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Comment by ohadron | Hacker News Reader

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.

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> 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.

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

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

Our team of 25 use Notion as a replacement for Asana AND google docs AND sometimes excel (for tables). We LOVE it. Thanks so much!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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...

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