Notion's mid-life crisis
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In a way, Notion has come to occupy the same space as Jira for me: A tool that tries to be everything to everyone and gets abused by people who feel like using as many features as possible is a best practice.
I’ve had better success lately asking people to step outside of Notion and instead work in an old-fashioned shared Google doc. It’s amazing how much more productive we can all be when the tools are simplified to exactly what we need and people don’t feel like they need to sprinkle emojis and checklists and other features into everything just because they can.
Jira doesn't try to be everything. It's a project management app. It does nothing else.
Notion is wiki, CRM, project management, calendar etc.
Jira has deep integration with bitbucket, confluence, and GitHub.
It can manage your CI pipelines as well.
Jira is an anything app with a bend towards project management. Setting up jira workflows is a whole career.
Source: I worked at Atlassian for 5 years and they use jira as the backbone for _everything_. It all flows into jira.
This is the company that (already having owned jira) bought trello and did nothing with it for 5 years.
Email has deep integration with bitbucket, confluence, and GitHub.
Email can manage your CI pipelines as well.
Email is an anything app with a bend towards project management. Setting up email workflows is a whole career.
Source: I worked at Google for years and they use email as the backbone for _everything_. It all flows into email
I mean email isn’t an app, it’s a handful of protocols, but… sure
b) It can't manage your pipelines. It can visualise deployments and link them to work but you still need some sort of CI/CD tool like Bitbucket, Github etc.
c) It is not an anything app. I can't use it as a wiki, CRM, database, calendar etc.
B) it can manage pipelines through those services. Each card change would kick off pipelines whose status updates would cause jira to further change cards potentially kicking off more ci/cd steps.
C) you absolutely can use it as a database, calendar, and a wiki.
It has an api and can store data. You can query cards by label, search by content, and extract structured information from them.
Nested and linked cards provide the tools needed to build wikis.
I’m not 100% sure what the difference between CRMs and support ticketing system are, but Jira instances have been used as support ticketing systems in order to give devs view into what customers want.
It’s not the best at any of those things, but those are all doable (and are being done) with jira.
I would say it doesn't do that very well. You can't manage projects without mapping out dependencies, visually and with integrated relationship tracking. JIRA is miserable at this.
The 4th, a Wiki, is of course more-so just Confluence, but I have seen echoes of a wiki make their way into Jira; e.g. in one place I worked, every release was a ticket that was duplicated from a previous ticket, and that ticket had step-by-step instructions on how to run different parts of the release.
You're just wrong on this, bro. Notion tries to be everything to everyone. Jira is everything to everyone, it doesn't matter what it tries to be.
Release Management is a fundamental part of IT Project Management. So of course companies use Jira to track releases. And of course you can tie milestones and OKRs to releases. And of course tickets can have small amounts of text content associated with them. How else would you describe the ticket without them ?
But the idea of Jira being remotely like a Confluence style wiki is just ridiculous.
And your comment is out of some parallel universe where Jira is Confluence.
To be fair that’s not on Notion per se, there’s an underlying communication problem (which it sounds like your google doc solves!).
I agree there are issues any time the bored folks in “product” are allowed to set up, well, anything, honestly.
I think of company wikis as a place where information goes to die.
A useful feature, which I'm sure exists somewhere, would be "freshness" checks on pages. A timestamp for the last time someone looked at this and said "yes, this is still valid". For pages that are important, a team could set up recurring tasks for people to do periodic freshness checks.
Surely this is already a common practice, although not any team I've been on. Undoubtedly there is some ISO-9000 process for this...
Now, Notion's done a lot since then. If you want a knowledge base that can also have semi-structured tabular data, and portability in that data, it's hard to beat. Notion AI, pulling from disparate sources with the context of the current planning document, is really neat, too! But not every company will want to pay the per-head cost for this, unless it can replace other existing tools.
And when it comes to spaces like CRM in that context, looking at https://www.google.com/search?q=notion+crm&udm=14 ... there's a lot that could be said about Notion's (lack of) SEO/advertising there, but more concretely, a CRM solution nowadays has to bring a wealth of integrations as a near-prerequisite, and Notion doesn't have a mature story there - nor can they easily, because different customers will have different data models that make it hard to have a standardized notion of "what fields can I count on to be present for an Account."
Notion is a really powerful system. If it didn't already have a $10B valuation, it would be in tremendously good shape. But it has a long way to go to find the areas of growth it needs to grow beyond $10B.
I just don't get notion. I use Apple Notes for everything id use notion for + scratch.txt on every project folder root. (i've used notion, quip, gdocs, dropbox paper)
Notion lives rent free in my mind because while im indifferent to it, people seem to LOVE it. and that's so fascinating.
even this article, I upvoted it because the conversation about notion is interesting, the article itself is a dud after reading it.
we live in a world where Notion is a multi billion dollar company and i have no idea why—now that's interesting!
I might be strange but I just really vibed with Confluence and I’d be happy with it if people would commit to it.
I felt very dumb. Like i just want to write this thing and it wants me to be more magical about what i'm trying to write and fuck it's just text, get the fuck out of my way.
i think it's just there are notion users and then there's everyone else. I recovered in my self love again. I use txt files in my ancient sublime editor :)
A relevant and somewhat meta example: This year they added disclosable sections, which were previously a differentiator for Notion. That's in addition to handwriting selection and editing, voice memos, collaborative editing… Not to mention it's still a regular app and you can have as many note windows as you want.
But it just needs to be a bit more open and extendable. Give me good tables, proper linking between notes and a graph view (or at least an API so I can build that myself) and I'll be back forever.
- note data stored in a proprietary format
- no way to access note data from other apps/api
- no way to export in bulk, or in any other format than PDF (a terrible format for notes)
- iCloud sync is a mildly terrifying thing to entrust important data to
I use Apple Notes for the occasional quick grocery list but that's about it.
Thing about Apple Notes is in spite of the open ideals, if you're in the apple ecosystem, it's just easily there, on all devices, very unassuming and simply, and that's so so very valuable.
It's the long view that gets me. Over the last 20 years, if i'm in the Apple ecosystem, notes are there, synced across everything, and it's just text. and it's simple.
I tried really hard to love Notes. I wanted to. For the reasons you note, and this one, and many others, I couldn’t.
I've never experienced data loss due to icloud sync YMMV
I've never had iCloud Sync display any weird behavior in Apple Notes, and I've got thousands in there. I have, absolutely, seen Obsidian Sync delete notes I did not delete, and fail to upload notes; both of these were generally remediable via their recycle bin, but still very concerning.
All of these complaints are of the nature of "I don't actually have anything valuable to write down so I'd rather worry about the nature of the tool than what I'm writing". And, to be clear, I think this is why Notion is so popular, just for different reasons than your's; it looks great, and makes you feel productive because you've got amazing cross-referenced tables and hyperbacklinks and h1h2h3s and then wait where's the content?
When you have tens of thousands of notes, it's hard to even know if at some point, the note has been suddenly changed, reverted, or modified in a way that you didn't even realize occurred.
With an open format, specifically a text based one like Markdown, I can sync all my notes to a git repository in a diffable manner that I can quickly review.
sqlite3 "~/Library/Group Containers/group.com.apple.notes/NoteStore.sqlite"
This is because it needs to support CRDT style syncing.
But the schemas have been decoded so you can access it using pretty much any language.
Notes is also quite terrible at many things:
* Embedded photos cannot be resized or placed next to text
* Table support is incredibly limited, to the point of being unusable except as a rudimentary grid
* No support for multiple columns
* No table of contents view
* No linking between notes (I think?)
* No way to change the font or change out the dreary yellow background colour
* No syntax highlighting of embedded code fragment
* No support for equations
* No support for shorthands (e.g. # to get a level 1 headline)
Notion, for all its flaws, has all of the above. And its collaborative editing is solid, if maybe not as good as Google Docs.
I see it at similar to Figma in the sense that both tools are cloud-based and free, and their users love yapping about it.
I just use it for taking notes and writing stuff down. I like how easy it is to drop an image, video, or document into a notion page, but I've only barely used features like databases which seem to be the big selling point, and none of my usage of those is really anything that couldn't just be a plaintext table in a markdown doc.
One of these days I'll get up the gumption to crawl through, excise what's worth keeping into Obsidian , and cancel my subscription. But not today, lol.
But Notion has good tables by default, so I can have both good tables (and tableviews) and normal text files in the same app.
I could have tried Obsidian plugins, but I suspect that it would have been a time sink, and Notion offered everything in a neat package, so in the end, it won.
I use it for my workout logbook and cooking/recipe log with hundreds of entries.
You can click "export to markdown" on a notion page, you can click "import from markdown", but those two markdown dialects are totally incompatible. Most of the time notion can't even read what it exported.
The notion web editor for me has very noticeable lag, so I really want to just be able to write some text somewhere to represent a notion table or whatever, but there's simply no supported way to do that I'm aware of.
I mean, it's fine, using a i7 core at 100% at all times just to produce text at a 2 second delay is totally fine for a text editor, I'm sure notion's doing its best.
I will say that Obsidian's tables have gotten a lot better in terms of reflow, sorting, etc. At some point Obsidian might add some additional config to their tables to allow users to manually control column widths, etc., but it would have to be non-standard markdown - like how you can scale down images by adding a width parameter.
![[./media/example_image.png|Custom caption|450]] +------------------------------+
Product,Cost per seat,Importance
+------------------------------+
GSuite,$7.20,Critical
Notion,$10,High
"Something, ""with"", commas and double-quotes",$5,Low
+------------------------------+I will asked ChatGPT to output responses in a note form in markdown so I can copy/paste it in.
You can wrap code with: ‘’’elixir Code here ‘’’ To get syntax highlighting
Todo lists are as simple as -[ ] to do item
You can use iCloud/dropbox to sync.
It's WYSIWYG, so even if you don't know markdown, you can just use standard shortcuts like Ctrl-B to bold something, Ctrl-I to italicize, etc.
But it's only as valuable as the notes that it contains. If you are a fastidious note taker (for your projects, work, etc), like to ontologically tag things, and appreciate building inter-related knowledge (like wikipedia links), then you'd be hard pressed to find a better substitute even compared to other heavy hitters like Joplin and Logseq.
And for many, it does. It may not for you, but everyone has their own system.
Notion shines with database use, and was how I used to write my blogs and connecting the API directly to my site to auto update. I’m surprised you’re a paying customer and barely use the database stuff!
I also really like how it treats everything as blocks, that's another thing that I can no longer live without.
If you're not interested in features like this, then yeah. Obsidian would be a good use-case.
HN, never change.
In practice, Google could put a tree-like organization of docs on the sidebar, make the search a bit comfier, and make draggable blocks, and get 80% of the Notion users. I guess they don't have a financial incentive to make docs better, but I would gladly pay extra to have everything there.
I guess someone could build a browser extension that adds that UI to Google Docs, or eventually I'll go and do it myself.
Technically they can. Organisationally they can't.
> I guess someone could build a browser extension that adds that UI to Google Docs, or eventually I'll go and do it myself.
You won't though, or at best you'll make a rough-and-ready version that works for you. Polished stuff doesn't get created without a business model, and you can't make a business model out of a browser extension that messes with a third-party site, not these days anyway.
Notion/Retool/Airtable/Coda/Etc are fighting over a cursed long tail and their employees are slowly going insane trying to generalize asymptotic industries. The “AI” rebranding has no doubt made them want to put a gun in their mouths.
And those companies will inevitably want it to do everything
I've been doing the sales engineer thing for a few years now. Salesforce management is a big part of my job, as this is what the salespeople use to track opportunities and deals.
The data that goes into SFDC is a big part of what gets reported on in sales/revenue forecasts, so it existing is extremely important and is a big reason why Marc Benioff has, like, a billion yachts.
At its core, SFDC is nothing more than a database and a shitload of plugins that enter stuff into that database.
Notion can, theoretically, do this as well.
Given how large the TAM is for revenue management software and how much Marc pays to acquire anything in his space, Notion chasing that market makes a lot of sense.
A bit more of a learning curve but that's an absolute no-go when a tool contains the inner workings of my brain. Plenty of comparable private options.
Intellectual capital is rapidly being migrated from workers to shareholders under the guise of "AI".
Imagine a world where C-suites no longer rely on or support creative minds.
EDIT: They may say they don't train on user data currently but there's nothing stopping them in the future, especially if they are moving upmarket.
I’m not even worried about them training on user data. The more immediate problem is that if you accidentally type something in the Ask AI box (which is very easy to do because it looks like search), the page you’re on and god know what else is sent to god knows where. When I use LLMs, I like to know which one I’m using and exactly what I’m sending them.
I felt their AI integration was very cavalier and it completely changed my opinion of them as a company. On top of that, the YouTube and Tik Tok productivity grifters thrive on the ecosystem of template BS that Notion seems very happy to encourage. I guess they can’t help it but it is not my vibe. I also want something more stripped down and programmable. Obviously a programmer is not a typical consumer.
We maintain a list of data su processors here: https://www.notion.so/notion/Notion-s-List-of-Subprocessors-...
It’s not as specific as citing the actual model version in use from each vendor, though.
And I'm not anti AI. I'm an ML researcher who uses LLMs all the time. But there's a big difference between that and revealing all my private information to them.
There’s far more for Notion to lose “training customer data on AI” than for Notion to gain. Like if an AI feature ever disclosed private information of one customer to another, that would be a huge blow to the company.
The closest thing to that that makes sense for us is building “learn to rank” style search models to improve search results, but this is not usually considered “AI” and is typical for any product trying to make search good.
That being said, I appreciate that you understand the risk, and want to believe that the people on the helm of the AI feature and people on the leadership also share your opinion.
All the users in my circle are the opposite, they are all technical individuals. Largely developers for whatever reason.
If it's possible, it will eventually happen.
In his case, he uses it as a CRM for prospecting and it really isn't that bad at the business development end where you don't have a lot of people doing a structured process. But if you could somehow add some structure to notion, in the UI or with some AI interpretation of the text, or both, I could see Notion becoming a CRM or something else, think of something like a spreadsheet for notes.
Of course it might not be Notion that does it, it might be a startup that does it, it might be an established company. Saleforce is a good comparable because you can customize Salesforce to build many kinds of application but you still need programmers to do it. Is somebody in 2024 going to build a system which is as flexible, maybe even more flexible, but doesn't need the programmer?
Other teams still use Confluence. People said Notion is a lot better than Confluence. Well, I agree I'd rather use it over Confluence, but that's a very low bar for comparison.
For ages they didn't have a find-and-replace feature. I just checked, it looks like they've finally added it in the last few months, but this is the first I notice.
They claim you can export stuff as markdown, but if I export as markdown, edit and reimport, I lose half of the formatting – even basic formatting which is part of the markdown spec.
Their native format (which their API exposes) is a bunch of extremely complex JSON blobs. I thought about writing a tool to let me download stuff, edit it in a sane text editor, then reupload it, but when I saw the complexity I just gave up.
It has a built in Figma style diagram/flow-chart editor which is handy for architecture documents, infinite array of plugins and the interface is simple, clean and focused.
Notion has become this kitchen sink app where even editing a table is a convoluted mess of an experience.
Our public API format is not the "native" format used by the Notion editor. The overly-nested format we designed the public API is aimed at supporting statically typed programming languages like Java or Golang that do not have (tagged) union types natively. Instead we represent each option in the union type as a nullable field pointing to a nested object. This makes the structure much easier to decode in these kinds of languages, but does make it more verbose.
For a hypothetical typescript union type:
| { type: 'plain', text: string, format: Formatting }
| { type: 'link', text: string, href: string, format: Formatting }
| { type: 'page-mention', page: { id: UUID, spaceId: UUID }, format: Formatting }
{
plain?: {
text: string,
format: Formatting
}
link?: {
text: string,
href: string,
format: Formatting
}
pageMention?: {
page: {
id: UUID,
spaceId: UUID
},
format: Formatting
}
}
Rust's serde calls that "internally tagged": https://serde.rs/enum-representations.html
Rust structured enums qualify - each enum case can have fields, so it's natural to represent a Typescript union type using a Rust enum; It's not quite the same (needs a newtype wrapper for each different combination of types in the union) but is very serviceable for the API use-case.
C and Zig have a different "union" concept where the caller needs to switch on a "tag" field like `type` in Typescript but with less compiler guidance to ensure you use the right union variant for a certain tag value.
Java and Go are more limited. Java can represent an "internally tagged" union as a superclass with subclasses, and Go can represent as an interface type with a method for getting the variant, but both require the consumer to know all the subtypes, and perform their own "if canCast(supertypeValue, unionCaseSubclass1) { // handle case 1 } else if ..." structure, which substantially hinders discoverability and requires more work.
It has real-time collaboration and support for diagrams (drawio, excalidraw and mermaid).
It can be tempting to want to do it all, but I am focused on building a great wiki and documentation software.
Yes, lots of things can be done in Notion, but most of them are done better elsewhere with dedicated tools.
I think it's core functionality as a team wiki (aka a confluence replacement) is the one thing it does best and better than most competitors...
On the other hand, Confluence does really just one thing. But it doesn't do it especially well, and there's lots of things that it can do that are bolted on haphazardly. Go ahead, try to embed that Loom video. I double dog dare you to try to configure it to show Git commits from GitHub. IMO something that isn't good that's purpose built is actively worse than something that does everything pretty okay.
They want business from me, a tech savvy technical leader in an enterprise who mostly doesn’t care about what they offer. I want all my docs to live in Git, the way it does in Google’s g3doc.
We use Notion and, while it seems better than Confluence, I’ve never actually authored a single thing in it. It has no overlap with my goals. The world should be accessible from my IDE, and if I were them that’s where I’d really focus: a bi-directional sync and a first class VS Code plugin for whatever their file format looks like.
Some people use Notion for research and academic writing, which is the same use case for my software (https://getcahier.com). By specializing on this specific use case, I've been able to: offer a standard data model that's widely used in the field (bibtex), innovate in the PDF reader in the direction that my users need (by adding scrollbar markers for the relative position of highlights), and provide clear instructions to users on how to use the software. In principle, learning to use the software is learning how to perform an activity better - in this case, formal or informal research. When working with a software that's too general the user will always have to ask himself an additional question: "now, how do I make it do what I need?".
As the mathematician Hardy used to say, a beautiful theorem is one that is not too specific but also that is not too general - it has to strike a balance between the two.
If there's a conversation within a company about getting dedicated CRM software and they're already a Notion user or strongly considering Notion for their wikis and documentation, getting the word out there that Notion can also function like a reasonable CRM replacement can help close that deal or prevent a conversation about how Notion might not meet their needs.
However, Notion kind of gives me the vibes Evernote cult of the ancients we have forgotten.
That being said, I used Notion on early days as my brain-dump for everything until I found that my needs are just putting some text and images, then I moved to simplenoteapp(also from forgotten stone age) and substitute with Bear or Apple Notes.
Much like how SharePoint at most companies turn into a zombie wasteland of random unorganized documents, this also happens with Notion.
All of these types of products need their customers to effectively have someone dedicated to curation, organization and do librarian task - to maintain a good hygiene.
Otherwise, any type of team collaboration tool will get unwieldy super fast.
There seems to be a group of nerds that's apparently pretty huge and have enough decision making power that it was able to tap into.
I know a few people at Notion, and one thing I can say is that they have taste, in the way Apple has taste. I think this shows in their product.
Notion was one of THE new tastemakers. Every startup copying their designs, now there’s AI generators to make “notion style art”. To see their new pages and additions have such clunky copyrighting is disappointing and I hope just temporary, not a sign the tastemakers have left the company.
But to give you a more substantive response, I think the tastemakers are not in control in the slightest. Everything about Notion now screams "we don't give a crap about note-taking or personal wikis, we want a piece of that juicy enterprise market".
But now that they've added a ton of features requested left and right, and effectively presented Notion as a one-stop solution to every documentation problem, I don't see much taste and elegance persisting. Not that the people you know lost their taste, more that it doesn't matter if they have to say yes to absolutely everything to keep being a one-stop solution that does it all.
In my or people started changing the way they write to stop triggering Notion features, and on the other side figjam and spreadsheet documents are coming back even as it could have been a Notion page.
There's definitely a shift IMHO. Notion will keep being used, but it might not be the first choice when other simpler options are available.
I really don't. Notion is one of those tools that entrepreneurs gravitate towards for it's simplicity, and then engineers rip out for being a parasite. At the end of the day it's an overpriced CMS that can very easily be replaced by any number of different alternatives. Their "taste" is just as overrated and overpriced as Apple's is.
Notion's main strength and stickiness imo is as a hub.
Notion is like Excel. It isn't or wasn't meant to be used in certain ways, but its simplicity and flexility meant 99% of the world is running on Excel. From SMEs to Fortune 500s. Because that is what normal non-tech users, from managers to exec know how to use and understand.
There are a lot I dont like about Notion. Mostly on performance. But I valued it a lot because that is how 70% of my team understand and can continue to work together.
The most painful part, the part that led to us switching back, was how painfully slow Notion was. Thanks to Electron, it used an obscene amount of ram, and a lot of opportunities to jot an idea down, or file something in the right place, were lost because of that slight lag.
Like being forced to cold-start Chrome to visit any website.
Knowing it would feel tedious to open Notion made me reconsider if the idea was worth writing down at all.
In some cases, it was!
a new notion is lurking somewhere waiting to ride in the wake of a growing disgruntled pile of notion users
Extra points for answers in the form of questions.
> Streamline your customer relationships with Notion's CRM Templates
It's a joke, but it's also not a joke.
I mean, come on. Is notion really pitching itself as a CRM?
It's not a CRM. Anyone who uses it as a CRM is an idiot, bluntly.
...
https://www.notion.so/use-case/crm
Oh, wait. I guess it's a supported use case. I uh... take it back... I guess...
> If you don’t want to use a dedicated CRM platform or start from a template, you can use a no-code platform like Notion to build a knowledge base or team homepage and modify it to fit your CRM needs.
Yeah, I guess some people will think that's a good idea.
Saw it happen first hand for project management: Notion started promoting the Task Board/GANTT like view of the databases as a fully supported use-case, and the bean counters came straight away to ask if we really needed a dedicated ticket management system.
As our use case was relatively simple it was borderline doable, and our dedicated system went away, even as we knew there will be rough edges. It's not great, but not bad enough to justify paying a full license price for a more polished product.
Yes it’s decluttered but it’s not a very sticky product.
I see academics going crazy with Obsidian to organize and link their precious little ideas and research articles together. But, only to create an overwhelming mess that they will be afraid to look back to in couple years.
Anybody, remember MindMap? Same idea as Obsidian and it is all but dead at this point.
I wish I had a 70 million/year mid-life crisis funded by web-based notepad.
Notion forgot that we pay monthly price so that they can keep developing their software to our benefit too
It's been somewhat maddening switching from Confluence.
Notion to me is the prime example for "too much JavaScript". Opening a note in a tab take 10 seconds and interrupts me half the time with some random news or a prompt to try some AI feature.
My favorite is to type something then /turnh3 where /turn let's you turn the block into something else.