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Comment by Semaphor | Hacker News Reader

I guess I might as well ask here. I tried notion 1-2 years [0] ago, and the features were great. I'd even have considered paying for it. But the performance was atrocious. It made Gmail seem fast. Have things Improved on that front?

[0] I've always been bad at remembering how much time passed, but COVID really didn't help … So those numbers might be off.

Edit: Thanks everyone, sounds like I'll at least give it another chance.

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I’ve found the performance to be pretty good, and I use it most days. I certainly rarely feel as though I’m waiting for it. The global search can take upto a second to return results, but that is as bad as it gets for me.

I recall some blog post about a major refactoring/sharding they did sometime in the last few years. Maybe that helped?

Just tried it again. Slow initial load on pages and worse, even after that almost every action has a few ms delay, not a lot, but enough to feel them. It’s like with Gmail, Facebook or new reddit, everyone else seems to have a far higher pain threshold for slowness.

I use it daily. We use it for a mix of documentation, specification, changelogs and so on. Some tables are generated through the API.

I personally wouldn’t have chosen it over something that’s text/html/markdown etc. based with git version control.

For one it’s as you said, slow. And it’s restricted.

But it’s very practical, nice looking, easy to use for less technical people etc.

We use it daily. It's way, way better than it used to be, but there's still times it feels a little sluggish. I'd definitely recommend giving it another go though.

What feels sluggish? Load speed, and/or something else?

Load speed is generally fine (but then I tend to have it open in a pinned tab). On occasion you're clicking and waiting, or you're typing and everything is just a second/fraction of a second behind what you're actually doing.

I don't think it ever hits frustration point, it's just not magic.

The performance is better than it was at that time. At that time performance was the #1 item for improvement on their roadmap.

I currently pay for Notion and I don't usually mind the performance. However, things like opening a new window and changing it to a new document with the "quick" search (command-p) is still almost unacceptably slow (it's an Electron app). The benefits for me do outweigh the costs though.

I've never seen native apps anywhere in their stated plans.

Native vs electron is probably not the thing that makes notion slow - AFAIK (last used notion ~2 years ago) everything has to go through the web, nothing is local, and the performance bottleneck is their server.

Notion is known for being a laggy web app.

It's partially why local-first, Markdown-based solutions like Obsidian and Logseq have exploded in popularity. Logseq is amazing and truly shows the power of backlinked text with a query interface. And the whole thing is FOSS, at least for now.

I just started using Logseq and I am blown away with how amazing it is.

They are also far from notion in how powerful they are.

I was turned off by Obsidian because, much as it is local first, it doesn’t have the more notion like mode where I can invite a team and use it as a shared wiki.

Did I miss something? For me, being able to edit things from multiple devices seamlessly and share it with my coworkers so they can edit it too, that is critical.

Obsidian just uses whatever files are in the directory you point it at. So you could just pair obsidian with any folder syncing product that does everything you need as far as ability to invite team members. OneDrive, Dropbox, Google Drive, etc.

I think that's because Obsidian is designed for individuals over teams. It uses a local folder structure for organizing MD files and keeping them portable, although the backlinks mean everything can stay in sync. They aren't set up as a SaaS in the way Notion are, and that has a big impact on the design and intended audience for it.

... as long as those coworkers don't use Linux. I was going to give Notion a try, but not having a native Linux app sunk any interest. I understand Linux has a smaller base, but if you're making team software it only takes one member to have an unsupported system to force you to look elsewhere.

I use Linux. Notion is a web app. This is a you thing, not a Linux thing.

Performance has improved noticeably, particularly for the mobile apps, but it is still slow. I am a heavy Notion user and happily pay for it, but I really wish they would support local sync so that it would be more responsive.

It's pretty responsive, and I use it everyday.

But note the search is HORRIBLE. Unless you know the title of what you want to find, don't both with the search.

I use it daily for kanban and as a scratch pad and the performance is horrible. I’m on a 2015 mac

What feels sluggish? Load speed, and/or something else?

When I type '/todo', I type '/', and sometimes it just hangs for like 10 seconds. Then I type 't'... and then I can usually finish 'odo' quick

Also when I click to maximize a notion page, that is often quite slow

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