can't handle (Several hundred megs to 1GB).

Been a paid user for a while. I love all the UI elements, markdown support, cross-platform compatibility etc. I have used Evernote, Simple Note and Boostnote previously.

Some problems however:

Desktop app takes a while to load. I understand it's electron, but so are Slack and VSCode. I am ready to keep it open on Mac. But on pressing Cmd+W, it closes the app, though not quit. Re-opening from that state is still slow. No other electron apps do that.

Offline experience on mobile isn't good. When I am in subway and want to jot down something quickly, it searches for internet for a while before allowing me to do anything

Have they added tags support? Last time I checked there were no tags in Notion.

A great deal of comments here want self-hosted capability, understandably given the HN crowd. But really, Notion is (probably) not in a position to do that, given their code being proprietary from Day 1.

I run PageDash [1], a personal web archive service, and that is also the No. 1 ask. While I can understand it, for any startup to focus on self-hosting from Day 1 is probably a shot in the foot, unless I have an open-source model from Day 1.

Just a cautionary note.

[1] https://www.pagedash.com

Why is anyone using this? From reading the comments:

>Requires Google contacts to be shared to sign up

>Can't export my data

>Extremely slow on mobile (iPhone)

>Updates stalled, seems abandoned

>No Linux electron app

And I'm only half way through the comments.

I've been using Notion for a couple of years now and it has consistently gotten better, faster, more useable, and more exciting.

I cannot recommend this product and the team behind it enough.

I really, really want something like this as a desktop, fully native app, for personal use, and maybe with Groove-like peer to peer sync for small, closed groups.

> Groove-like peer to peer sync

This guy gets it.

Groove is one of my favorite examples of the damage done by Microsoft in the 90's. That product would STILL be useful today, 20 years later. I still wonder: Did Ozzie make the product just to get acquihired?

Is there anything that does this out there? EDIT: Now that I think about it, maybe OneNote does this in the background.

I would love to use a product like Notion, but I cannot leave my vim/Emacs keybindings behind!

Would be cool if they had the ability to import / export structured text.

https://github.com/tmc/notion/tree/master/cmd I wrote some tools to use notion from vim.

See a nice comparison here: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/fabiospampinato/notable/ma...

from https://github.com/fabiospampinato/notable

I love this.

Slightly OT, but does anyone have some links to open source apps / tutorials from creating pages that are fairly free form like this? I'm a backend kind of entity, so the front end is a mystery.

Edit: I'm not asking in an "I'm going to make my own" kind of way. I'm asking in an "I've always been curious how other devs solve problems / create things" kind of way.

Do you mean like the notion service? I'm not a notion user, but from the description here, it sounds a lot like Google wave with less hype and more "product focus"...

Wave is now dead(?) and Free:

http://incubator.apache.org/projects/wave.html

https://github.com/apache/incubator-wave

I've pretty much immediately fallen in love with this service. For me, the killer feature is that the 'share' functionality lets me share a public link to that page and subpages with no personal info included, so it can double as a pastebin/Dropbox-share replacement.

If they just had a way to associate shared pages with a custom domain, this could be a Medium replacement too.

This is really, really awesome and has the crucial features I require out of a notes app, including pasting images from the system clipboard and a deep hierarchy of pages/folders.

Sadly, I just poured hours of time into putting all my stuff from OneNote into a self-hosted instance of BookStack. However, I like the looks of Notion so much, I am probably going to have to move again!

Not sure how this product (if it's new) isn't running afoul on Presonus' trademarks for "Notion".

https://www.presonus.com/products/Notion

Presonus' product is for music but it is a software product, it is trademarked, and it is older than this one AFAICT.

Trademarks only protect against competition in the same category, or where consumer confusion is possible. They may both be "software products" (what isn't, these days?), but these products seem sufficiently removed from each other -- one a music authoring tool, the other a notes and project collaboration tool -- that I don't think trademark protection would apply.

Notion is my favorite app of 2018. It's seriously a game changer for my personal organization and how my team communicates.

Does someone who uses Notion has a working pipeline to automatically import notes from Kindle Highligths?

These "I will organize all your world" apps pop up at a non-trivial rate. Seems like they're mostly designing some database tables and then serving a front-end. Am I missing something? Is there something deeper than database design that I'm missing?

No. But I wouldn't dismiss them on the basis of being trivial to implement. The added value is in the UX.

> Seems like they're mostly designing some database tables and then serving a front-end. Am I missing something?

Isn't it how all SaaS web apps are developed ? I sense from your tone that it shouldn't be taken seriously on the basis of it being trivial to implement.

Some cli tools here: https://github.com/tmc/notion/tree/master/cmd

I use these plus some vim recordings to do bidi synchronization of buffers

We've been using Notion for a year or two now (a lot of people didn't like Confluence) and it's been working pretty well.

I particularly like how they construct URLs for documents; it always keep its ID regardless of title changes, but it also shows the title in the URL.

I've been using Notion for quite some time now. It's pretty neat although I wish it was (a) faster and (b) had a better writing experience. I find Dropbox Paper to offer the best writing experience but Notion is unbelievably flexible, so I use it instead.

There is an small bug that I found when trying to signup. The signup form doesn't allow signing up with .co domains [1].

[1] https://i.imgur.com/NDcd6X1.png

I've reported your issue to Notion.

In the past, they've been quite responsive about bugs (and even feature requests).

Notion feels like SVN. The implementation that is workable and delivers enough value to tolerate, but isn’t quite there.

Somebody please take what they’ve done, fix the annoyances, and turn it into Git.

A single central source of truth is long long overdue

I wish I could import stuff from Evernote into Notion. Just copying and pasting would be amazing. If I could copy and paste checklists (or maybe even just copy a list and turn multiple items into checklist items at once).

It's not a perfect import but they do have it: https://www.notion.so/Importing-Guides-18c37b470e8941789548b...

Does it allow exporting data to human readable form like csv? I am very wary of exposing myself to the risk of losing all this information and history if the company goes under or if I want to change to something else.

https://github.com/tmc/notion/tree/master/cmd Has some tools

Can anyone compare this to Dynalist? I've been experimenting with Dynalist as more of an information / brain dump tracker. A notepad, for people who can't write -_-. Yet, I'm not super happy with Dynalist.

Thoughts?

It depends on what makes you "not super happy", but as someone who uses Dynalist all the time for everything, I must say the only reason I haven't switched to Notion is that their free plan has a hard limit of 1000 "blocks" (vs. unlimited in Dynalist). I actually haven't used it that much, but Dynalist doesn't have many features so it's easy to compare them and come to a conclusion.

From what I've seen, there are only two things I still prefer Dynalist for: Zooming into nodes (minor issue, since in Notion you can quickly turn a node into a page and "zoom into" it) and contextual search (major one, global search is a real pain if you have lots of data - but you can still make up for it by being more organized than I am).

As for everything else, Notion is a clear winner to me.

This is one of those products that I feel I should've come across earlier.

I really like the make and structure of the notion, but lack of encryption beyond tls is a deal breaker to me. Also, their developer has no intention to implement encryption whatsoever, just like the Evernote.

If somebody could develop some products like this that either create or extend open standards so we have the freedom to use any client or service provider we want, I'd throw my money at them so fast.

400 comments and now one mentions the missing web clipper feature, which is a deal breaker for me.

I guess that answers the question why this feature has been 'in development' for close to 2 years now.

Unfortunately due to privacy concerns we have issues using this - I would be very interested if they offered a self-hosted option. Notion looks great and I might try it out for side projects.

The product looks really really nice. Wish it had better accessibility, though - from what I can tell, everything is a div :/

No links, buttons, or anything (that I saw in my 5 min of checking it out).

Oh, I love this. I'm especially fond of how well the keyboard integration works!

I JUST got my cofounder to regularly use Trello, though, so I'm not going to make him switch to this. Not yet.

We use this for our companies sprints and it's been working out pretty well for the last few months. Give's us a LOT of flexibility in the way we want to do things.

I've been working on a similar project more suited to my own tastes. It's free and online and in-progress. jumproot.com.

Sure, it's self-promotion, but highly pertinent.

While your project seems nice, at this point in time there is little overlap with the concepts found in notion.

Did you publish a roadmap, that would allow us to differentiate it from something more like evernote?

I've been using Notion on and off for the past year, and have to say it's exceptionally well made and thought-out. If you haven't yet, give it a try.

Really satisfied (free) user that will likely pay the monthly fee at some point.

It's friction-less, but with some rules/ideas in place to help you.

Well done Notion team, 100% satisfied

Looks clean.

Would love to try some time but can't imagine porting all my notes (and knowledge base) from Evernote that I've accumulated over the years. Too exhaustive.

Lotus Notes was not dead, it just got reinvented as Notion.

Sorry, how is this different from Quip? Looks exactly same?

Eh...this is nice, I really like it, but it's just solving the same problems that some of the things it offers to replace were solving. Call it Lessware.

I use Notion for everything now - work and personal. The blocks are super smart.

I crowdsourced a bunch of workflows and product suggestions on Twitter: https://twitter.com/TZhongg/status/1067234359915163648

all I do is talk about Notion with my friends tbh. if anyone wants free $10 credit, here ya go: https://www.notion.so/?r=02c3100209a54c48b22e19771ba4c916

I expect posting a referral link on Hacker News to be frowned upon.

Gorgeous UI - whiffs of web brutalism, though not so "purposefully ugly" as sometimes that can get. Appears very functional without any cruft.

Notion is synonym of inkling, Matt Macinnis invested, and it has drag and drop composition... I wonder if some people from Inkling are working on this.

Why use anything that's not end to end encrypted this day? Why share you data with a server that has no actual reason to have your data in plain?

What sets this apart from incumbents like Basecamp?

I haven't used either one in some time, but I would reframe the question: what makes you think this is similar to Basecamp?

If you're familiar at all with Basecamp, 10 seconds on the page makes it clear how different it is. If you're not, I guess I don't understand why the question is asked.

Tangent: How fine is it to build a business with a Somalian/International TLD? Could a rug be pulled underneath you?

I’m using iOS default Notes and Things 3. Why should I migrate all my notes and tasks here and pay to sync?

It can’t even cache online

Alright...this looks great.

One question though, if it's electron based why in the world isn't there a Linux Desktop client?

Best app in the game. Since we started using Notion we’ve documented any important procedure just because it’s fun

My only hope for Notion is that the Calendar gets updated so we can view different pages into one calendar view.

So how does Notion make money? By mining your tasks/knowledge base articles? Analytics? Serving ads?

https://www.notion.so/pricing

Basically it's free to start with limited data/upload and then a small ($4) monthly for a personal subscription that is unlimited. Team and Enterprise subscriptions from there.

https://www.notion.so/pricing

Would that not make them money?

They have paid plans: https://www.notion.so/pricing

For any existing users, is there a provision to create alarms/due dates attached to your notes?

Yes! You can type @Remind and pick a date/time for the reminder.

Has anybody compared it with coda.io?

I have.

Don't get me wrong: Coda looks like a fantastic product. It also has features that Notion doesn't have, like built-in support for charts inside the document.

If there was no Notion, I would give it a serious try.

But Notion just fits my use case better.

The biggest difference is that Code is like Google docs on steroids: the UI is structured as a collection of separate documents. Which makes perfect sense in an enterprise scenario.

Notion is hierarchical. It's just an infinitely nested collection of pages.

It makes for a different (and for me vastly superior) user experience.

But ultimately both products have free tiers so you should try them both to see which fits your use cases better.

IMO coda is closer to airtable than it is to notion.

Can Notion do infinitely zoomable lists, a la workflowy? As far as I can tell, it cannot.

Who is so stupid to give up all contact information to anonymous people over website...

This is so well made. I love the concept and the ambition of the idea. Good luck!

Check out Dynalist for a more minimal (and slightly different paradigm) offering

Got a chance to meet the founder a few weeks ago. He's a really cool guy.

What's with the playboy bunnies as the team avatars on your homepage?

Looks nice. Are we getting away from the term "ERP" by the way?

I love notion, been using it to collaborate with my friend on a project.

looks good as an alternative to my github wiki https://github.com/hrnn/wiki/wiki

Overall UI is nice but it takes a lot of time to create a new template.

Why would I put my most important data on someone else's computer?

Great app. We use notion as a team. Happy to see on HN front page.

Can I send emails to notion and it will store them as notes?

I had visions of Google Wave watching their screenshots :)

I like the app but it is too slow to create new items.

What are the advantages over Atlassian Confluence?

Does it support math formulas in LaTeX notation?

Another electron toy saves the day complete with flat buttons and hamburgers - I wonder how reliable and fast it is?

Is it that hard to make something in QT that doesn't eat up a gig of RAM?

So... like Lotus Notes, reinvented/respun?

This looks very close to quip.

Terms and Privacy

TLDR: Notion does not own your data, nor do we sell it to others or use it for advertising. It's your data, period

Looks a lot like OneNote, how this is different?

does this work over in china?

Somalia?

What about privacy? I read through their pages and found nothing. Is it end to end encrypted? I don't want some disgruntled employee to leak my life plans. How is this protected against such event?

Looks nice, but I am uneasy putting this kind of information into an opaque platform. Google, Salesforce, a self-hosted wiki...not going anywhere plus options to export and move.

If it were a desktop app with a local sqlite DB then, yes, definitely (for single user). If I could run a network security and host it on my company intranet, absolutely.

Stopped reading after I saw emojis splattered EVERYWHERE in the UI.

Only 1000 blocks for free

1000 blocks == 1/3 of Moby Dick?

that sounds like a terrible deal compared to evernote and all the other apps this promises to replace

> free

> terrible deal

God forbid that anyone ever charge for their software.

$4 per month removes that limitation.

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