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Comment by remram | Hacker News Reader

Notion takes 15s to load to an empty page. Then another 5 to dismiss the popup about new AI features and the like.

I'm glad they are making their app faster, in the meantime I (browser user) have cancelled my team's subscription and will be using something else.

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I was about to say, does Notion actually feel any faster to anyone? I stopped using it years ago but the last place I contracted at was invested in it heavily and the thing was crazy slow.

That's because the big optimization would be "don't cram this entire application into the browser", but we've all collectively decided desktop software is impossible, so.

> we've all collectively decided desktop software is impossible

the customers are the ones who did.

Suppose there was a desktop app, but a competitor has a web version. It's much easier, faster to use the web version, because you dont need to download the desktop app, install it (which might require admin perms). Then your files are local, so if you have a second computer, there needs to be some way to share those files between.

Developing a fast system requires an entire different mindset, unless it is critical it never happens. Most people think it is w/e we don’t need to optimize and when you have people complaining it is already too late

Stay away from Clickup, it's just as slow if not worse. Also same AI notices.

One team works insanely hard and saves 2 seconds on app load. Another team takes the opportunity to add 3 seconds worth of crap that no one wants. Welcome to modern software development.

Curious where you're moving? About to begin finding a tool similar to Notion (but not Notion).

I felt like a grandpa when using Notion, but haven't found a good alternative yet.

As of now, I use google sheets for collaborative work and plain text/md files for notetaking.

I also moved away from Notion a while ago for being crazy slow. For personal note taking I use Obsidian, big fan of it.

For my dev team I recently moved us to eraser.io. Still in the early stages with it but it's working well enough for us atm.

I second the Obsidian recommendation.

Not sure. We're currently using GitLab wikis a lot, oddly enough.

Obsidian is nice but start time on mobile is bad too.

I’d love advice too - I’ve become heavily reliant on Notion’s database-lite features, which is what a lot of the markdown-based apps don’t invest in by default. I’m beginning to get frustrated with loading speeds that feel like spinning disks.

For anything database-lite, https://coda.io is a lot better than notion.

I tried Coda a few months ago. The feature set was very appealing. Coda turned out to be slower and more buggy than Notion, especially when routinely working with databases. The typography and graphic design were also less polished. I kept using Coda until I could no longer tolerate its issues and then have moved everything to Notion.

I work at Coda and would love to hear more about your experience. We are focused on our tables and formulas and I am surprised to hear that you had such a bad time with them. Feel free to reach out at gleb at coda dot io.

We’re rolling out a new databases backend right now, if you email jake@makenotion.com I’d like to make sure we’re optimized for your database views

Someone posted recently on the golang subreddit that they are building a collaboration tool with performance being the priority: https://www.superthread.com/

I am not affiliated with them and haven’t tried it out, but it fits perfectly in this discussion.

Anytype looks promising. It’s at the top of my list of collaborative workspace tools to try.

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