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Comment by untech | Hacker News Reader

I’ve come to hate Notion with passion because of its abysmal performance, but I still pay for it for my small business. My non-technical employees use it as a database for clients, tasks, payments etc. I tried to research replacements several times, and still haven’t found anything good. Sometimes I wonder if I should build my own.

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Anytype (https://anytype.io), Appflowy (https://appflowy.com)

Do you use Anytype productively?

I have it installed but I find it kind of daunting compared to Notion for organizing my notes, it seems to want to be a more abstract kind of 'knowledge management system'.

I just opened it again and it popped up a 'What's New' with phrases like 'Relations are now properties' and something about 'types', 'templates', 'sets' and 'queries', I really just want to take notes and organize them in a straightforward hierarchy.

These concepts have been copied directly from Notion.

I’ve found Anytype to be more streamlined. I’m highly familiar with Notion though, so adapted easily.

Fair enough, maybe it's the way they are surfaced that makes them hard to parse to me – I may just have to give it another shot

Anytype recently made a significant change to the way certain types of information are categorized and related-- which resulted in the "What's New" note you saw. That's just unfortunate timing on your part and was a one-off change that's long been in the works. Not a regular occurrence.

I will say Anytype (and the like) can come off daunting at first, depending on your specific use case. Especially if you're just using it for notes/info/etc, I would recommend not getting too lost in examples and templates. Just make something simple for your purposes using the built-in types. (The "notes" type should suffice for you.)

Then as it evolves over time, you can expand and elaborate as needed. But trying to dive straight into the deep end and create some overarching master system right off the bat will definitely leave you feeling overwhelmed and questioning whether it's worth it.

I just gave it a try again, unfortunately I couldn't really figure it out, my issues were these:

The Notion import didn't work correctly, I've got tons of links to 'missing pages' and messed up formatting – fine, this I can live with.

I want to see my hierarchy of pages and jump through them intuitively like I would in Notion, instead on the left sidebar there is something called 'widgets', one of them is called 'Pages'. This does not show all my top level pages, instead it seems to show all pages, regardless of how 'deep down' they are, and it also only shows a maximum of 14, so it's kind of useless for me.

Same with navigating through pages, I want to be able to click through to

  /Projects/Some Project/foo/bar

And then quickly go back to 'Some Project' or 'Projects' again through a breadcrumbs style navigation at the top.

That's how the file system and Notion and most things on my computer work and I like that I don't have to think about it or learn some system to use it, it seems to me that Anytype just fundamentally doesn't work that way, it appears to treat pages (or objects) as nodes in a graph, with links and backlinks, which doesn't really fit with my way of thinking.

Not the software's fault, I'm sure some people like this style of knowledge organization but it's not for me I think.

Most intriguing thing in that vein I've seen: https://thymer.com (haven't used it, am not affiliated, just looked promising in a demo video esp. on performance grounds)

Looks like org mode for the masses

Hey thanks for mentioning us!

With Thymer we really care about performance, but Thymer is also end-to-end encrypted because we don't want to compromise on privacy. And it's real-time collaborative and offline first.

Thymer has optional self-hosting. Then you can upgrade (or not) at your own leisure, or intentionally stick to an older version you like better. Enshittification is a big problem in our industry. We've all been burned by it -- we certainly have -- and being able to opt out of a "new and improved!" version is a real feature.

Thymer will also be very extensible. Today we launched our plugin SDK: https://thymer.com/plugins and https://github.com/thymerapp/thymer-plugin-sdk/ with a bunch of examples. With Thymer you will be able to "vibe code" the very simple plugins and with VSCode/Cursor you can make more complex plugins with hot-reload.

I really like Notion’s information architecture (in particular the top index pages) and its multi-user capability.

I tried some other tools like Confluence and Obsidian but like you say, there seems to be no match from a UX perspective.

Do I love Notion? Definitely not. Would I change to another tool with the same feature set? Instantly.

If you like Obsidian and want it to be multiplayer you might be interested in Relay [0] (shameless plug).

There are also plugins like make.md [1] that are focused more on making the UX feel more like notion.

[0] https://relay.md

[1] https://github.com/make-md/makemd

Interesting product. What do you use for the backend sync? I see CRDT so I assume Y.js?

I’m building a Y.js sync server: https://github.com/nperez0111/teleportal

Yeah, we use yjs and a fork of y-sweet [0]. We have a custom-built control plane that allows us to support many different types of relay server configurations (including self hosting, multi-tenant, per-relay, per-document) and optimize for cost.

Your project looks cool -- especially sub-document support -- thanks for sharing

[0] https://github.com/no-instructions/y-sweet

I'm in the same boat. Since they decided to bundle in their AI features with their core product (at only a 30% price increase!), I've been looking for an exist route. But finding a single collaborative text editor + database designer replacement has been difficult.

> I wonder if I should build my own.

Please consider improving one of the existing open source solutions before doing this: XWiki, Nextcloud, wiki.js...

There's advanced stuff that already exists and we could use some cooperation to get better instead of another competitor in a crowded space.

(I work for XWiki SAS - you can also pay them to build what's missing for you)

NocoDB perhaps? It's not a document-focused system, but you said they use it more as a database.

https://github.com/nocodb/nocodb

There are many suggestions already let me through in one more: Affine : https://affine.pro/

You can self host too if you like. Not all features as Notion but comes very close. Seems more private too compared to Notion.

I am also looking for more private and secure Notion alternatives. My company doesn’t allow using Notion.

I like templates, tasks, scrum etc. which I use for personal use. But I am reluctant on saving any personal information in it.

Bummer performance is a problem for ya. We've worked on it a ton over the past year or two and generally performance should be much better across the board. Feel free to email me (username @ makenotion.com) if you have example pages that are slow you're willing to share. thanks!

I used a lot for organizing my personal projects, endup changing to Microsoft Loop for client stuff. And Obsidian for personal stuff.

The performance really is abysmal. I started using it years ago and the change from the early days has been drastic.

outline - https://getoutline.com is pretty good and you can import all your notion spaces too.

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