Slab – Team Wiki and Knowledge Base | Hacker News Reader

Slab – Team Wiki and Knowledge Base

slab.com

14 pointsutopian39 comments

I had the displeasure of using this at a previous client. It's a good example of form over function. It looks decent, but is an absolute nightmare to use:

* No Markdown editing support, only wysiwyg. Certain Markdown control characters will start wysiwyg markup blocks but not stop them, overall making it terrible to use.

* Markdown imports are bad. Valid Markdown that renders fine in StackEdit has trouble when imported into Slab. Ended up using StackEdit to render to HTML and then pasting the HTML.

* No Markdown export, so you can't export the existing text in Markdown so you can edit it in a decent editor instead of the shit wysiwyg.

* No "save" button. It's supposed to save incrementally and I guess it also saves when you exit out of edit mode, but honestly I would not trust it on a flaky connection. Just give me a good old save button when I have real feedback when the document is saved in the form of a page reload.

* It lags. They have managed to make text lag. It's a sad but nevertheless very impressive achievement. I wonder how many NPM packages they have in their dependency graph. The entire product just feels bloated and you start being scared to click anywhere because it'll cause a good 1-second delay during which your CPU will be at 100%.

With these limitations I wouldn't take it for free, let alone 35$/month.

I second this. I've been trying to find some system to organize my teams knowledge base. We tried Slab, Confluence, Notion.

Everyone had so many gripes in the end, we just returned back to using google drive/docs.

What was wrong with Notion? I would've thought that it'd be the best option out right now given its popularity.

No option for hosting it yourself is the biggest reason I haven't been able to use it at clients.

Disappointed to see the usual onslaught of HN cynicism.

"Product doesn't meet my narrow expectations; is bad product."

1. We use Slab. It's a fairly ok product in a crowded space. Needs maturity. Far better than confluence.

2. I have had no experience with the lag that another commenter insists is a product killer, and I write and edit docs all day.

3. The niche this product and others like it solve is to keep your entire company's docs organized and discoverable. Remembering to file things away correctly, share content, and do full text search on google drive is... not a good experience.

4. Editor is pretty solid and responsive. If you know markdown it's a breeze. Literally can't understand why you'd want to edit raw markdown when the WYSIWYG reflects markdown syntax as well as it does.

Your criticism of the criticism is disappointing too. Because you "can't understand why you'd want to edit raw markdown" means you don't understand the audience. I edit in raw markdown because it's faster for me, especially when I need to make changes and it's 100% predictable. I can't understand why you'd want to edit in a WYSIWYG when the end result reflects the stylistic and user experience whims of some development team.

See how that works? Markup is always predictable, keyboard shortcuts have to be learnes for every new system and if their keyboard shortcuts aren't sufficient and I have to touch my mouse, then it's a bad product. (I'm looking at you, Atlassian. Always looking at you.)

No demo?

Can anybody familiar with this vertical comment on tends, leaders and/or opportunities in this vertical (team wiki/knowledge-base)

Per my research, this space is crawling with options:

1. Coda

2. Notion

3. Tettra

4. Wrike

5. Confluence

6. Box Notes

7. Dropbox Paper

8. Slab

9. Basecamp

10. MSFT Teams (in a way)

11. Click Up

12. MSFT SharePoint

13. Marvin

14. Monday.com

15. Many many smaller notes apps

Curious to know why would anyone want to use this kind of service instead of the wiki / discussion / documentation / issue tracking provided by the project management system? I know this service can "integrate" (mostly just links) with other system. I still don't see what the value added of this system can overcome the pain of using two systems.

May be mostly for teams do not use project management?

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