Notion for everyone
notion.so
notion.so
1. Flexibility of blocks is a cognitive overhead for most folks in my team. They would rather prefer more constrained and opinionated approaches like Trello
2. Notion is currently a jack of all trades and master of none. We have tried to use it as a wiki, project tracker, issue tracker, CRM & spreadsheet. Though it's good to have one tool that can do many things, we quickly reach limits of what is possible automatically and have to spend a lot of time to manually maintain it
3. Convention over configuration creates problems for other team members to follow because conventions are not documented properly.
But I see a lot of potential of it becoming a platform. If they can incentivize 3rd parties to build over their platform and build trust, I think it's gonna be the next big thing. "One platform for all my data" with specialized tools to deal with different kinds of data. I can imagine tools like Tello, Jira, Hubspot, Google spreadsheets & draw.io running over it.
Emacs has a number of collaborative editing solutions: https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/CollaborativeEditing
The nice thing about org-mode is that it automatically gets all the cool stuff that emacs has. (Although, I have never tried any of the solutions listed in that wiki page and I suspect even the "working" ones have issues).
I'm trash at vim (I use evil-mode), org mode, and org-agenda, but I'm still lightyears ahead of where I was 2 years ago before I used these tools.
Did you topped out the tool or your personal ability?
> but I'm still lightyears ahead of where I was 2 years ago before I used these tools.
But is this because of the tools, the gain of new experiences or the 2 years difference?
And how do you know whether you are really moved forward, and not just run in circles appearing busy without being more productive? Do you have some objective metric for this?
Both, I'd say.
> Do you have some objective metric for this?
Well my happiness, for one. My sense of accomplishment. How much more I can fit in a day. But no, I don't KPI myself.
There's just enough flexibility to slow you down, but not enough flexibility to make it down exactly what I need without jumping through a lot of hoops.
My favorite productivity tools blend into the background. I can get down to doing the work without mental overhead of managing the tool. Notion, on the other hand, feels like I'm spending half of my energy fighting with Notion, and only half of my energy doing the work I'm trying to accomplish.
This reads as if you except Notion to give you meaningful work to do, a workflow you can follow? Or do you just don't know how to implement the workflows you envision yourself?
1. GP isn't doing this. You misunderstood. 2. Even if they were(they weren't), how would this be something exclusive to HN?
https://help.github.com/en/github/managing-your-work-on-gith...
Pro:
- Integrated with GitHub issues
Con:
- Can not move card to other board
- No import/export
- No themes
- No change background image
- Only basic automation of moving cards to Done list etc
Trello
Pro:
- Can move card/list to other boards
- Export to JSON
- GitHub Power-Up for GitHub integration
- Butler for automating, in English
- Themes
- Change background image
- API
Con:
- Only SaaS, can not self-host, not Open Source
- No Swimlanes
- Export to CSV needs paid account
- No Import from JSON/CSV on free version web UI
Wekan https://wekan.github.io
Pro:
- Open Source, can self-host on x64, RasPi3/4 etc
- Import from Trello JSON cards/lists/checlists/attachments/labels/votes
- Import CSV, currently importing custom fields in progress of being added
- Import from Wekan JSON including attachments
- Export CSV, currently exporting custom fields in progress of being added
- Export Wekan JSON including attachments
- IFTTT Rules wizard has translations, but less rules than similar Trello Butler
- Swimlanes
- Themes
- Gogs integration https://github.com/wekan/wekan-gogs
- API, Outgoing Webhooks per board, Global Webhooks at admin panel of (nearly) all board actions
Con:
- Not integrated with GitHub yet
- No move list to other board yet
- No change background image yet
If I want to track tasks, I just make a Google Spreadsheet with a row for each task. This scales up easily to a hundred tasks or so, and it's straightforward to filter on a column to focus on particular categories or statuses. In Trello, I can see maybe 30 cards max before my screen space is all used up, and I spend so much time hunting around for cards. If a card has moved, I have to just read linearly through all the cards to find the one I'm looking for. I could use the search box, but that only pops up the detail window for the card; it doesn't show me where the card is in context.
Trello is like a task spreadsheet where you can only see a small amount of information at once, it's really hard to find tasks, you can't add custom columns, you can't colour-code things the way you want, you can't add tabs, you can't add formulas to do simple things like addition, you can't see previous versions, and on and on.
So why would you use Trello when you could use a Google Spreadsheet and get things done twice as fast? Does the whole product exist only because people like the cute little animation of picking up the tilty little cards and dragging them to other columns?
I've often used it with clients to let them know which high-level features are in progress, which are done, etc. It has also worked really well for collaborative trip planning. Both of these workflows benefit from cards with cover images too.
It's not a replacement for a company-wide knowledge base or an issue tracker for hundreds of tickets.
Why Trello over Sheets?
I use Trello as basically a really extensible digital kanban board.
It also makes easier to associate tasks with each other add extra context (for instance if I'm keeping track of some long form context associated with a task where would you put that in sheets? A note? Can you search those? Once it gets really long a Google doc? I guess).
Also can add custom fields. I used this to allow me to add weights to cards so they automatically rearrange in priority order.
I even have boards that serve as a personal knowledge base.
I feel like Trello gives you really great free reign to discover a process for things and have it evolve over time.
Could you accomplish that with sheets? Probably but not as elegantly and definitely not with a UI
Just because you don’t understand why people use Trello does not mean everyone’s a frivolous idiot.
What do you guys do for a living? Not a joke question.
It's sleek, powerful, constrained and optimized for it's single purpose, while still remain flexibel enough to give space. Also scales up nice for multiple users, from 2+, teams, 2+ departments and even whole companies or even more. And it also works on most platforms effortless.
> If I want to track tasks, I just make a Google Spreadsheet with a row for each task.
That reads horrible. How do you manage richtext with Spreadsheet? Links? Pictures? How do you collaborate with others? How does this get automated and integrate with other systems? How do you get a sane overview of the state of your tasks and projects? Sure, more or less all possible, but not on the level of quality you get from a specialized and over a long time optimized solution. And you need to invest the time to build this all first.
> So why would you use Trello when you could use a Google Spreadsheet and get things done twice as fast?
More like ten times slower.
How do you manage hundreds of cards? Dragging each card one at a time takes forever. If you want to make a change to a bunch of cards, do you open each card, edit it, close it, open the next card, etc. -- doesn't that take ages? Isn't it frustrating not being able to just drag 20 rows of a spreadsheet at once, or paste/format 20 cells at once?
> How do you get a sane overview of the state of your tasks and projects?
How do you get an overview when you can't see anything? In Trello I feel like I'm blind -- all the cards are scrolling off the bottom of the screen and the columns are off to the right. Instead of a single line of text maybe 20 pixels high, every card is a stack of labels, dates, a few lines of text, little icons and profile avatars. The minimal card is 100 or more pixels high, which means that only about 5 to 8 cards will fit vertically with all the other detritus packed into the UI.
How about an objective metric: in a given column of your Trello board, what fraction of the column can you see at once? Like what percentage of the vertical scrollbar track is the draggable part? For me it's about 5 to 10%.
This lead me to my latest startup https://froosthq.com/ which is Notion inspired and aimed solely at software teams.
I don't think there's any easy answer here. I respect the Notion team a lot for making a tool that is so flexible, but it's also a curse in some key scenarios.
Visual cognitive load is ok as far as the brain can process blocks of information. Such as a table with borders. When you have emojis, colors, effects, etc without clarity of separation, you get something that becomes tiring after a little while to look at.
I called it Emoji-Driven-Development.
Please link me the github issue so I can make use of a bottle of kerosene I've got left from 1940's gas lamp.
I really like how Marie Poulin's sets up her Notion process, here's a good example of how to make contextual dashboards - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YX2AJD4kx80 but there's a bunch more, just massive productivity boosts from not having to jump between so many different apps/services.
But... even after looking at all the four separate landing pages I have no idea what exactly fibery could do for me
I want to use notion, it's such a nice UI/UX. Problem is, it's just too complicated.
Trello is basic, but gets the job done.
What all these platforms really need is solid APIs and interoperability so we can use the right tool while keeping everything in one place (ideally email or slack).
My only beef with Dropbox Paper is their iOS apps are buggy as hell and have been for a few years. I really wish they’d invest more in their native apps.
My only pain point is the damn file system
That, and the fact that new files are world-readable by default. (With unguessable URLs, but still...)
It's interesting seeing where teams hit the limits of the tool & wish for (or move to) something else though. I wonder if "The Notion Way" will emerge at some point, which would be useful for quickly qualifying yourself in or out.
[0] https://www.notion.so/How-Notion-Uses-Notion-616f41d2f5124f3...
Flexibility is always a challenge, but in case of Notion IMHO the bigger challange is getting over it's aweful userexperience and interface. And flexibility is not always a problem. Excel proofs that flexibel solution can succeed with the laymen.
> 1. Flexibility of blocks is a cognitive overhead for most folks in my team. They would rather prefer more constrained and opinionated approaches like Trello
Is this not solved with their Template-Library? Those deliver a guided opinionated experience. Though it's not as constrained and powerful as a specialized app like Trello.
> 2. Notion is currently a jack of all trades and master of none.
It's a canvas-tool. You get a set of brushs and pencils and it's up on you to paint what you need. This has naturally advantage for some and disadvantages for some others.
> 3. Convention over configuration creates problems for other team members to follow because conventions are not documented properly
Is Notion a team-tool? Do they advertise it as such?
> But I see a lot of potential of it becoming a platform. If they can incentivize 3rd parties to build over their platform and build trust, I think it's gonna be the next big thing. "One platform for all my data" with specialized tools to deal with different kinds of data.
There are far better soltions around for this. I doubt this is a sane endgoal for notion.
What I really wanted was just a simple flexible to-do list, something that I missed from Basecamp v1 and was willing to try somewhere else.
But the flexibility made it a nightmare. Because what I wanted was very simple, the friction that I encountered, though probably not huge, felt much larger, because I felt, why can't this be easier? I just want a simple to do list, and I was messing with headings and all of this non-essential stuff that I didn't need.
I'm sure in a business setting it could be different, especially if someone goes through the trouble of setting things up so you have some sort of system of consistency that you work inside of, but as a first time user the flexibility was a bit of hinderance.
Stopped using it and went back to old good Google Sheets, Apple Notes. Very constrained and just the right amount of "flexibility" to make it work for you workflow. No emojis encouragements.
And that's part of the reason we went on to build Obsidian (https://obsidian.md/), the local-first knowledge base app. Everything is in plain text Markdown.
Screenshot: https://i.imgur.com/zof4zCj.png
Just released 0.6.0 and here's a video for anyone interested: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KAkJMHg-dGw
The private beta community has built cool stuff already: https://github.com/kmaasrud/awesome-obsidian
In private beta right now, looking to launch soon.
I just placed in a beta request.
A business partner and I heavily prefer to utilize markdown for note taking (we generally use Typora) but this poses problems when we are trying to colaborate on a document together.
Does Obsidian support real time collaborative editing?
Not yet, currently most of our users bring their own sync (Dropbox etc.), so if you edit the same document in real time that might create conflict copies.
We're working on a sync service with end-to-end encryption (for convenience, completely optional), and we might improve it to support real-time collaboration in the future.
Right now I think the closet thing is to use set up an encrypted folder with a third party app to use with Obsidian.
But just keeping folders of Markdown notes is also inflexible, but on the opposite side of the scale.
Obsidian looks like a great balance! I've requested beta access as well.
Edit: Obsidian seems to make it easy to create a Zettelkasten, sort of like https://github.com/alefore/weblog/blob/master/zettelkasten.m... but with automation baked in.
Which, sure, I guess I'll take it. My $4/month isn't going to make or break their business and they probably barely give a shit about getting money for personal usage. Does remind me that my usage of their app doesn't align with their business model, which makes it feel rather... tenuous? Like at any time they might say "actually we're going to only support paid enterprise usage now" or "oh we're shutting down because companies just used Confluence and Airtable instead" (I have yet to sell any employer on using Notion because it's too unstructured for them to grok the benefits of :\).
it can work well for productivity apps, slack, for example.
Recently they have been hiring aggressively and expanding their templates for specific use cases. Coming from a cynical HN perspective, this looks like another promising startup falling into the vicious cycle of using VC money to fund hyper growth.
However their founder Ivan Zhao has been outspoken about not taking more VC money than necessary, and creating sustainable growth. So for now I'm approaching this news with cautious optimism.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/01/technology/notion-startup...
Also, I find it interesting that they're working on an API. A lot of organizing products lack integrations and this might open to door to sync items between Office, GSuite, fitness applications and other services for life management.
GitHub and Notion are two recently examples, but for every one I see in the market, I can point to at least 10 that failed to take the obvious action.
BookStack doesn't have any client apps — it's basically a PHP app like WordPress that you can self-host, but the collaboration feature set is pretty good. It's a wiki that feels a bit like Notion.
It is BSL licensed, the only restriction is that you cannot run a hosted version for other organizations to use (aka compete with the only way the project maintains itself).
>> What if I had multiple members in my free workspace? No worries, you don’t have to remove anyone! Nothing is different for you until you hit 1,000 blocks of content. At that point, if you want to add more, you can:
Upgrade to our Team Plan. Start a new workspace for just yourself and use it for free, indefinitely. Remove members, and enjoy no content limits on your own. Note: Make sure members in your workspace have their private pages backed up before you remove them!
Another example of the SSO Tax: https://robchahin.github.io/sso-wall-of-shame/
Sure there’s a way to opt out of fullstory in general, but that’s not very reliable.
I should mention that we use fullstory for our saas product and quite happy with it. However, our implementation makes it possible to opt out upfront during registration and or change your session recording settings from within our app. We don’t rely on fullstory or bs workarounds, we simply don’t load fullstory when you opt out.
Do employees have access to the content of my notes?
We are working on updating our T&C and Privacy Policy to make this more clear, but it is rigorously practiced internally already.
We do not yet have end-to-end encryption, or other encryption functionality that would make it technically impossible to access your data. We would love to do this at some point but it will be difficult because our permission model is quite complex!
I would definitely pay for an E2E encrypted Notion.
Do you have technical controls in place to prevent this access, or is it more of a policy?
That being said, having clear-text data would allow features like an API on publicly shared pages/blocks, to use Notion as a CMS. I have seen some attempts [1] at reverse-engineering their internal API, but an official one on a paid plan could be a nice addition.
I certainly agree that that's the point, but such a system needs some potential usability affordances. For instance, a key stored in the browser rather than a password the user has to remember, and ideally a key synced between multiple devices controlled by the user so that the loss or failure of one device does not mean loss of the account.
For example, imagine having the browser generate an asymmetric key for the user, and making sure browsers store such keys (encrypted) in Firefox Sync or equivalent, so that the keys are safe even if the user moves to a new device or an existing device fails or gets lost.
https://francoisbest.com/posts/2020/password-reset-for-e2ee-...
https://1password.com/files/1Password-White-Paper.pdf
Don't work for Agile Bits, but have used 1P for a long time and couldn't live without it.
right now i'm trying out Outline [1] which has an option for self hosting.
Outline also has an RPC-style API for the entire project btw, the documentation needs a little work but it's there: https://getoutline.com/developers
We're considering the self-hosted option too - that's the big draw.
* unlike Notion, it's one workspace per instance. makes sense, but worth noting as using workspaces as for organisational purposes won't work so well here.
* for personal instances, Slack doesn't make all that much sense. i see a PR for LDAP support on GitHub, so i will play around with that
* supports embeds just like Notion - paste the link and it just works. supports codepen, figma, gsuite, youtube and others. this was the feature that made me take notice of notion, so it's good to see it here.
* even better, the embed API seems pretty easily extensible, so the sky's the limit here. i can't wait to make some sweet dashboards based on entirely self-hosted data!
* no mobile app is a bit of a bummer, but the PWA experience works pretty well. considering i'll be authoring predominantly on desktop and only reading on iPhone, this isn't so much of a big deal for my use case
* no auto-save :(
* you can share a read-only, fully public link of any page you want. pretty damn cool.
all in all i'm pretty impressed. it seems pretty robust! i mean, it's definitely not as full-fat as Notion, but perhaps that's a good thing - and OSS means it's easily extensible for whatever you need to use it for. who knows which way my opinion will change after some more extensive use, but this definitely shows promise.
Currently everything happens client side, however we believe homomorphic encryption is at a level of sophistication that should support most users and their needs.
My guess is that all these apps are salivating over the data to be able to train their NLP models which they can sell to an acquirer. I can't wait for Obsidian or some other app to reach feature parity (including wide, stable platform support). Would happily pay $$$ per year for it.
This isn't necessarily because people who think they're smart are melancholic. I think it's because praise ultimately sounds the same in the end. Because it sounds the same, it doesn't sound smart, it doesn't get upvoted, you're better off just not posting it.
On the other hand, you can sound smart and original with criticism if you word it right.
Hence why I take the critical comments with a grain of salt and pay attention to the fact that the original HN post is on the front page with 256 points at the time of this writing. A lot of people clearly really like Notion.
I'd recommend watching their office hours video for building things from scratch to see how powerful it is for personal use: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x1I3Hic0urY
Most negative comments aren't mean-spirited, but they can verge on nitpicky. The worst type of comments are not those talking about product shortcomings, but are ones that veer way off topic into a commenter's pet point and kind of tank the whole discussion. Similarly, if everyone's just praising a product its not particularly constructive or helpful, except to know the product is going in the right direction. Good critique is super valuable.
- keep your daily todo stuff on a sheet of paper in front of you, transfer the stuff from yesterday onto a fresh sheet before starting to work
- keep project specific tasks close to the project. If the project is physical stick a note onto it, if it is git managed code open a issue or add a todo inline, or add a todo.md in the project folder. Only put a vague line on your daily todo sheet: "work on project x" all the detailed stuff should be in the project
- if you have calls, meetings etc, just add them to your calendar with a reminder, no need to have them on the todo list
all workspaces now appear as "Team plan trial" but still the same limitations as before which is fine with me. all the workspaces are named with our initials at the beginning to make sure we don't get confused with personal ones...
ie : "AB - Home | AB - Finances | AB - Life" etc.
More recently, we used Notion - where 'we' = a group of professional volunteers; professional in that everyone had skills to contribute and volunteer in that no one is being paid for those contributions - to create a Citizen-to-Citizen long term support platform for those impacted adversely by the COVID19 epidemic. In India in case you're wondering.
The challenges are many:
1. Make it clear that we see ourselves not as a charity but as a citizen to citizen support network - today it could be that person, but tomorrow it could be you. We have to design around the dignity of the recipient and the donor.
2. We need to identify potential beneficiaries whose needs are verifiable. Which means involving organizations that work with migrant laborers at scale (to take a key demographic) and can verify and on-board those potential beneficiaries.
3. We need to pull together the back-end and front-end technology to make donations without intermediaries, i.e., there's no middleman receiving and storing the money - it's a direct transfer from one individuals account to another individual's account. No administrative fees and with any luck we could even see if the credit card fees can be waived.
4. Compelling and easy to grasp design that inspires trust in potential donors and even more importantly, builds solidarity between the donor and the recipient. We are all in this together, aren't we?
5. A communications strategy that brings in donors and creates a democratic narrative around donations.
Each one of these needs several individuals and sometimes several organizations to collaborate and agree upon a course of action. Notion helped us do that layer by layer, with the top level principles leading naturally to more technical decisions and an easy way to share content with non-technical but nevertheless insightful leaders in organizations that are providing essential services.
We first tried doing it with a combination of Google docs, Github repositories and other pieces of chewing gum and string, but once we shifted to Notion we never looked back. So much so that the next project this group is attempting is Notion native.
Thanks.
edit: apparently there's also a free upgrade to Personal Pro for EDU users, I wonder if that's been around for a while.
Just type `/math` in a Notion document to bring it up.
Disclaimer: I built it.
Of course, on the one hand we do want you to opt in to tracking. This is a marketing site, after all. If you're actually interested in the product, tracking helps us understand who is interested and why, which in turn allows us to improve the product and reach more potential users. If you're not interested in the product, you don't need to click yes and there is no problem – because presumably you won't be spending very much time on the landing page for a product you're not interested in.
I think a landing page like this one is slightly different from, say, a big cookie banner on a news website, as the intent is not really for you to be spending a lot of time reading content on this site.
> Dark Patterns are tricks used in websites and apps that make you do things that you didn't mean to, like buying or signing up for something.
And here is the one used by the verge [0]:
> A dark pattern is a user interface carefully crafted to trick users into doing things they might not otherwise do, such as buying insurance with their purchase or signing up for recurring bills
Here there's no trickery and no chance that a user would unintentionally agree to cookies when they didn't mean to. It's just a little annoying thing that bugs you until you do what they want. It's not unethical, but if you don't like it you shouldn't use their site.
[0]: https://www.theverge.com/2013/8/29/4640308/dark-patterns-ins...
I'm happy to include multiple forms of coercion; the pattern here is the ratchet: https://jacquesmattheij.com/dark-patterns-the-ratchet/
> It's just a little annoying thing that bugs you until you do what they want.
That's a nice summary of a class of dark patterns, yes.
> It's not unethical, but if you don't like it you shouldn't use their site.
It absolutely is unethical, and yes as I said above I will consider this a good reason to avoid the app.
For me, this is only a dark pattern if the cookie banner makes the site unusable (as many sites do) until you click "Yes". Ours clearly does not.
Regardless, the initial accusation was:
> If you're not giving people a choice, why even pretend?
Which is clearly not true. There is a very real choice – we are not pretending. Your choice matters.
However, since a lot of people are not a fan of our banner, we've decided to add an explicit "no" option. I still disagree that our original implementation is a "dark pattern", as we very explicitly[1] will not sell your data, and tracking for the sake of improving the product seems like a square deal to me. But I understand that people are finding it annoying, so it's been changed. Sorry about that.
But for kids, older adults, and recent immigrants I feel this is borderline confusing (the right way to say no is to ignore?) and manipulative, and I would prefer more margin from the border.
The difficult conversation is to what degree do we expect rational agency from different kinds of folks, how do we think about formal or business relations with them, etc, but I don’t think the answer is “you shouldn’t let older moms or kids into the web”.
> There is a very real choice
I don't see a 'No' button... I love the app, really, but that isn't nice. Also a GDPR violation for those in the EU.
Ah, cool then.
From looking at the currency used though, it seems that you don't need to concern yourself with EU stuff soon =)
However, since a lot of people are not a fan of our banner, we've decided to add an explicit "no" option. I still disagree that our original implementation is a "dark pattern", as we very explicitly[2] will not sell your data, and tracking for the sake of improving the product seems like a square deal to me. But I can understand how people would find it annoying, so it's been changed. Sorry about that.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPrivacy_Regulation_(European_... [2] https://supernotes.app/terms/
[my setup is just markdown, really, but it's here](https://lesser.occult.institute/an-opinionated-approach-to-t...)
This is a good piece of software. But if you want to take simple linked notes, then you probably need something else.
Can you be more specific about what doesn’t work for you?
It will come out in about three weeks and we're always curious about feedback :)
From the look of it this seems like another poor implementation of the same old tricks and concepts which everyone already know and uses.
(On macOS, don't know if this is the case on other OSes)
They say they are audited by NCC ( https://www.notion.so/Security-6c56b4854b624b0d8f36711018647... ) but I don't know how NCC missed this. They disabled TLS 1.0 few days after my message.
My second concern is that their .so domain is the TLD of Somalia (with all the risks it brings in case of malicious takeover), and .so zone doesn't even support DNSSEC, once again this is a big issue for me, especially for an app that hosts "personal data" (I see they also make calls on a .com domain, but the .so main domain issue still stands). Support told me they would change the domain in the future but still didn't happened.
It's only my personal security stance/paranoia, but my 2 cents of what happened with them.
What's ironic about this comment is that in our present WebPKI, Somalia's ownership of .so only tangentially impacts their security (Somalia could in theory seize the domain and DV-verify a new cert). But in a DNSSEC world, Somalia would have de jure control over both the domain and Notion's TLS certificates, which would chain through DANE from the same root.
I've found out about Joplin[1] and thought it was the answer, but it seems that I cannot easily share the notes with my team in a collaborative manner. A pity! The quest continues.
EDIT: Unfortunately, my company is heavily invested in Office 365 (Teams and friends) and we use our Azure AD logins for everything. Emvi seems to integrate Google credentials only. However, your product looks amazing! That's exactly what I'm looking for. I'll be sure to keep an eye on it for when it starts supporting Microsoft (i.e. Teams) logins or when (if) my company migrates to Google in the future :)
Also if you ever change your mind on hiring outside of SF, call me :-)
My current workflow involves Taskwarrior + Joplin. I use TW for very very specific tasks and `task next` helps me plan my day. I use Joplin as my "Notebook" and have all my notes synced there. The default theme is a bit ugly, agreed, so I use "Artim Dark" with it. The biggest reason to choose Joplin was that it's actively maintained, the apps are not great but decent I'd say, it lets me use the APIs and CLI tools to backup my Joplin DB and upload to remote storage periodically (in addition to the built in Dropbox sync), in case the sync doesn't work some day. I also use Joplin Web Clipper Firefox extension to save bookmarks/screenshots from website to a notebook "Bookmarks". It can even store the whole webpage in your Notebook, which is beautifully rendered. It even has support for E2EE for notes, but I am yet to explore that. The search is based on SQLite FTS4 and it works awesomely well. There is a support for wildcard queries, and it basically searches across all your notebooks and is quite fast that too. Also, I love writing in Markdown, and unlike Notion, this is really quick to launch, open a notebook and start writing ASAP without dealing with the cognitive overhead that Notion presents with it's quirky "Template/Empty Page" options. Did I mention that I can write notes in any editor (I use VS Code) and Joplin will simply `watch` for changes on that file and save it in your notebook? :D
So basically I am in full control of my data, something any Notion user can never claim. I also love the fact that the code is OSS, the APIs are open and it allows me to build tools on top of Joplin to use it the way I like. And I don't have to worry for the day, the VC funding of Notion dries up and I am left with no option but to move to some other SASS product.
The only feature it's lacking for me currently is a Drafts-like quick capture action on the iOS version.
Notion looks like one more super-hyped web-app, who will get insane amounts of VC money and start adding features no one needs or wants just to spend it all. Then it'll be a bloated mess that's not quick or easy to use.
What I would support is a note-taking solution, that is run like Basecamp. No VC money, no immense hype, just people dogfooding their own product and keeping it lean, functional and profitable.
Now I rely on vimwiki and fzf. More robust and future-proof. Who knows how long Notion will be around?
Come to think of it, I don't see why you couldn't use both vimwiki and notational-fzf-vim. That might be pretty good actually.
I love Notion, but the Mac client feels so sluggish, I didn’t investigative but looks like a web view or Electron or something similar.
Trello can be toggled with a global hotkey with absolutely no delay, while re-opening the Notion window or loading another Notion page takes quite a while. It is a day and night difference for note taking.
Notion does seem pretty interesting, but if they ever shut, stop innovating, or are outshined by a competitor, I don't fancy the idea of moving everything
On Linux I use typora (previously caret when it basically shut down). typora and caret are built on web technologies and cross platform.
Oh Android I used to use and recommend JotterPad, but they've disgraced themselves and moved previously paid features (which I bought!) to a subscription, so I don't have an Android app anymore :(.
im not sure if its actually native though or whether its using electron... but i think ghostwriter is. tried that for a while. pretty much the same as marktext just without a sidebar
I'm not in love with it, but it works and I have a client everywhere I need one. It's text recognition in images is one of the killer features (I save snapshots of whiteboards), the other is searching metadata.
I do agree with others that Notion's flexibility can turn into a problem. Therefore, it is essential to clearly define use cases and conventions. Luckily, you don't have to argue about those with anyone else if you use it as a personal knowledge base ;)
* https://tkainrad.dev/posts/managing-my-personal-knowledge-ba...
There are some things - like personal notes - that really don't need to live in the cloud.
I guess it makes sense to downgrade until API is actually released. "Coming soon" messaging seems promising, but yet again, it's been on their priority list for at least half a year now. Seems hardly justified to spend another $30 or so waiting for it.
I want to open my note taking solution, preferably with a shortcut and be able to jot down my thoughts right there. Plain text is fine, but markdown is preferred.
After I'm done writing, I can spend 10 seconds adding a tag or two so I can find it again using smart filters or searches.
It's a very well built notes app, cross-platform. The dev team makes really solid decisions (they say no more than any other company to feature requests).
I'm in no way affiliated to them, just a happy paid customer who agrees with their mission and values.
I really love Notion. It's filling the vacuum left by Evernote, once Evernote started spamming the hell out of its users.
I like how it's built with a "developer" mentality: there are things that you can do that require a little learning, but become very powerful productivity shortcuts.
What I really, really HATE about Notion is how they handle using it offline. At least for me, every few weeks it happens that I get logged out of Notion, and I couldn't have access to my files offline. It happened to me twice on a plane, and it was frustrating because I needed to access the information.
The other thing that I am not sure about is how they handle security. I've simply been lazy not to read enough about it, but perhaps Notion could make it more clear.
Overall, great job guys. (p.s. I live two blocks from your office, I'd love to come and say hello post-covid if you'd like. My email is my HN username @ gmail.)
I want a ticket to be able to 'depend' on another ticket in a visually satisfying way like a dependency graph view.
Dependencies are such a huge part of ticketing systems but they don't seem to be treated with first class attention.
Not sure if it's the rich formatting or customization, but I find myself coming back to notes and utilizing them much more frequently in Notion than I did with plain text.
The latest releases have resolved some of my larger issues like performance, search, and quick notes on mobile. I'm happy they're making their product more accessible, and I'm looking forward to the API.
I found myself wasting time setting things up and then not using them. I found the community full of people bragging about the beautiful minimalism of their dashboards. I'm not sure if anyone is "getting things done," however.
I'd be willing to pay Notion for the ability to use recurring tasks, but they seem interested in solving every other problem with their platform before tackling recurring tasks.
Also curious if anyone has comments on how it compares to similar apps like Dropbox Paper (which Notion seems like a direct clone of) or Quip.
Have you ever used Confluence? If not, have you ever used any Atlassian products? Atlassian is all over corp structures, and everything they make is painful to use without a training course or the desire to immerse yourself in boring-as-shit documentation. A lot of corps jumping onto Notion are jumping off of Confluence.
Yes. Is Notion a Confluence competitor?
I guess I'm struggling to understand it because my aforementioned friend talks about how he uses Notion for basically every possible use case under the sun (probably even some where it's not meant for that but he found some way to finagle it). Based on that knowledge, I still don't really know what Notion is meant for other than being just-another-note-taking-app-that-supports-markdown-and-embedded-pics.
"With Notion, all your work is in one place" is a terrible descriptor of a product.
> Write better. Think more clearly. Get organized.
Totally useless in terms of explaining what the product is.
>A simple, beautiful writing experience, with 30+ types of content to add.
Great, so I can... write things in it? What are these 30 types of content? It doesn't even give examples.
> Turn your tribal knowledge into easy-to-find answers.
How does it do this? No explanation given.
> Kanban boards, tables, lists, and more.
"and more"? And more what? This is what I'm trying to get information on.
> Lightweight and flexible.
Flexible how? This phrase is meaningless to me.
This is one of the more marketing speak ridden websites I've encountered.
If someone made a post on HN asking people to compare and contrast, say, AWS vs Azure, would your response be "just go read the AWS website duh"?
Take a look at the other comments in this thread and ask yourself if the Notion website conveys even half of the insight that the other commenters have provided. Those comments are the entire point of HN, not "just go read the website".
It's great to have these questions and insightful answers. The thing is you've said your friend is nuts about it, but apparently haven't bothered to ask them the same questions you're asking here. Not only that, you do seem to be fairly interested in knowing what it's about, but you don't seem to have read anything about it at all, so maybe you could have at least followed the hacker spirit and... I don't know, scanned for the links on the top of the page... and formed a basic opinion?
https://www.notion.so/wikis (I've just seen you can even try a live demo without signing up)
https://www.notion.so/projects
(There are more, but I believe you get the idea)
or I could ask about it on a forum that is dedicated to discussing topics exactly like this? As you can see, other commenters have given some great insight that is infinitely more helpful than "just go read the website", and is definitely more insightful than the website itself could ever be. I thank them greatly for their insight.
I'm not sure why you would expect the main page to list, individually, 30+ types of content. Do you similarly complain that the homepage for Lightroom doesn't say that you can edit the following parameters on an image:
* Lens Correction - Chromatic Aberration, Profile Corrections, Distortion, Vignetting
* Basic - Color Profile, White Balance, Temperature, Tint, Tone, Exposure, Contrast, Highlights, Shadows, Whites, Blacks, Texture, Clarity, Dehaze, Vibrance, Saturation
* Transform - Auto, Guided, Level, Vertical, Full, Rotation, Aspect, Scale, X Offset, Y Offset
* Tone Curve - Regional and Global Highlights, Lights, Darks, Shadows, Point Curves
* HSL / Color - Change hue for Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Aqua, Blue, Purple, Magenta. Change saturation for same. Change Luminance for same.
* Split Toning, Highlights (Hue, Saturation), Shadows (same), balance between two.
* Details: Sharpening (amount, radius, detail, masking), Noise Reduction (luminance, detail, contrast)
... and so on.
Or do you settle for "Wide ranging, comprehensive non-destructive image editing"?
> What are these 30 types of content? It doesn't even give examples.
There are, just off the main page.
I'm just not sure what you're expecting is at all reasonable of any product. The main page draws you in, and the Product page breaks it down by use context. You're certainly entitled to "I don't want to have to go to any additional pages", but that doesn't work for anything more than the simplest products.
The love for it makes more sense if you think of it as a really simple website builder. You can have a database of pages with structured data, unstructured data, and nice layout. That sounds simple, but it covers a lot of use cases.
If you check out communities talking about Notion, you'll see the layout stuff is huge. You might even think it's overboard, to the point of productivity porn. But if you're the kind of person who cares about that (think the girl in middle school who took notes with 6 colored pens) or you want to make something pleasing to use for a tiny organization, you can end up falling in love with it.
I think this is what's mostly caused some confusion for me, so thanks for taking the time to explain it a bit. I've seen tons of stuff about how to customize Notion to fit personal preferences and specific layouts, and that kind of drowns out the actual discussion about what those customizations/layouts are used to accomplish.
Yes. I don't know why you're getting such convoluted answers from others.
I'd stopped using it because it was too easy to outgrow the free plan. Now with unlimited pages I'll give it another shot but I'm still not sold on its benefits vs storing all my notes locally in plain markdown files.
We used it for our company wiki. Wanted to use Notion but for 500 users the Notion quote came out 15x more expensive so it was a no-brainer!
- Implementing GTD, when I move a task to "waiting" I add a date when I want to be reminded to check on it.
- I create a new table quarterly with a row for each week with columns for goals (e.g. practice Spanish or get out running 3x), then embed date reminders for each one so I don't forget to keep it updated.
- I keep a table of annual subscriptions I pay for, with the date the payment occurs, and a reminder a few weeks earlier. This way I can decide whether I want to renew (this alone has paid for the cost of Notion).
I've been using Notion for 3+ years now and I've been happily paying for it. The main reason I went away from Dropbox for organizing and writing is b/c each Paper document felt like a separate piece of work. In Notion, documents are easily linked, workspaces are a starting point and there's child documents and sibling documents that can help keep things organized. I have over 200+ documents and about 3 months ago the search started to feel sluggish and they updated their search code and it now feels pretty fast again.
It's not all perfect though, with 3+ years of use, I can tell you their mobile apps have come a long way but still don't feel as native as some other writing apps (iA Writer).
My final thoughts are that if you're hearing good things about it and haven't given it a shot, try it for a 1-2 week period and see how it works for you. Some people like the way it does 90% of the things and others hate the same things ️
IMO the biggest issue with these sorts of better-mousetrap documents/business tools is that they add another application to your organization. They're almost all slightly better than Confluence/GSuite (and I say that as a GSuite fan), but my team already runs our SSO/Email etc through GSuite and our issue tracking through Jira. Even with better functionality, maintaining another tool can turn the value proposition negative for scaling companies due to time spent on enablement, vendor negotiation, change management, wrangling of docs, security, etc.
Of course, these products like to sell/market via guerrilla, bottoms-up strategies propelled by their great design and natural appeal: the people introducing them to organizations are typically insulated from the negative logistical externalities. This allows them to dodge a top-down procurement process that would have much higher requirements. There's a whole organizational question of whether it's best for your company to accept new bottoms-up tools that incrementally improve efficiency, or accepting "worse" tools that simplify the overall logistics of running a team.
Fwiw my team also used Dropbox Paper in the early days of the product, and the story then was quite similar to Notion (we weren't customers of Dropbox's storage product).
While it's a good product (and now totally free), I don't really get why people are absolutely nuts about it all over Twitter. There is also like a Notion community, organizing Notion meetups and events. That's kinda beyond me. At the end of the day, it's just a note taking app.
The way you can display these cards is also very flexible (views): kanban, a table, list, gallery, etc with easy to setup filtering and sorting options. You can have multiple views attached to each collection (e.g. a KanBan board for team project managment and a separate "my TODOs" list)
The most powerful part is when you start to setup relations (foreign keys) between tables, which allows you to use all the power of relational data using GUI point and click. Anyone familiar with SQL (or Django ORM) will feel right at home with Foreign key, and reverse relationships.
The reason people are so excited about notion is that it "democratizes" the power of database — to non-technical people.
There isn't one.
Notion blasted the Youtube Selfhelp/Productivity space with sponsored videos to get a buzz going and now are moving to continue their growth story by offering a free tier.
It's designed to convert your productivity into minuscule parts to convince you that you are achieving goals. Akin to playing a game.
I've been working on a similar app (https://usebustl.com) focusing on project management. However in doing so I've really come to appreciate how much of a quality product Notion is.
Also Notion seems to store code blocks without formatting them, I found that in Evernote, the backtick and single quotes would get formatted even inside a code block.
Also recently build a resources hub on a custom domain using Notion and open-source toolkit Fruition.
Pretty happy with the result. https://resources.remotejobs.center
From views on Notion perspective is that this is the right time to go open source and let the world patch in. It's not a work that can be done in private as it's a huge pile of possibilities and requires an immense group of talented people to make it a success.
Why don't i do it then? Well i can definitely start a repo but my lack of experience, skills will easily out-number me by people who are better. I can be a good thinker and a decision maker and a leader but this thing needs support from amazing people and a repo is generally successful because of immence tech skills in initial phase of development in open source.
Notes itself was actually not that bad but it was very complex and usually turned into something it shouldn't have been - like an email server.
The only thing I have disabled are cookies and connections to trackers or ads. But cookies are not necessary to load a page. And adblocking is standard.
Does anyone know the reason?
So I signed up and after looking around for a minute or two I still have no idea what Notion is. It seems to be a way to create lists of rich to do items with dates?
Can someone ELI5 Notion to me?
So, what is notion? I'd call it a flexible on-line data organizer. Notion gives you a concept of pages (which then can have subpages) and blocks. A block can be a text, a table, a todo list, a calendar, an embedded Tweet etc.
I think a good way to see what you can do with it is to use the templates - they are example pages that allow you to see what are Notion's capabilities.
A few examples of what I've used Notion for:
* tracking my job applications when I was looking for a new position
* notes on resources I'm using for an online course I'm working on (I have a plan for lessons, each lesson has attached resources)
* planning my holidays trip - it was a combination of todo list, map with our stops, list of hotels I booked etc.
* todo list when moving to another country
I've also seen it used as a team handbook, here's a public example by Blendle: https://www.notion.so/Blendle-s-Employee-Handbook-7692ffe24f...
You can downgrade to the free plan for which the number of blocks is not limited anymore, or keep paying paying $4/month for a bunch of extra features.
From the FAQ:
What if I'm already paying for the old Personal Plan?
You've been automatically upgraded to our new Personal Pro Plan at no extra cost!
In addition to all the features of the free Personal Plan, Personal Pro includes:
- No limit on file uploads (5MB is the limit for free)
- Unlimited guest collaborators (5 guests is the limit for free)
- Version history up to 30 days
- Priority customer support
- API access (coming soon)
You can switch back to the free Personal Plan at any time.Do sometimes get lost and wonder if I'm doing things in the most optimal way though, it's so powerful.
I've just tried the HTML and it looks pretty good. CSS is at the beginning of each HTML and looks pretty similar to their light mode interface, no JavaScript gets loaded.
This is a weird testimonial. Any frontender should be making their own cool resume website, and not using a website generator!
Does anyone have any deep-dive recommendations on how to get the most out of Notion?
Not that you are using it for busy work.
It's a strategy used by productivity "gurus" for 100+ years to keep the $$ trickling in.
Just a few years ago it was todist...before that it was Omni.
Once notion peaks we will all move on to the next one.
What is next?
I've gone into further depth here: https://usedone.today/blog/posts/davinci/