Just in case someone might need it: I reverse engineered their API and wrote (an unofficial) client for accessing the data: https://github.com/kjk/notionapi
It's for Go but one could easily port it to any other language. It's just HTTP requests and some light processing of JSON responses.
I use it so that I can have my blog content in Notion. In a daily cron job I download the data from Notion, convert it to HTML and publish on Netlify as a static website. This script is open source: https://github.com/kjk/blog
Used notion for about 6 months, but stopped for two main reasons:
1. It's extremely slow on even a new iPhone - about 6-7 seconds until I can start typing a note. By then I forget what I wanted to write. It's basically a webview of a very heavy web app, so it's not snappy at all.
Lillie from Notion here! We're working on a big release, hence the cadence has slowed down some. But we have definitely not abandoned development, nor are we being acquired :)
Bear is "just" a personal Markdown note app. No folders, no support for anything other than text/images, no collaborative editing, no support for multiple workspaces. The tag model is nice, but pretty limited.
Notion's raison d'être is collaborative, structured text: Workspaces for sharing and editing documents, with a rich set of embeddable objects (for example, you can embed Github gists and CodePens). It also has some pretty powerful Airtable-type database support where you can treat pages as records, and then view/sort/filter them in different presentation modes (gallery, board, etc.). Like Airtable, this lets you build mini apps such as task boards inside pages.
Bear's in the same space as iA Writer, Apple's Notes, etc. Notion's closest competitors are probably Google Docs, Dropbox Paper and possibly Quip and Milanote.
There’s also another competitor to those mentioned, called Coda (https://coda.io) The biggest downside they have compared to Notion is that docs are separate from each other. There’s no structured workspace. Dropbox Paper also has this problem.
I didn't know about Bear. Just had a look on their website and the application and user experience looks pretty stunning.
However, I am not quite sure it justifies paying for this service when Apple Notes has got a lot better in the past few years (I also feel confident in the privacy approach of Apple).
Out of curiosity, what features make you use Bear and not Notes? I take a lot of notes, and if something can make my life easier, I would seriously consider making the move.
Main difference to Notes is that Bear uses Markdown as the data format. It has a rare capability of converting webpages to Markdown when you save them as a note using a sharing extension on iOS. The conversion is decent.
But as mentioned above it also lacks important organisation features: no folders, no dated notes, etc.
I use notes for every bit of random stuff, things to quickly remember, et al. I keep Bear for serious writing -- researching for a blog post, documenting for a Design Sprint. I love Bear's export to multiple formats.
Lillie from Notion here again - this upcoming release is going to seriously help with speed as well as improve usage offline and on unstable connections. This is one of the reasons we've been working on it for so long!
I've tried using Notion on iOS and it feels so slow and I know it is not native because swiping back should get me back to the current page but it just refreshed the whole page. Are there plans migrating iOS to a more native one?
There is something about Notion that makes it feel very well-made and coherent. It’s one of the few apps I use with this inherent feeling of quality (off the top of my head Sublime Text/Merge, Beyond Compare, Things fall into this category of intangible greatness). Every interaction is delightful, and the app scales really well from basic note-taking to decently complex databases with grouping, filters, relations, templates and permissions. It comes with really good real-time collaboration.
On the flip side the software a bit slow to start and uses a lot of resources—it’s based on Electron, but I encourage everyone to try it (the demo on their website is cool!).
This is as close to “painting the back of the fence” as it gets.
Notion's founder here. Thank you for the kind words - we are honored :-)
To be honest, nothing we are doing is that new. Most of the ideas came from the 70s-80s (Alan Kay, Doug Engelbart, Ted Nelson...) We are just applying a fresh coat of paint.
Of course, there's still a lot more to be done to fully realize these pioneers' dreams of computing as a medium for everyone – not just programmers like us. If you are interested to learn more or work with us, feel free to message me directly at ivan at makenotion.com, or link below. We are happy to host you for lunch:
https://www.notion.so/notion/Join-Us-e7aeb157238a4603a2964b2...
I see a lot of potential for Notion and really enjoy the service, but currently it still feels a little rough. Some thoughts:
- while the browser-based webapp is mostly fine, the mobile apps feel really subpar and somewhat out of place on iPad and iPhone alike: Sluggish, slow animations, inconsistent keyboard behavior, unnecessarily large fullscreen modals on iPad - it's very noticeable that it isn't a native app. It feels like a second class citizen. I'd like to make Notion a central part of my daily, essential tools - similarly to an app like Things. Unfortunately the difference in user experience is night and day. Please consider developing native apps.
- this is a very minor issue, but since I often use Notion as a note taking tool the rigid separation of paragraphs into multiple isolated content blocks is rather annoying. It leads to side effects like "Select all" on iOS actually not select all, but just the current block/paragraph. I think text, regardless of the number of paragraphs or format, should be one single block until it's actually interrupted by inline data structures like tables or galleries.
Other than that I love the idea of your service, which can turn a blank canvas into a simple text document or a fully featured Airtable-like application, or anything inbetween.
I also have similar issues with the text processing.
I like the model they use that everything is a block - you get predictable behaviour, but I do think the normal shortcut for select all should select a page, and that I should be able to select text from multiple paragraphs using keyboard commands (if you do ctrl+shift+arrow you get stuck at the edge of a block).
What do you find wrong with the search? It's pretty good for me, except one day where the indexing must have screwed up and it was ignoring the thing I knew was there.
It is impressive that your work is directly on top of the work done by the guy who invented the mouse, the guy who invented smalltalk and so on. Are you sure there were no inventions in between?
I downloaded the app months ago for my Mac but honestly forgot I even had it installed until I read this thread. I use the website every day just fine. There’s no need for the app.
I use Linux, am a heavy Notion user through the web app and I'm very happy. I'm not sure why people would want the desktop apps (I do use the android app for a bit of on he go reading and adding images).
Say what you will about Electron apps that use excessive resources and lack native touches, but they are definitely not “as close to painting the back of the fence as it gets.”
That Jobs-ism was specifically about caring about the internals of a product that nobody looks at, but you know are there.
This has been downvoted so let me expand on this. I am not judging Electron so please relax.
The Steve Jobs quip about painting the back of the fence sought to explain why the Apple II and Mac teams cared so much about the inside of the box and even signed it. It's why they invested so much in the OS X internals and stuck with a native focus that helped iOS be so fast and nimble out of the gate on extremely resource-constrained mobile devices. That's "painting the back of the fence."
It is a very distinct concept from focusing on user-visible details, which I think is what you're referencing here. That's still the front of the fence. Back of the fence is the fine touches on the unseen internals, but reflect a general care and pride in your craft that will probably pay off in the long run.
"And while sacrifices were often made of money, time and frustration, users of Apple products often reaped the rewards."[1] This is definitely not the Electron approach. It's about taking the extra time and care to do it native. You can chose that path or not, but understand what this very important element of Apple's philosophy means because it affects so much of the past couple decades of our industry.
Having built an electron app with linux support: it takes time and effort to get it right, you have to come up with a different updating strategy than windows/mac, and they might not have many users on linux at the moment (low priority).
It's not as simple as "add a flag to build linux." There's a little bit more to it.
Some people like to have things in separate apps (even if they are not native) just so you can open and close it quicker than finding it in your tabs or getting distracted by all the other content open in your browser.
Yes it matters. I could write a WebKit2 wrapper for the webapp in 10 minutes just so I can treat it a like a standalone app and not just another tab.
If it's electron, give me linux.
I honestly never use their Electron app, even though I have it installed. One thing about Electron apps is that they also usually work great in the browser :)
I really like Notion and have this same feeling. The app being Electron is a really big bummer for me, though. Performance is terrible on my Android phone. I really want to ditch Evernote but nothing seems to compare still.
Lillie from Notion here! We're improving our speed and performance across the board. We're also still working on features that Evernote has to make the transition easier, stay tuned ;)
I am a paying customer and it has always stand out for me in terms of UX. The only problem I see is that sometimes when I am editing a page I need to use the mouse because the keyboard just does not work in the way I am used to. This is a huge UX pain and I don't understand how didn't they fix it yet.
The "quality" feeling of sublime app for me is majorly undermined by the constant nagging popups to pay for it. so many other services I happily pay for and somehow sublime has made me not want to pay for their services.
If you'd happily pay for it without the popups, why didn't you pay for it the first time the popup appeared? Would've saved you a lot of annoyance, no?
You know it goes away if you buy it, right? I own Sublime and honestly the nag is so NOT-annoying that I have more than one instance of sublime where I simply haven't bothered to enter the code
Hmm, I cannot seem to create an account without sharing my Google contacts; which I see no need to do and it's needless friction.
I get into a loop of clicking checkbox "I don't want to share my Google contacts", then being rerouted back to login page and requested approval to share my contacts.
Pricing wise, I wish these types of apps didn't have such a steep escalation as soon as I want to share. $4 for individual, but $8/team member, which means wanting to share this with my wife is four times as expensive as just using it myself, with limited to no appreciable improvement.
Same here — I cannot create an account with a password. If you try to go in and do an email signup, they will punish you for it by emailing you every time with a new password, until you suffered enough that you'll relent and give them access to your Google account.
Not a great first impression — especially not after their support tells me that this is for my own security.
I use Notion with a non google e-mail and don't mind the password being e-mailed to me. I have to re-auth maybe once a month, tops, and it's one less password to manage.
It is an extremely frustrating practice (emailing you the password). I find that I have to go through this every few days for whatever reason and I've had cases where the email from Notion took five minutes to arrive.
> wanting to share this with my wife is four times as expensive as just using it myself, with limited to no appreciable improvement.
I would hardly say "no appreciable improvement". IMHO it's appropriate to price products based on the value derived, not the effort to implement each incremental "feature". And the ability to share is the most human feature. We are social creatures. To share and collaborate and be relational is to be human :)
So the price jump feels fair to me. We can get near full-knowledge of the product at a reduced price point, but to be human with the tool, we get hit with the real cost :)
EDIT: I also don't like the actual pricing structure, but that's only because I would rather participate in co-operative systems, and dislike capitalist ones. The above comment is my putting myself in their shoes :)
I absolutely agree with your general principle, as I read it: price is not necessarily determined by your cost (which goes up only incrementally with added users), but by the value (what the customer is willing to pay, which may go up more significantly).
Specifically, however, I am indicating by my post that I'm not willing to pay 4x the price, for privilege of sharing - it does not have that value to me and it's not where my expectations were level-set :).
[I currently use ToDoist which makes it easier to start (no privileges/contact sharing required) and add guest-editors/share]
My post is meant to provide feedback: I'm currently not trying their product (and I've explicitly provided why - the seemingly minor request to share my contacts), and I may not become paying customer once I figure out a way to try it (because the jump to my desired level of service is too high). It is up to the developers, if they read it, to gauge how representative I am of the target audience and therefore how relevant my concerns are; I'm assuming somebody like Pateo11 would quickly setup A/B switch - signup with and without asking for contact permissions, and see the impact :)
ABsolutely; putting a maximum cap of 4-5 makes it a nice distinguishable offering; and it probably doesn't need same features as small workgroup, so they can differentiate on features (artificially or not:).
Note: Notion's free plan actually provides unlimited users. But it only allows 1000 "blocks" (a heading, paragraph, file etc. counts as a block), so I imagine two users sharing notes would run out of space fast.
At approximately 14:00EST, clicking on "Get Started", then inputting a gmail address, offered ability to login via Google; then, request for contact permission. There was no way to avoid it.
As of right now, 16:22EST, that behaviour is different and I'm no longer seeing the prompt. I've tried different computers & laptops/browsers, to ensure it's not some cached/cookied experience, but it _appears_ the actual request is no longer being sent. Not sure!
There is a way around that. First of all, if you and your wife have two free accounts and share workspace subtrees with each other, you can double the free content limit.
And if you pay for just one personal account, you can still share content with a free account. This is very close to having two people sharing one paid account, feature-wise.
Its really easy to sign up for a Google account for stuff like this, and I have multiple accounts on gmail anyways in case I dont want to share my important personal email.
Agreed, but -- Ironically, one of the reasons I don't want to share my contacts is that I did use the Google Account I use for commercial tryouts... so there'd be no value in Notion.so having access to the contacts, let alone spamming me with any potential "helpful" tips or contacts or recommendations based on such contacts :P
Android would actually leave you in a much better position than Windows or macOS here, since the app has to at least go to the trouble of enumerating and requesting the permissions it wants. PC operating systems don't typically sandbox desktop apps by default, so the Windows/macOS versions of this would have free reign over anything accessible by your user.
On the latest version of macOS (Mojave), applications need to request the users’ permission before accessing photos, emails, webcam, microphone, calendars, and contacts, like how they do on iOS.
I am uncomfortable to put all personal thoughts, diaries, etc into a non-self-hosting place.
Can they dockerize this and sell that so I can self-host the docker image instead?
for people that is not tech-savvy, what about they buy a docker-container-hosted-by-the-vendor-company but can encrypt the contents in a way that nobody else can peek into the content ever?
It looks like they use FullStory, so employees can probably see everything you're doing. I'd be surprised if they were recording without ever watching the recordings.
(FullStory records what you do in your browser. It records all DOM elements, so all your data is being recorded and sent to a 3rd party.)
Not that it should be necessary, notion should not be violating you're privacy by default, but at least uBlock/uMatrix block the entire fullstory domain by default.
In the EU they are by law. In reality not all websites disclose all services they share data with though. And all users click accept in the cookie pop-up anyway.
Have you seen those pop ups with a button to consent to cookies and a link to a privacy page where usage of 3rd party services like Fullstory has to be disclosed? That's your opt-in.
If it’s like Matomo’s opt-out system, that cookie is required – it’s the very thing that turns on the opt-out.
When you opt-out of Matomo, the message warns that “if you clear your cookies, delete the opt-out cookie, or if you change computers or Web browsers, you will need to perform the opt-out procedure again”.
Matomo also honours the browser’s DNT setting, which is a) nice and b) rare.
There's a reason nobody really does this: there's just no money in it. Nylas mail is a good example of this: it offered the ability to self-run it and pay them for the license, but nobody really did. I wonder what they would need to charge to make it feasible? $1000 a year? It makes me pretty sad, but it's just such a distraction for a company of Notion's size and stage.
On-prem enterprise software does make money. You still charge money for it either way. A few examples: Github Enterpise, JIRA, etc.
And notion doesn't need to see their users data to charge money for a service. They could engineer it to be E2E encrypted for the group and not have the ability to see their customers data even with a subpoena.
Enterprise is the key word here. Much more companies care about having control over their infrastructure. As for Notion, I guess even on Hacker News only a small share of users would care enough.
It's possibly something many of us should care more about, though.
Suppose your company handles a fair bit of confidential information, and some of that information ends up in Notion as part of your general project management workflow. Now you've got to worry about Notion experiencing a data breach, and whether or not that breach could get you in hot water with your clients, or even into legal trouble.
With on-prem options, you can gain a little extra confidence, because it can all live behind a firewall instead of being directly exposed to the Internet at large.
This started with the idea of a personal on-prem solution, which is probably not worth the cost to maintain for the company. I mean, how much is it worth to you to have an on-prem personal solution for a diary? Because that's the worry... people are afraid that their household budget or their database that tracks the content of various adult films or whatever is going to get exposed. That's mostly about embarrassment, not actual harm. That's not something worth hundreds of dollars a month to most people.
And really, if I want to write down my deep dark thoughts where no one will read them, I'll use paper.
Personal users want E2E encyrption, so it doesn't matter who is running the server. And most users do not have the skill to run their own server. The technically advanced can just use the enterprise version if they really care about personal on prem.
Maybe we should change the notion that it's difficult to deploy an on prem service.
Why can't it be as simple as containerizing it and presenting it exactly like your would install an app on your phone, with the same possibility to grant permissions? App store provides automatic OTA updates so you don't have to bother about security. And the app itself should not have internet connectivity, connectivity is provided through authenticated tunnel into the container so the app cannot phone home in the background, you can only connect into it using the tunnel with your own password.
Even if you have the skill, is it worth the time to do on-prem, considering, you know, a pen and paper?
(Full disclosure: I'm a total bullet journaling convert. Given a choice between giving up my bullet journal and giving up Google Calendar/Docs and Trello, I'd give up the online stuff in a heartbeat.)
> It's possibly something many of us should care more about, though.
Definitely, but I'd argue that even with containers etc., we don't yet have the capabilities to make what we know is right, as easy to operate as SaaS.
> Suppose your company handles a fair bit of confidential information, and some of that information ends up in Notion as part of your general project management workflow.
Many folks that post to HN seem to miss this even though they are probably very technically capable. Many IT people in small/medium organizations don't have the time to consider this. Sometimes relationships with big organizations force this reality and threats get addressed, but it's not the norm. Most IT managers are under pressure to cut costs, reduce staff, modify accounting (review vs capital budgets), coexist with shadow IT, etc. Cloud solutions seem fantastic to them, and they don't have the energy to fight with someone in marketing who introduces a rogue solution because they don't understand how the current Wiki works.
I think that's pretty common, so I don't disagree entirely. It can also be the case that you have increasing numbers of tech-savvy folks who feel that they can build their own tech solutions, but aren't actually equipped to build/select something that is equipped to serve the needs of their team or the organization.
This can result in the team being left holding the baby when certain individuals leave, data loss, security issues etc. In 15+ years of enterprise probably two-thirds of the time I've seen this issues and it has been predictable that it would work out this way, but IT didn't help themselves by pretending their solution was better. When IT tries to learn and adopts the tool, or incorporates the needs then things work out better. But, that's only a third of the time.
Well, then we should create open-source analog of notion. I actually was itching wondering what could I create in OSS realm. Probably will have a look at this task :)
That seems to be pretty hard. I just finished a long search for an Open Source one-page markdown editor (no split windows for preview and editing): the closest I could find was an editor called MarkText but even that doesn’t have half the functionality of Notion or Dropbox Paper. It’s hard to compete with fully funded and devoted teams.
Bitwarden offers self-hosting as one of their paid perks (Docker image and documentation included), in addition to a free tier. It may not be viable as the only business model, but I appreciate that they cater to the small number of people that will make use of it and I imagine the token of goodwill does something for the product as a whole.
Bitwarden is a niche application which handles very sensitive data. Value is created when it is hosted internally by a security sensitive organization.
When it comes to business and productivity applications the situation is very different. Many IT admins are tasked with moving to cloud (or other outsourced) solutions. When you see posts you have to realize you, or I, who value autonomy and control may not be the expected customer of these solutions.
To reduce the economics further:
* Startups like this have a product which may not have a complete market fit or reknown. They can't build something that's most likely to stick e.g. a required mail system because a couple of cloud products own the market. Therefore, they move up the productivity stack to team and document collaboration.
* Since they aren't a mature product and will likely change it considerably in the short-term, possibly "firing" customers as they search for a bigger market, they'll need their product to keep up. If they host it, then they can change it end-to-end.
* Any time you release a product that gets deployed on-prem it's virtually impossible to get people to update in a timely manner. Even if you decide to provide an on-prem version to a potentially huge customer, the enterprise sales cycle means that there is a risk your product will have changed before it gets deployed, but some person/process will prevent you get updated to the latest version as they advocate for a competitor.
* Worse, they like the old version and want to stay on it. How do you support these on-prem customers? They liked the value at your cloud pricing, but the cost to support on-prem customers can be much larger.
I miss the days when you could buy a piece of software -- like, physically buy a license that allows you to use it in perpetuity on your own terms. Then, if you want to pay for some hosted features, it makes sense to have a subscription. But the default cloud subscription dependency business plan immediately turns me off to any product. I've got too many damn subscriptions, and I can't take on any more.
I see the same problem with many products nowadays. There is a whole part of the economy following this and I wonder how so many users can cope with it.
Examples:
- Adobe (PS, ID, AI,...) all cloud + subscription model since CS6 is gone
- Music (Spotify & Co)
- Movies/Series (Netflix, Amazon,...)
And there is many more not only focused on software products. That is why I pirate stuff first and then try to buy something that offers value to me (like vinyl from bands I like to hear) while supporting the real minds behind the work (I don't like companies just (ab)using their power for profit like amzn without delivering real value themselves).
> For a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem. From Windows or Mac, this FTP account could be accessed through built-in software.
tbf I think the "I don't want to entrust all my notes to a startup that might not be here next year" issue is more relevant to the average person than "but surely you could roll your own if you were a desktop Linux user". On the other hand, I agree normal users don't want software to stick in docker containers, they want a nice friendly GUI that also happens to backup copies of their data somewhere they might be able to access them with another programme if the company ends their incredible journey.
One of the best things about Dropbox as an early adopter was knowning that if they died or got acquihired, you still had one or more local copies of everything you'd ever uploaded to them.
Oh, I agree that even Google isn't immune to "sunsetting" useful products. But I'd still rate files on my Google Drive as being a lot more likely to be still usable in 5 years time than a service from someone with a few million dollars in Series A funding to get big or die trying.
With https://collect-app.com I'm indeed trying to build such a tool that is not requiring any service and giving you back 100% of privacy and data control, right now. But it is in a very early state yet. But I would love to get some feedback on the idea.
I've been looking for a Personal Knowledge Manager for a while (and been thinking about creating one). Feel free to message me if you're considering open sourcing or releasing it.
That sounds like a good feature - I think the app is trying to replace current jira etc functionality for now, is that something that Jira and other offer?
Jira has a self hosted version at very reasonable price ($10 one time for small teams with a single server up to $500k per year for high availability setups with >50k users).
The same is true for all other Atlassian products.
The next tier is 25 users for $2500. So it went from $1 per user to $100 per user.
JIRA is, by its nature, a multi-user software. The $10 for 10 users is clearly engineered to get small teams to commit to using it and then squeeze them when they grow.
That is a reasonable strategy for what is a product for companies i.e. enterprise software.
It wouldn't work for a product that is primarily for people who are paying from their own pocket, like, I assume, everyone here that expressed the want for a self-hosted version.
In a personal use case you more than likely stay below 10 users forever. If you are a company paying multiple employees 2500 should be easy to justify: that's 25 users at 10$/month for Jira Cloud would cost you 2500 in 10 months, with hosted Jira it's just a one time payment
Notion is a hierarchical note-taker/wiki with some additional features like simple databases, task lists etc.
They are not the same kind of software.
Also, you can link notion pages. They have a block element that is a link to another page and for inline links you can use the regular link (each notion page has its unique, stable url).
Notion does but it's not well implemented. If you copy a link to a notion document and paste it in another it does create a link. Wish they made it a little more well defined though (I don't want to copy a link and paste it).
I love the product, but the login workflow is awful. Why innovate on logins? We've solved that problem.
Specifically, the login is a randomly-generated one-time code sent to your email address. Notion says this is more secure than them storing a username+password, but that's a dubious argument. They've also said this is two-factor auth (lolno). A side effect of this is that Notion is unusable on my mobile device since I have no email on it.
I really hope they implement a more traditional login system. Until then, I'm sticking with Evernote. :(
They imply that the login is 2FA-protected because your email or Google account can be 2FA-protected, and they're piggybacking off that...
Having passwords means storing them correctly and still implementing some form of reset -- and if email is a weak point, they would have to 2FA prompt you to reset your password, or not use magic links, or handle such issues out-of-band. They're probably trying to avoid auth/password support by outsourcing this function to Google for the time being.
I agree though, the user experience that is hardest-hit by this is mobile, where iOS now supports much better integration with password managers than was allowed previously...
Thanks for telling me this. I will definitely avoid Notion now. I want a username/password combo at the very least, both different for every site I use, and preferably with TOTP as well. I never want my email to be used for security purposes as it is among the most hackable target out there.
Yeah dude someone might go through the trouble of hacking your email just so they can find your todo page with an unchecked checkbox for feeding your goldfish.
You have no idea what they want to put in their Notion account. And so what if they want to have high security for something you deem trivial? You gain nothing by being an asshole about it.
Ugh you reminded me why I never went all-in with Notion. Having to remember what email I signed up with every time I need to log in is super annoying (as it doesn't seem to trigger my browser's autofill dialogue).
Yeah, Medium does this same thing and it makes me hate logging in so I'm rarely in the account I pay for. Especially since Medium makes you log in seemingly every few days.
> A side effect of this is that Notion is unusable on my mobile device since I have no email on it.
It’s unusable for me as well, but for a similar reason on the computer. When I’m on a computer, the last thing I want is to be forced to login to email for a code since I use web based email (which I don’t keep open all the time). Even if I were to use a desktop client, I wouldn’t have it kept open all the time.
I actually love their login, but it's not for the reason you would think. They expire the session very frequently which has been an annoyance for me, so log-in with the magic link has been faster than digging for the password through my manager.
If you like Notion but are looking for something open source, similarly polished and more wiki-focused then this will be up your street - http://getoutline.com
We've been building it for 2 years, happy to answer questions.
Looks great, except I cannot use it because, I don't have a google company account nor a slack account. It seems that self-hosting solution requires those accounts too.
I previously tried to sign up via a Google account but it required a 'company Google account' - I was slightly confused about the reasoning behind this.
It's designed for teams, Google auth is used to avoid having to manage invites etc. If you could sign in with any old Google account then it would introduce a class of problems with having to manage invites / user management / accidental duplicate teams.
Having said that, I do think it would be cool if signing in with your personal gmail account gave you a personal non-team wiki.
I've been looking for something similar for a while now, and I love the fact that it can be self-hosted. Is there any way to easily disable the Google / Slack auth integration in favour of something local, for small self-hosted installs? I'm trying to reduce external dependencies (and specifically dependencies on Google).
On the integration side of things I'd wish for GitLab and other chats (don't like slack).
I'm afraid it's not easy to test your app without Slack/G+ Account and would be grateful if the project could "open to the free software world" a little more.
Thank you either way for sharing and keep up the good work!
Definitely, with the syntax support it's just a matter of balancing bundle size – need to figure out a way to dynamically load the language syntax and then we can add all of the languages
For me, Notion replaced Evernote and I haven't looked back. Three features that have been particularly useful for personal productivity are
1) explicit support for Kanban board-ing tasks and similar to-do management
2) collapsible blocks
3) substantially smoother linking to, or embedding, notes within notes
Notion is just as sleek as Evernote for small independent notes, but these two features allow Notion to scale much better for projects that require an inter-related network of notes with substantial breadth and depth.
I hard-swapped to Notion from Evernote about a ~month ago. The Markdown support is excellent, and I really like:
- The "database" type that give a table view over child pages has been great for organizing recipes. I can quickly filter by {protein, core ingredients, cooking time, etc}
- The same again for blog posts
- Free-form writing for talks & other notes
- Shared to-do lists, which I used for organizing an apartment move w/ my partner
- Search works great - across titles, labels and document content - with a quick Ctrl+P.
- The web-app is fantastic. The Electron app on Windows is solid, although sometimes takes a while to sync after being minimized for a while.
Being able to export everything into a reasonable format was a requirement for me, and they've had that for a while. I'm OK with having "some" element of lock-in for the convenience, provided I can get my data out in a structured format. There's _always_ a risk something might be deprecated or shutdown.
Edit: After testing, seems not too bad. Reconciles non-conflicting edits just fine. But apparently, in the iOS app, search doesn't work in offline mode!
Edit 2: It seems like "attachments" (files like PDFs, and also images) are not stored offline, either. In the iOS app, clicking on a file or image brings up an S3 URL inside an embedded web browser.
I use search way less in Notion than Evernote due to the ability to hierarchically organize notes in a manner that better matches my mental map, to the point where it's hard for me to comment on the quality of search in Notion. I haven't had any complaints with it during the occasional times I have used search though.
Notion is now becoming a lot more like coda. I love how Coda exposes tabular data in a programmable way (but programmable as in easier than spreadsheets). It also even has API access: https://coda.io/developers/apis/v1beta1
Airtable was really bad for me compared to Notion. The rich text support is the primary but not only problem. I can't speak to the others, but Airtable is a really bad alternative.
Same, I tinkered around a bit and so far really like the semi-free form nature of how this looks and feels, plus the dirt simple, out of your way/distraction free interface is something that could easily line up with how I scribble down notes in my pocket journal, but am averse to signing up to another account somewhere for my obsessive checklisting and note-taking.
I'd gladly pay for a desktop application of this where I kept all of my notes and todos with local persistence that I could backup, migrate and move (similar to something like Notational Velocity), I like this, but I guess so far OneNote remains my personal champ in this regard-even though I have to tie it to OneDrive across my pc and surface.
Edit:
Although feverishly refreshing the thread and looking at all the praise...maybe I'll give it a more thorough shot for a couple of weeks.
This is one thing I've wanted. A local app that lets me store all my data with markdown syntax, syntax highlighting, in local files and directories, specifically for macOS although a cross platform app would be fine. One that doesn't require an account or the internet at all for it to work. I've wanted this kind of app for many years (and wouldn't be opposed to making it if no existing solution is all that great at it).
Emacs with org mode, helm, and projectile as a starting point would hit all of your asks (although org syntax has differences from markdown, it's still quite intuitive).
I use org mode for: my tasks (gtd style), food log (using org columns), notes (easy export to any other format), habits. Alongside beorg for iOS for quick capturing on the go, I cannot imagine I would be any happier elsewhere.
Same here, org-mode is going nowhere, it's one of those things that just works. From wikis, todos, document authoring, agendas, code notebook, ...
On mobile, there's a few options, I made one, a web app called filestash: https://demo.filestash.app/s/hn . It has a lot of the org mode candies: agenda, todos, and the real org-mode exporters: HTML, PDF, Markdown, TXT, Latex, iCal, ODT and even beamer
I’ve been using Quiver for a few years, and love it. Totally replaced Evernote for me. Not sure if they have syntax highlighting though — there is a “code” cell, but I haven’t used it.
I also use Quiver, I just wish I could have my notes on my Android phone. No one has yet brought together quite everything -- there's always tradeoffs between the various note apps, even though there doesn't have to be.
Been using it for a work journal for a while, and it's pretty reasonable. I used to use RedNotebook before that, but I finally got fed up with the lack of Markdown syntax.
Bootsnote and Joplin works great for notes, but Joplin was less than ideal last time I checked. Hugo is really the tool I think will get me closest to what I'm looking for.
Because the way it backs up your files isn't symbolic with the file system. The Hugo template I'm working on does this for you. Their are some minor annoyances, but it is the most powerful tool that I know of to get setup quickly. Wish there was some more standardization around Templates though, and the ability to do custom output templates for section lists that create paginated sections of content based on grouping, custom parameters and more. Best thing is it is all managed in a logical folder (section) and file (page) hierarchy and so far I've just about got a infinitely nested template setup with paginated sections and pages throughout, with the ability to add custom paginated sections using specific layouts for custom sections.
It's a bit less than ideal, overall. I would like to see you be able to assign a custom output format, so for each index and section kinds it would be nice to automatically create paginated sections that you want for specific layouts. I've tried this and it only sort of works, but expects them to be the pages as your lists.html or index.html, and can't paginate a path.
Also, built in client-side search. I'm working on Mermaid.js, Chart.js and Reveal.js short-code integration next.
It sounds like a private git repo would suite you fine. You'll only need an internet connection to update when you've made changes on a different device.
I'm pretty happy with Gollum (https://github.com/gollum/gollum/wiki) for this. Your data is just a Git repository containing a hierarchy of files. You run Gollum to fire up a local web server, which gives you a wiki interface to view and edit any Markdown files in the hierarchy. You can use a local Markdown editor if you prefer, as long as you commit your changes. You can choose whether to run Gollum all the time and expose the server to others, or just launch it locally when you want to browse your own repository. And you can use Git to create, push and pull branches.
Gollum also seems to have powerful customisation features like macros and YAML front matter, but I have yet to make use of them. For now, Gollum suits me as a simple, free alternative to Confluence. Notion is obviously a far more powerful product.
Why is it every time something like Notion is mentioned, there is always someone who wants "local, self-hosted, Markdown"? Just build it yourself.
This clearly shows you have no understanding of the product at hand. Notion is so incredibly powerful that Markdown doesn't even scratch the surface here.
I'd prefer a local or self-hosted product because when the innevitable "incredible journey" blog post comes out, I don't want to have to try and migrate everything to a new service. If I've paid for a product, I can at least keep using it as-is when the company goes under.
Many people care about things such as "what is this company doing with the data I store with them?"
And many people don't have the time or skill to "just build it yourself," so when something awesome like this comes along that looks really appealing, you get people asking for self-hosted options.
Friends don't let friends use web apps. Aside from privacy concerns, relying on someone else's server functioning and being forced to use whatever the newest "improved" version are all strikes against em. Who needs another login collected by someone else (so trustworthy) that you fill with credentials that will be stolen in a hack revealed a few years down the line? There's never any real consequences for service providers. It's best not to use new web services for anything important.
You can either log-in with Google account (which you most likely already have) or via 2fa mechanism where they send an expiring login link to your e-mail address.
There are no password and therefore nothing to hack.
Having no password doesn't mean it can't be hacked. Maybe Notion won't end up in a haveibeenpwned email, but that only addresses half of a single one out of three of my objections to web applications.
Exactly... I've started building something using Hugo that does all this. That way you can create a calendar section, and then use front-matter to define the calendar entries in that section. It even creates an ICS for each item and a calendar for the entire section.
Markdown and front-matter does scratch the surface, and I do have an understanding of the product. It just isn't what I'm looking for. I care about my data and having it accessible, even outside of the application. I like organizing my content using directories for sections, and files for pages. I don't want everything saved to the cloud using a database. I want to use local files and front-matter to create content, and Hugo does this... I've started building what I'm looking for already.
Markdown is a fileformat, while Notion is an interface which can utilize this fileformat. I don't see anything in notion which I could not fit in that fileformat and some folder-structure.
The problem is that making a good interface is a though and long task. It's not done with crapping something together which then barfs out some file. That's people just can't build it themself, because it would be months and years to reach a good quality.
The demand for local&selfhosted on the other side is clear: people don't trust the companies. Companies peek into your data, sell them to other, or just disappear one day. With something under your control this will not happen.
You're pointing out that there seems to be this unmet demand for a self-hosted markdown based product. Rather than wonder why people keep asking for that, maybe you should include those features in whatever it is that you are building.
Maybe the demand is from the worst kind of users a business would want, those that would never convert to actual customers but want something for to tinker and install for free...
those that would never convert to actual customers but want something for to tinker and install for free...
There also might be a valid demand from those who would want to use the features of a collaboration suite like this for internal projects but find themselves beholden to internal or even client-demanded security/data retention policies.
It's surprising that I (for personal use) and my company (commercial use) would be willing to pay good money for the ability to run this app on-prem?
Personal data notwithstanding we have data we put in our company wiki that is simply not allowed to be hosted on cloud services without lots of red tape and compliance certifications. Offering a on-prem option, at least for us, pushes all that responsibility onto our ops team, and Notion gets paid about the same but without the hosting costs.
But that’s fine. My company can easily afford a few tens of thousands per month for the on-prem version.
If the on-prem version does not exist, I’ll never even try to convince them to switch, since we aren’t going to store anything sensitive on someone elses infrastructure.
So we stick with Confluence. Which everyone hates, but is still the best solution around.
I'm not sure I understand your math. The support burden is very real but why would the pricing be anything other than $premium/user/month with tiers based on support requirements?
Self-hosting nerds like myself would be able to get by on a no-support 'community edition' for like $10-15/mo.
Business is not synonymous with 'subscription model.' It's good for people to express their desire for on-prem, one-time payment products. Maybe the market can find a middle rather than the utter domination of subscription services.
For those just discovering Notion, it's one of the most liberating tools I've ever used, because it offers just enough complexity to configure it however you want, while still remaining simple on the surface. I just love that I can mould it around how my brain works. I wrote this guide that might be useful for anyone else in understanding its power and what you can do with it: https://medium.com/@ow/the-writers-ultimate-guide-to-notion-...
After trying many different things over the years, I wrote this: http://onemodel.org (yes I plan to move to https sometime). You can think of it something like a personal wiki + emacs org-mode, very efficient, keyboard-oriented, using postgres, but with a much larger vision than today's features, including sharing (linking/copying securely) between instances, and computability of the info for things like anki-like features. Self-hosted now but open to hosting for others. The most current code is in github (AGPL). Comments/questions very welcome, preferably via the mailing list; be patient if my answers are slow. The lists are currently low-volume, and the announcements list should always be.
(It can store files, but isn't especially smooth about it yet. For personal notes of all kinds, it is the most efficient, effective, flexible thing I know of. The FAQs link to a discussion comparing it with emacs org-mode and others. It has fulltext search, some finicky but very functional import/export, a nice numbered-outline export to text, and a journal/activity log.)
I have noted to look at Notion, and Trillium, to see how much they overlap and if we can collaborate. I have been quite slow lately though, hoping to get more done sometime relatively soon.
I used Notion for a significant period but ended up switching to Nuclino [1] - which is identical in many respects, but without the various add-ons that are unnecessary if you're working with text/images.
I've found it to be more responsive, and to my tastes, it has a better UI. I'm not a big fan of the emoji/blank file image that is necessary with every Notion entry.
Notion looks great, and I've been hoping to migrate it. There are two big problems.
One is the migration path from Evernote. If you look at all the current notetaking apps, none of them seem to have capitalized on the fact that there are lots of unhappy Evernote users out there who would kill for a smooth, painless migration path. Instead, these apps ask you to export your Evernote notes as HTML, something which Evernote only lets you do for a single notebook at a time. I have lots of individual notebooks, so this would take forever. Plus, you lose folders and images this way. Why not just write a small app that scrapes the whole Evernote database? Last I checked, it's an SQLite database!
The other is the lack of offline search. This isn't a dealbreaker, but it seems pretty suspect for an app like this. Losing cell service completely is one thing, but shouldn't it be "offline indexing first" anyway? Obviously it has all my notes synced at all times. I want the search to be lightning fast even if I'm on a slow connection.
It seems like "attachments" (files like PDFs, and also images) are not stored offline, either. In the iOS app, clicking on a file or image brings up an S3 URL inside an embedded web browser.
The database is evernotes internal structure, and can change. The HTML at least is their official export and somewhat stable. I bet when you search on github you will find some scripts converting the database into html. But for a company it might be to much hassle to maintain such a tool.
This should be the bread and butter of a company like this, no matter how much hassle the technical implementation details are. In today's world, getting people to bootstrap a completely new app with content is a very hard ask. Want customers? Have great onboarding.
A company has always thousands of imporant tasks which they should do. But ressources are limited, so most of them simply can't be done. This task here is nice on paper, but in reality just a minimal enhancement over the existing solution.
Notion is just awesome and I have been using it for 6 months now. It's the only app I have used so far that feels like a text editor and despite covering so many use-cases, excels at each of them and outdoes individual apps made for that specific purpose.
Tools I have replaced with Notion:
- Todos & Planning: Evernote, Workflowy, Text Files.
I also use it for pros and cons lists, inspirations and moodboards for design and so on.
One thing that would be quite helpful in Notion is to have some sort of "marketplace" where users can share pre-made templates. I am not sure if they have an API for extensions yet, but that would be awesome.
I haven't really experienced that but if I had, that would make me quit on the product. I use it on my MacBook and Hackintosh Desktop, and perhaps there's lag on other platforms but I haven't used them.
You might wanna add codeBeamer from http://www.Intland.com to your list.
This one can be self hosted and probably has the largest capabilities of any of the mentioned tools. It’s web based and has a good UI that you can get familiar with in 10 minutes while easy to configure and administrate. Think: Agile team planning + Project Management + Dashboard + Wiki + Documents Management + Requirements Engineering + Workflow Engine + Database
+1 for having a native linux client. I'm not sure what the process would be, but being electron based I can't imagine it being extremely hard. Right now I'm using https://github.com/sysdrum/notion-app to basically wrap a browser instance. But there's a very noticeable performance difference between this hacky solution and my friends native electron client on MacOS. Especially on my heavier pages with lots of photos. Notion has completely changed my life and workflow, but I feel like I'm starting to run up against the limits of what I can do on the operating system I'm on. I even considered reaching out to CodeWeavers the makers of Crossover to see what it would take to make a linux port, but it seems like I actually have to be the owner of the app being ported for that to be an option.
I haven't tried it in firefox, I'll definitely give it a look. Using it in chrome however, the performance feels the same as the hacky electron wrapped version. I notice it the most when switching between two heavy pages or trying to get to the bottom of a page I have 50+ pictures saved to. But it's useful for me to still have it register as a separate application in case I ever need to kill chrome for some reason. Or for organizing it across my different desktops.
We use it to keep track of all
Of our tasks and projects. Switched to it after getting annoyed with Asana and not wanting to use something like Jira. We love how freeform it is and allowed us to create a workflow that fit us.
There are some gripes I have with it, notifications are still hit or miss despite talking to support about it multiple times - they’ll be delayed or missed altogether if you’ve recently opened the iOS app or have the desktop app open on another computer. Search still needs some love. It should probably weigh recently opened pages higher. And I’d love it if the Mac app was native instead of electron based.
Their team is pretty responsive when messaging them so that’s a huge plus.
After downloading the mac app and signing up with google I got an email from google saying
Security Alert: New device signed in to my@email.com
This is a concern. How are they doing the signup that google is not recognising my computer? When signing up as there is no redirect to a google sign in page, for all I know they have just created a fake google sign in page and stolen my credentials.
I'm concerned about the privacy of this service. Do company employees have (or are able to get) access to users' private data? Is there any data mining in use?
They encrypt your data at rest, have their stuff audited by a third party quarterly, and give the employees some amount of security training.
The thing I am curious about is that to log in, you don't have a password. Rather, then send a temporary login code to your email address. Not sure how I feel about that.
It's safer than email + password. Every email + password combination I'm familiar with allows you to reset password by having a link sent to your email, which means that access to email is always considered the ultimate association of identity.
This just removes the email + password altogether and requires that you have explicit access to the email. So it takes the end-all-be-all access criteria of the other solution, but removes the possibility of them being able to have a weak password, and also removes the issue of them having to store and transport passwords.
It's less safe than email + password. Someone can break into your email with email + password, or you can forget it logged in and they have your Notion automatically, so it has the same problems email + password have, plus some more.
In case anyone is interested in a similar open source solution that can be self hosted I can recommend Trilium (https://github.com/zadam/trilium). It was also recently featured on HN. I since host it on my private server and it works like a charm.
I’ve started using notion as a kind of personal wiki a few months ago, and I really like it for that. Breaking the distinction between files and folders is one of the ways it’s way easier for me to navigate/structure than it is in google docs.
My only issue with Notion is that I feel it’s hard to get stuff out of it, especially on mobile. I sometimes type draft documents with it that I really don’t want to share as notion links, and I haven’t figured out how to export them on a phone - I usually have to go to my computer and export the markdown/process it then share...
I think Notion tries to do too much (a database? really?) and because of that it's not _great_ at any. Yes, at the end of it you can end up with pretty looking pages but the process is not fun. For example, you _can_ use Notion as Trello, but it always feels like fitting a square peg in a round hole. (a path which Slite and Quip also took)
Apps like Bear on the other hand, don't try be a smarter paper and end up being great at their limited use case.
Maybe, for enterprise customers it has some value, but as a personal user I didn't find much utility in it.
I am wondering if this is just the thing for our workplace - it is remarkable how spot on their value proposition is. It is not every feature from every service - but they seem to deliver very well on core functionality. And I must say that their landing page is one of the better I have seen for a SaaS.
I posted this in hopes of people posting stories and discussions about their experiences and thoughts about the product - which you very well delivered, thanks.
I just started using Coda.io now and I already think it's amazing. It's like Excel in Word (Or Javascript in HTML) with superpowers and it's very usable.
I too am a big Notion fan. However, I have a ton of things I would improve, two of which I kinda solved already: drawing input [0] and inline math [1]. The success of these has led me to create a small slack group to discuss other such hacks, more info at [2].
Not gonna lie. That knowledge base with the collapsible menu looks like a very useful feature. Especially with integrated search. Will definitely give it a try. As far as self hosting goes. If there is a feature to export to text, csv or md. One could use the app to edit. Then archive and serve a read only copy locally.
We're are developing an open source offering in this space: https://budibase.com . Planning to have an MVP in the summer - at which stage we will also make the source public.
We are more focussed around a tool for building SaaS products, fast. However, we are planning to build a Notion-like app using BudiBase, for management of the project & business.
Sign up for updates if you're interested!
Website is a bit vague on detail right now... a few features:
- Design your own data model: create typed fields, data validation rules, object relationships, indexing & scaling options
- HTTP Api for all CRUD operations, based on your data model
- User Management & User Role definitions
- Generated UI, with the ability to drop in your own UI wherever suits
- Fully pluginable backend, for integrations
- Output is a Single Page Web application, with an HTTP Api & data storage. Web app will be mobile ready (PWA).
Having switched from Evernote about 6 months ago, here are some of the biggest positives and negatives to me -
Biggest positive: The variety of formats & integrations. I use “toggles” and tables a ton. This was the main reason I switched and it’s enough of a differentiator to keep me around.
Biggest negative: Notion doesn’t handle a large volume of notes well. There is no easily accessible metadata, no tagging, no way to see a table of notes sorted by create date as far as I can tell.
Other observations:
It’s terrifyingly easy to delete a note and not realize it. Notes show up as a line item in their parent note; a simple press of the delete button and a note is gone with no warning
Sharing is also a little funny. Shared notes show up in a separate workspace and are easy to forget about.
Also, no offline support at all... if you aren’t connected, you can’t do anything on the desktop or iOS app.
This seems like a great tool. What's the security model for this? I get that it's offline first with sync capabilities, but is notion hosting any of this content to facilitate syncing and if so is it encryped etc? Is there an easy way to export all of my content?
On that note, regardless of what the actual answer is here, insight is sorely missing on the brochureware. Conversely, quip.io has an in-depth whitepaper @ https://quip-cdn.com/iR2bxQSxnJmpXi8KbaQ-XQ which is linked to from their global page footer.
Like Notion a lot and we looked at a number of the modern wiki tools (cloud based).
vs Confluence it is much faster. We did end up with Confluence, but that wasn't my first choice.
vs Samepage it just felt a lot more modern. That might be harsh, but we only had a limited time to eval all the options.
vs Quip, well, it's Salesforce. The sales was spammy and you just know how hard the sale will be if you've ever used the core SF products.
Best OS with a combo of Bookstackapp and a ticket system that I forget the name of now. No integration between the two, and no support.
The reason it lost in the end was it was the only one that didn't have draw.io integrated and we do a lot of diagramming. But, as I say, really nice and I would have preferred it to Confluence.
I use Notion for my personal productivity, and I highly recommend it. It's one of the few personal tools I'm happy to pay for. It many ways it's a personal wiki, and it is incredibly easy to use.
Notion has made it much easier to keep track of and refer back to my old notes. For example, I used to draft emails in an unorganized OneNote notebook. If I needed to find an old draft, I'd have to use search and hope that I remembered the right keywords. With Notion, I make all of my email drafts a subpage of an email page, which makes them much easier to find.
I think the problem is that it isn't a single nut to crack - everyone works slightly differently, some like a clean interface, others like all the info laid for them.
With Notes and tasks, it is quite personal, so any issues in the interface are seen as worse, eg we are more likely to accept a slightly shitty interface when paying a bill or logging on to a corporate system than a product we use daily.
Glad to see this here, it's a very well-built product that finds the perfect balance between strict JIRA/PM tools and completely unstructured wikis/text files.
Everything is a "block" and blocks can be nested and attached together to create pages/subpages, tables, kanban boards, calendars, etc. It's a very nice way of working and everything loads fast. The sharing links are nice too.
Only feedback would be fixing some UI issues that can be a little too sensitive, with an errant keypress or misclick changing everything.
It has full read/write support for Notion data, with a local data store that live-updates async when data changes on Notion, including callbacks. And you can manipulate database entries using classes with columns mapped to slugified attributes.
I've tried Notion (I've tried most PIMs since 2003) but it didn't fit my brain / what I wanted to do with it. Not enough structure yet too constraining.
The closest I've found is Workflowy, but it's just that bit too basic.
I store all web clippings in Evernote and hope to find what I want one day.
I bookmark heavily into an online service, and wish my tag vocabulary was better constrained (but full text search helps).
And finally I mind map on paper; none of the digital ones have quite cut it.
One day there will be a PIM to rule them all. One day.
I'm in the same boat. I have a vision in mind for how a perfect PIM could look like: a mind-map like structure to organize everything. A pintrest-like UI to list all "cards"/"pages".
I'd love to create an ipad app with pencil support to just draw the mind-map and allow unlimited nested depth.
zenkit.com tries to combine a table/kanban/mind-map visualization, but it's not quite what I want.
It seems like we are all on a quest for a Holy Grail.
I'm a visual person, also dyslexic. I think in terms of relations between items. I also find nested lists helpful for something more 'ordered'.
The Kanban-style board a lot of people love does nothing for me unless using it for pure, strict Kanban. Sorting mixed stuff into 3-4 columns doesn't help, unless ensuring I am always progressing through those tasks. It loses the relationships between items which I see.
I plan to draw/write up my ideas this year. If you permit I'll keep in contact with you via email.
Thinking further, what I'd like is something like fractals. You can keep zooming in on your information down to the details - but also out to an overview.
Nope, no idea how that would work, other than when I'm mind mapping I would have it work like Workflowy, where you can focus on each node in turn -- so you can zoom down to a node, and have an entire mindmap off there. Zoom to one of its nodes and be in another mind map.
This appears to be aimed at the small / medium organization. I think individuals should probably just stick with Emacs / Workflowy depending on whether they're already using Emacs or not.
Personally I think individuals need to just accommodate to shifting every now and again to new tools as they become available.
I've used Workflowy since its inception (2010), but recently switched over to Notion. For my use case, it's worked perfectly and I haven't looked back.
I'll start by saying they're not strict mind maps; they're a cross between mind maps and spider diagrams.
If I'm listening to a talk, I'll be jotting down the key concepts in the map, just like anyone else would do with bullet points. But I'm then linking them together, where their talk jumps between ideas. Connections are the vital part.
The closest software to what my brain thinks like is https://www.literatureandlatte.com/scapple/overview. A key thing missing is representing the same information in multiple views; that's something virtually all tools miss (Coda.io et al are starting to add it - but multiple types of list-view of the same info, nothing more wild)
Realtimeboard works well for me, but ends up lacking organisation because it is totally visual and nothing structured beneath the surface.
Thanks for the overview! I will definitely try incorporating a similar approach in the future.
I can definitely see how filtering out some of that information can help focus on a specific node and immediate relationships. Comparing against other seemingly unrelated maps could be interesting as well.
As a product manager I have to say the UI is great. Simple, clean, easy to navigate. If only Enterprise apps could be made to look this good (yes its possible but usually politics get in the way).
On Android also works smoothly even on my low capacity line at home.
Security aspects raised by others is a concern - there is enough secure storage solutions out there it should be high on the roadmap to address that so there is encryption at rest (and at REST :-D ) . Data should only be accesible to team or public. Nobody else, ever.
One more todo and notes app. Why does the world need so many such apps? I always find myself changing from one such app to another, porting all the existing notes. Currently I'm using onenote and am very content with it. But there's always this feeling that something's not quite right. I tried evernote, onenote, and several other notes apps. I don't understand why I try so many note taking apps. I think others too feel the same way. Any ideas why?
I had the same feeling for as long as I can remember: just when I thought I was content with some apps, I find a new one on Product Hunt or Hacker News that promise something that I don’t know I want but after some thought think I need esp. for note taking/organization/productivity combo apps.
Still coping with it with a better clue as to how to deal with it.
The antidote for me is to figure out this (with the help of pen and paper): a list of what are the absolute basic needs I want out of productivity apps. For example, I tried to find the best tools for my personal knowledge management. My criteria (or deal breaker): cross device (iOS and MacOS); easy to export and share in common formats to others; no need for collaboration features; I can throw in any file without worrying that I need to import or convert format. Upon examining the list, I figured out that I want a tool that’s more like a file management system with full text search ability.
A bigger and prior than “basic needs for productivity tools” question that took me some time to figure out last year between October and November is what my workflows are, what kind of communication I need between different apps. For example, I need a central tool to search all my files (preferably full text) in a project, yet I need editing features in specific apps (Photoshop, Mindnode, Numbers).
Last point is to be content. I was on a constant quest for finding the holy grail of all-in-one app to no avail (I experimented with Notion on and off for almost a year but ultimately decided that it’s not for me). And when I look back, my real need disguised as “finding the perfect tool” is actually to master the knowledge that I picked up from life and work, and the best way is really just to routinely index, review and edit my knowledge scattered around in the files (adding and deleting) and write reviews of what I learned whenever possible.
P.S. I grow more skeptical of tools that need internet connection to function (i.e., beyond syncing) because: can’t cope with my need to take down notes fast (therefore I went with Drafts for times like this); files cannot be loaded in places where internet connections are not great (surprisingly a lot of places when you’re on the road a lot); you can’t control which features they add or take down (for their own reasons).
You can't alt+tab to it and offline support isn't there. Not sure if there are any global keyboard shortcuts for quick/easy note capture, but if so, those wouldn't work in the web app either.
Notion is great in features, but it is just so slow and I find the editor hard to work with. Text doesn't flow nicely and it is clumsy to navigate between blocks. Some blocks are editable, some are stuck, etc. It is pretty hard. The speed gets me the most though. Maybe the website is actually better than the electron app, I always use the electron app.
Block navigation is definitely clumsy (maddeningly so), but I haven't had any issues with it being slow. Are you working with a lot of data on a single page?
Notion looks polished, the mobile app on the other hand is clunky, simple tasks like adding a member to a worspace is a hard task and if you don't close the android app completely it wont always update.
Like many others id like a version I could host myself locally, id happy pay for a licence to do so, and no id not expect any support at all. granted i'd expect yearly or monthly licences that had user limits, 10,50,100,enterprise.
Sadly i suspect that the reason there is no own-hosted version, be it paid or free open source is the fact that notion has been built around services like AWS/DO/RS for scalability and was never designed to be able to run in a single container and use a local datastore be it a MongoDB or (Ms/My)SQL(lite) database.
I may consider paying but not knowing where my data is stored, in what country, if it is encrypted or not or truly who has access is always an issue for me, as I'm sure it is for others.
This whole all-in-one thing has near-zero appeal to me :/
I have an urge to willfully resist entering monopoly scenarios. I prefer the ability to evolve process through a non-linear opportunity space (though I of course want to insulate the majority of others in my communities from being forced to grapple with that full infinite opportunity space :)
I am in the process of moving my digital life to Notion. This includes my huge collection of bookmarks, 40+ browser tabs, dozen or so text files and content of some spreadsheets.
Does anyone use this with their spouse / significant other? Seems like a great tool to have shared docs, lists, todos, etc. I'm thinking things like house and car maintenance, financial planning, shopping lists, and all the other things that I normally keep in a combination of Google Docs and Apple Notes.
I do and it is fantastic! My SO is not a lover of having more apps and especially loves to have todos and lists written down on paper. Curiously, she enjoys keeping those two things on Notion and actually likes organizing things in it. That feels like a big win for me personally. We haven't yet hit the limit on the free accounts but I do echo the other people's thoughts, that for 2 people $16/month doesn't feel worth it.
I pay for one personal account and then just share a page with my spouse and then she can put anything she wants in it, including creating subpages. It works great for us.
We use them in lieu of JIRA. Overall I like the product!
I wish they had ticket numbers (I like to put ticket numbers in TODOs in the code for more context; I think it leads to more TODOs being done). I had to hack them in using timestamps and hashes.
The ability to see tickets assigned to you (and not in closed status) would be useful too
Only partly on topic, but I wish there was a Confluence/Notion-inspired knowledge management software that's embedded in Git, like git-bug: https://github.com/MichaelMure/git-bug
Looks like a sleek and powerful interface, but at end seems to be just another kitchensink for manual input. No scripting or other automation and service-API is still in work.
Im always a bit surprised that programmer invest such an amount of time into recreating the same software again and again. Notes&Task-Manager are all more or less the same, and most of them are not something which a programmer really should use. Those people are handling code and data for other people as natural as a cook his knife. And yet when it comes to their own data they always go for the stale and static, the dumb solution which can is so different from their normal self. Why is that?
How well does this handle large file attachments? One of the problems one of my teams has is that they regularly need to trade and update files that most collaboration tools can't handle (Several hundred megs to 1GB).
Been a paid user for a while. I love all the UI elements, markdown support, cross-platform compatibility etc. I have used Evernote, Simple Note and Boostnote previously.
Some problems however:
Desktop app takes a while to load. I understand it's electron, but so are Slack and VSCode. I am ready to keep it open on Mac. But on pressing Cmd+W, it closes the app, though not quit. Re-opening from that state is still slow. No other electron apps do that.
Offline experience on mobile isn't good. When I am in subway and want to jot down something quickly, it searches for internet for a while before allowing me to do anything
A great deal of comments here want self-hosted capability, understandably given the HN crowd. But really, Notion is (probably) not in a position to do that, given their code being proprietary from Day 1.
I run PageDash [1], a personal web archive service, and that is also the No. 1 ask. While I can understand it, for any startup to focus on self-hosting from Day 1 is probably a shot in the foot, unless I have an open-source model from Day 1.
I really, really want something like this as a desktop, fully native app, for personal use, and maybe with Groove-like peer to peer sync for small, closed groups.
Groove is one of my favorite examples of the damage done by Microsoft in the 90's. That product would STILL be useful today, 20 years later. I still wonder: Did Ozzie make the product just to get acquihired?
Is there anything that does this out there? EDIT: Now that I think about it, maybe OneNote does this in the background.
Slightly OT, but does anyone have some links to open source apps / tutorials from creating pages that are fairly free form like this? I'm a backend kind of entity, so the front end is a mystery.
Edit: I'm not asking in an "I'm going to make my own" kind of way. I'm asking in an "I've always been curious how other devs solve problems / create things" kind of way.
Do you mean like the notion service? I'm not a notion user, but from the description here, it sounds a lot like Google wave with less hype and more "product focus"...
I've pretty much immediately fallen in love with this service. For me, the killer feature is that the 'share' functionality lets me share a public link to that page and subpages with no personal info included, so it can double as a pastebin/Dropbox-share replacement.
If they just had a way to associate shared pages with a custom domain, this could be a Medium replacement too.
This is really, really awesome and has the crucial features I require out of a notes app, including pasting images from the system clipboard and a deep hierarchy of pages/folders.
Sadly, I just poured hours of time into putting all my stuff from OneNote into a self-hosted instance of BookStack. However, I like the looks of Notion so much, I am probably going to have to move again!
Trademarks only protect against competition in the same category, or where consumer confusion is possible. They may both be "software products" (what isn't, these days?), but these products seem sufficiently removed from each other -- one a music authoring tool, the other a notes and project collaboration tool -- that I don't think trademark protection would apply.
These "I will organize all your world" apps pop up at a non-trivial rate. Seems like they're mostly designing some database tables and then serving a front-end. Am I missing something? Is there something deeper than database design that I'm missing?
> Seems like they're mostly designing some database tables and then serving a front-end. Am I missing something?
Isn't it how all SaaS web apps are developed ? I sense from your tone that it shouldn't be taken seriously on the basis of it being trivial to implement.
I've been using Notion for quite some time now. It's pretty neat although I wish it was (a) faster and (b) had a better writing experience. I find Dropbox Paper to offer the best writing experience but Notion is unbelievably flexible, so I use it instead.
I wish I could import stuff from Evernote into Notion.
Just copying and pasting would be amazing.
If I could copy and paste checklists (or maybe even just copy a list and turn multiple items into checklist items at once).
Does it allow exporting data to human readable form like csv? I am very wary of exposing myself to the risk of losing all this information and history if the company goes under or if I want to change to something else.
Can anyone compare this to Dynalist? I've been experimenting with Dynalist as more of an information / brain dump tracker. A notepad, for people who can't write -_-. Yet, I'm not super happy with Dynalist.
It depends on what makes you "not super happy", but as someone who uses Dynalist all the time for everything, I must say the only reason I haven't switched to Notion is that their free plan has a hard limit of 1000 "blocks" (vs. unlimited in Dynalist). I actually haven't used it that much, but Dynalist doesn't have many features so it's easy to compare them and come to a conclusion.
From what I've seen, there are only two things I still prefer Dynalist for: Zooming into nodes (minor issue, since in Notion you can quickly turn a node into a page and "zoom into" it) and contextual search (major one, global search is a real pain if you have lots of data - but you can still make up for it by being more organized than I am).
As for everything else, Notion is a clear winner to me.
I really like the make and structure of the notion, but lack of encryption beyond tls is a deal breaker to me. Also, their developer has no intention to implement encryption whatsoever, just like the Evernote.
If somebody could develop some products like this that either create or extend open standards so we have the freedom to use any client or service provider we want, I'd throw my money at them so fast.
Unfortunately due to privacy concerns we have issues using this - I would be very interested if they offered a self-hosted option. Notion looks great and I might try it out for side projects.
We use this for our companies sprints and it's been working out pretty well for the last few months. Give's us a LOT of flexibility in the way we want to do things.
Respectfully, I disagree. Notion and jumproot both have the philosophy of an arbitrary node structure used for composition. I prefer my ui, that's why I'm working on it.
Thanks for your feedback though.
No I haven't published a roadmap. I don't liken jumproot to evernote much.
To illustrate my point, see the Viewer node types in the demo. You can see that it allows composition of documents using the node structure. Was super handy in university.
Would love to try some time but can't imagine porting all my notes (and knowledge base) from Evernote that I've accumulated over the years. Too exhaustive.
Eh...this is nice, I really like it, but it's just solving the same problems that some of the things it offers to replace were solving. Call it Lessware.
Notion is synonym of inkling, Matt Macinnis invested, and it has drag and drop composition... I wonder if some people from Inkling are working on this.
I haven't used either one in some time, but I would reframe the question: what makes you think this is similar to Basecamp?
If you're familiar at all with Basecamp, 10 seconds on the page makes it clear how different it is. If you're not, I guess I don't understand why the question is asked.
I'm wondering too, I mean the interface is obviously completely different but it solves the same problems. Why is whatever this interface is better since I already enjoy basecamp? Edit: Also highly enjoy basecamp's pricing.
Does the linked page not answer this? That's what I'm confused about I guess.
In a nutshell, the biggest philosophical difference between the two is that Notion is "free form" while Basecamp has a sort of built-in workflow.
(Take this with a grain of salt, I haven't used Basecamp since shortly after they rolled out the new interface and it was much more limited then than it is now. And I've only briefly used Notion.)
Notion is sort of a wiki, with built in to-dos and spreadsheets. You can build your own workflow or adapt an existing template to how you work.
Basically it's free to start with limited data/upload and then a small ($4) monthly for a personal subscription that is unlimited. Team and Enterprise subscriptions from there.
Don't get me wrong: Coda looks like a fantastic product. It also has features that Notion doesn't have, like built-in support for charts inside the document.
If there was no Notion, I would give it a serious try.
But Notion just fits my use case better.
The biggest difference is that Code is like Google docs on steroids: the UI is structured as a collection of separate documents. Which makes perfect sense in an enterprise scenario.
Notion is hierarchical. It's just an infinitely nested collection of pages.
It makes for a different (and for me vastly superior) user experience.
But ultimately both products have free tiers so you should try them both to see which fits your use cases better.
What about privacy? I read through their pages and found nothing. Is it end to end encrypted? I don't want some disgruntled employee to leak my life plans. How is this protected against such event?
Looks nice, but I am uneasy putting this kind of information into an opaque platform. Google, Salesforce, a self-hosted wiki...not going anywhere plus options to export and move.
If it were a desktop app with a local sqlite DB then, yes, definitely (for single user). If I could run a network security and host it on my company intranet, absolutely.
It's for Go but one could easily port it to any other language. It's just HTTP requests and some light processing of JSON responses.
I use it so that I can have my blog content in Notion. In a daily cron job I download the data from Notion, convert it to HTML and publish on Netlify as a static website. This script is open source: https://github.com/kjk/blog
Basically I use Notion as CMS.
I described my reverse-engineering process in https://blog.kowalczyk.info/article/88aee8f43620471aa9dbcad2...
Whether there's a programmatic API or not, that's another matter entirely.
When used on publicly visible pages, there's no need for login token.
For private pages, the user would have to provide a new login token when it expired.
It only happened once in several months for me.
I'm hoping that my library will become obsolete when they have an official API.
I talked with them and gave them my wishlist for what capabilities the official API should have.
1. It's extremely slow on even a new iPhone - about 6-7 seconds until I can start typing a note. By then I forget what I wanted to write. It's basically a webview of a very heavy web app, so it's not snappy at all.
2. No offline support whatsoever.
In addition it feels like they have abandoned development or are busy being acquired (~bi-weekly updates until about three months ago: https://www.notion.so/What-s-New-157765353f2c4705bd45474e5ba...)
I migrated back to Bear (https://bear.app/) which was a pain - exporting from Notion is also not one of their best features.
Notion founders, do you care to comment on this? My company recently started a paid account on Notion and I'd love to know more.
Hasn't addressed a single question or replied to any concerns/feedback. Not a great sign and makes me reluctant to give it another try.
Ivan
Bear is "just" a personal Markdown note app. No folders, no support for anything other than text/images, no collaborative editing, no support for multiple workspaces. The tag model is nice, but pretty limited.
Notion's raison d'être is collaborative, structured text: Workspaces for sharing and editing documents, with a rich set of embeddable objects (for example, you can embed Github gists and CodePens). It also has some pretty powerful Airtable-type database support where you can treat pages as records, and then view/sort/filter them in different presentation modes (gallery, board, etc.). Like Airtable, this lets you build mini apps such as task boards inside pages.
Bear's in the same space as iA Writer, Apple's Notes, etc. Notion's closest competitors are probably Google Docs, Dropbox Paper and possibly Quip and Milanote.
However, I am not quite sure it justifies paying for this service when Apple Notes has got a lot better in the past few years (I also feel confident in the privacy approach of Apple).
Out of curiosity, what features make you use Bear and not Notes? I take a lot of notes, and if something can make my life easier, I would seriously consider making the move.
But as mentioned above it also lacks important organisation features: no folders, no dated notes, etc.
So, I scribble on Notes and write on Bear.
On the flip side the software a bit slow to start and uses a lot of resources—it’s based on Electron, but I encourage everyone to try it (the demo on their website is cool!).
This is as close to “painting the back of the fence” as it gets.
To be honest, nothing we are doing is that new. Most of the ideas came from the 70s-80s (Alan Kay, Doug Engelbart, Ted Nelson...) We are just applying a fresh coat of paint.
Of course, there's still a lot more to be done to fully realize these pioneers' dreams of computing as a medium for everyone – not just programmers like us. If you are interested to learn more or work with us, feel free to message me directly at ivan at makenotion.com, or link below. We are happy to host you for lunch: https://www.notion.so/notion/Join-Us-e7aeb157238a4603a2964b2...
Have a good one! Ivan
- while the browser-based webapp is mostly fine, the mobile apps feel really subpar and somewhat out of place on iPad and iPhone alike: Sluggish, slow animations, inconsistent keyboard behavior, unnecessarily large fullscreen modals on iPad - it's very noticeable that it isn't a native app. It feels like a second class citizen. I'd like to make Notion a central part of my daily, essential tools - similarly to an app like Things. Unfortunately the difference in user experience is night and day. Please consider developing native apps.
- this is a very minor issue, but since I often use Notion as a note taking tool the rigid separation of paragraphs into multiple isolated content blocks is rather annoying. It leads to side effects like "Select all" on iOS actually not select all, but just the current block/paragraph. I think text, regardless of the number of paragraphs or format, should be one single block until it's actually interrupted by inline data structures like tables or galleries.
Other than that I love the idea of your service, which can turn a blank canvas into a simple text document or a fully featured Airtable-like application, or anything inbetween.
I like the model they use that everything is a block - you get predictable behaviour, but I do think the normal shortcut for select all should select a page, and that I should be able to select text from multiple paragraphs using keyboard commands (if you do ctrl+shift+arrow you get stuck at the edge of a block).
Ivan
It is impressive that your work is directly on top of the work done by the guy who invented the mouse, the guy who invented smalltalk and so on. Are you sure there were no inventions in between?
That Jobs-ism was specifically about caring about the internals of a product that nobody looks at, but you know are there.
The Steve Jobs quip about painting the back of the fence sought to explain why the Apple II and Mac teams cared so much about the inside of the box and even signed it. It's why they invested so much in the OS X internals and stuck with a native focus that helped iOS be so fast and nimble out of the gate on extremely resource-constrained mobile devices. That's "painting the back of the fence."
It is a very distinct concept from focusing on user-visible details, which I think is what you're referencing here. That's still the front of the fence. Back of the fence is the fine touches on the unseen internals, but reflect a general care and pride in your craft that will probably pay off in the long run.
"And while sacrifices were often made of money, time and frustration, users of Apple products often reaped the rewards."[1] This is definitely not the Electron approach. It's about taking the extra time and care to do it native. You can chose that path or not, but understand what this very important element of Apple's philosophy means because it affects so much of the past couple decades of our industry.
[1] https://thenextweb.com/apple/2011/10/24/steve-jobs-obsession...
It's not as simple as "add a flag to build linux." There's a little bit more to it.
That's why there are apps packaging websites in apps too: https://meetfranz.com
Were it not in Electron, it would most likely still have a big web widget occupying most of its frame.
You know it goes away if you buy it, right? I own Sublime and honestly the nag is so NOT-annoying that I have more than one instance of sublime where I simply haven't bothered to enter the code
Pricing wise, I wish these types of apps didn't have such a steep escalation as soon as I want to share. $4 for individual, but $8/team member, which means wanting to share this with my wife is four times as expensive as just using it myself, with limited to no appreciable improvement.
Not a great first impression — especially not after their support tells me that this is for my own security.
I would hardly say "no appreciable improvement". IMHO it's appropriate to price products based on the value derived, not the effort to implement each incremental "feature". And the ability to share is the most human feature. We are social creatures. To share and collaborate and be relational is to be human :)
So the price jump feels fair to me. We can get near full-knowledge of the product at a reduced price point, but to be human with the tool, we get hit with the real cost :)
EDIT: I also don't like the actual pricing structure, but that's only because I would rather participate in co-operative systems, and dislike capitalist ones. The above comment is my putting myself in their shoes :)
Specifically, however, I am indicating by my post that I'm not willing to pay 4x the price, for privilege of sharing - it does not have that value to me and it's not where my expectations were level-set :). [I currently use ToDoist which makes it easier to start (no privileges/contact sharing required) and add guest-editors/share]
My post is meant to provide feedback: I'm currently not trying their product (and I've explicitly provided why - the seemingly minor request to share my contacts), and I may not become paying customer once I figure out a way to try it (because the jump to my desired level of service is too high). It is up to the developers, if they read it, to gauge how representative I am of the target audience and therefore how relevant my concerns are; I'm assuming somebody like Pateo11 would quickly setup A/B switch - signup with and without asking for contact permissions, and see the impact :)
* View your basic profile info (per Google: name, email address, and profile picture)
* View your email address
At approximately 14:00EST, clicking on "Get Started", then inputting a gmail address, offered ability to login via Google; then, request for contact permission. There was no way to avoid it.
As of right now, 16:22EST, that behaviour is different and I'm no longer seeing the prompt. I've tried different computers & laptops/browsers, to ensure it's not some cached/cookied experience, but it _appears_ the actual request is no longer being sent. Not sure!
And if you pay for just one personal account, you can still share content with a free account. This is very close to having two people sharing one paid account, feature-wise.
Agreed, but -- Ironically, one of the reasons I don't want to share my contacts is that I did use the Google Account I use for commercial tryouts... so there'd be no value in Notion.so having access to the contacts, let alone spamming me with any potential "helpful" tips or contacts or recommendations based on such contacts :P
Notion is a web app to AFAIK
Can they dockerize this and sell that so I can self-host the docker image instead?
for people that is not tech-savvy, what about they buy a docker-container-hosted-by-the-vendor-company but can encrypt the contents in a way that nobody else can peek into the content ever?
(FullStory records what you do in your browser. It records all DOM elements, so all your data is being recorded and sent to a 3rd party.)
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14978228
Source: am European
{ "Domain": ".fullstory.com", "Name": "fs_optout", "Value": 1, "Path": "/", "Expires": null, "Store ID": "firefox-default", "First Party Domain": null, "Secure": false, "Session": true, "Http Only": false, "Host Only": false }
As in: this cookie will stick around as long as your browser is running, but when you close it and start it up again it will be gone?
When you opt-out of Matomo, the message warns that “if you clear your cookies, delete the opt-out cookie, or if you change computers or Web browsers, you will need to perform the opt-out procedure again”.
Matomo also honours the browser’s DNT setting, which is a) nice and b) rare.
https://matomo.org/docs/privacy/#step-4-respect-donottrack-p...
And notion doesn't need to see their users data to charge money for a service. They could engineer it to be E2E encrypted for the group and not have the ability to see their customers data even with a subpoena.
1) sell me apps (desktop, mobile),
2) let me sync the content via my choice of providers (dropbox, iCloud, google drive, my own WebDAV server, etc)
3) Let me manually enter a strong password/key in all of my clients to E2E the data, so I don't really need to trust that sync provider.
Suppose your company handles a fair bit of confidential information, and some of that information ends up in Notion as part of your general project management workflow. Now you've got to worry about Notion experiencing a data breach, and whether or not that breach could get you in hot water with your clients, or even into legal trouble.
With on-prem options, you can gain a little extra confidence, because it can all live behind a firewall instead of being directly exposed to the Internet at large.
This started with the idea of a personal on-prem solution, which is probably not worth the cost to maintain for the company. I mean, how much is it worth to you to have an on-prem personal solution for a diary? Because that's the worry... people are afraid that their household budget or their database that tracks the content of various adult films or whatever is going to get exposed. That's mostly about embarrassment, not actual harm. That's not something worth hundreds of dollars a month to most people.
And really, if I want to write down my deep dark thoughts where no one will read them, I'll use paper.
Why can't it be as simple as containerizing it and presenting it exactly like your would install an app on your phone, with the same possibility to grant permissions? App store provides automatic OTA updates so you don't have to bother about security. And the app itself should not have internet connectivity, connectivity is provided through authenticated tunnel into the container so the app cannot phone home in the background, you can only connect into it using the tunnel with your own password.
(Full disclosure: I'm a total bullet journaling convert. Given a choice between giving up my bullet journal and giving up Google Calendar/Docs and Trello, I'd give up the online stuff in a heartbeat.)
Definitely, but I'd argue that even with containers etc., we don't yet have the capabilities to make what we know is right, as easy to operate as SaaS.
> Suppose your company handles a fair bit of confidential information, and some of that information ends up in Notion as part of your general project management workflow.
Many folks that post to HN seem to miss this even though they are probably very technically capable. Many IT people in small/medium organizations don't have the time to consider this. Sometimes relationships with big organizations force this reality and threats get addressed, but it's not the norm. Most IT managers are under pressure to cut costs, reduce staff, modify accounting (review vs capital budgets), coexist with shadow IT, etc. Cloud solutions seem fantastic to them, and they don't have the energy to fight with someone in marketing who introduces a rogue solution because they don't understand how the current Wiki works.
That's usually a sign of an IT department not listening to the needs of their end users.
This can result in the team being left holding the baby when certain individuals leave, data loss, security issues etc. In 15+ years of enterprise probably two-thirds of the time I've seen this issues and it has been predictable that it would work out this way, but IT didn't help themselves by pretending their solution was better. When IT tries to learn and adopts the tool, or incorporates the needs then things work out better. But, that's only a third of the time.
stackedit.io has been the closest that I could find.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18906118
Haven't tried it out personally (only support signing in from Slack/Google), but it might be your kind of thing. :)
When it comes to business and productivity applications the situation is very different. Many IT admins are tasked with moving to cloud (or other outsourced) solutions. When you see posts you have to realize you, or I, who value autonomy and control may not be the expected customer of these solutions.
To reduce the economics further:
* Startups like this have a product which may not have a complete market fit or reknown. They can't build something that's most likely to stick e.g. a required mail system because a couple of cloud products own the market. Therefore, they move up the productivity stack to team and document collaboration.
* Since they aren't a mature product and will likely change it considerably in the short-term, possibly "firing" customers as they search for a bigger market, they'll need their product to keep up. If they host it, then they can change it end-to-end.
* Any time you release a product that gets deployed on-prem it's virtually impossible to get people to update in a timely manner. Even if you decide to provide an on-prem version to a potentially huge customer, the enterprise sales cycle means that there is a risk your product will have changed before it gets deployed, but some person/process will prevent you get updated to the latest version as they advocate for a competitor.
* Worse, they like the old version and want to stay on it. How do you support these on-prem customers? They liked the value at your cloud pricing, but the cost to support on-prem customers can be much larger.
https://mobile.twitter.com/notionhq/status/99643620080931635...
Just shipped: export your entire workspace with one-click.
Examples: - Adobe (PS, ID, AI,...) all cloud + subscription model since CS6 is gone - Music (Spotify & Co) - Movies/Series (Netflix, Amazon,...)
And there is many more not only focused on software products. That is why I pirate stuff first and then try to buy something that offers value to me (like vinyl from bands I like to hear) while supporting the real minds behind the work (I don't like companies just (ab)using their power for profit like amzn without delivering real value themselves).
> For a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem. From Windows or Mac, this FTP account could be accessed through built-in software.
One of the best things about Dropbox as an early adopter was knowning that if they died or got acquihired, you still had one or more local copies of everything you'd ever uploaded to them.
Is it going to be open source?
Unfortunately, I'm not in a position to maintain the project if it doesn't bring in revenue.
I very much want to talk about it, but it feels a little meaningless to do so until I've shipped it :)
https://pureformstudio.com/diarly
Think the reason for non-self-hosting is price really. One time purchase is.. well it's one time.
The same is true for all other Atlassian products.
https://www.atlassian.com/software/jira/pricing?tab=self-man...
The next tier is 25 users for $2500. So it went from $1 per user to $100 per user.
JIRA is, by its nature, a multi-user software. The $10 for 10 users is clearly engineered to get small teams to commit to using it and then squeeze them when they grow.
That is a reasonable strategy for what is a product for companies i.e. enterprise software.
It wouldn't work for a product that is primarily for people who are paying from their own pocket, like, I assume, everyone here that expressed the want for a self-hosted version.
Notion is a hierarchical note-taker/wiki with some additional features like simple databases, task lists etc.
They are not the same kind of software.
Also, you can link notion pages. They have a block element that is a link to another page and for inline links you can use the regular link (each notion page has its unique, stable url).
Specifically, the login is a randomly-generated one-time code sent to your email address. Notion says this is more secure than them storing a username+password, but that's a dubious argument. They've also said this is two-factor auth (lolno). A side effect of this is that Notion is unusable on my mobile device since I have no email on it.
I really hope they implement a more traditional login system. Until then, I'm sticking with Evernote. :(
Having passwords means storing them correctly and still implementing some form of reset -- and if email is a weak point, they would have to 2FA prompt you to reset your password, or not use magic links, or handle such issues out-of-band. They're probably trying to avoid auth/password support by outsourcing this function to Google for the time being.
I agree though, the user experience that is hardest-hit by this is mobile, where iOS now supports much better integration with password managers than was allowed previously...
But on the merits: not storing the password is safer than storing it so it's a valid claim.
And it is a 2fa mechanism to a tee (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-factor_authentication)
It’s unusable for me as well, but for a similar reason on the computer. When I’m on a computer, the last thing I want is to be forced to login to email for a code since I use web based email (which I don’t keep open all the time). Even if I were to use a desktop client, I wouldn’t have it kept open all the time.
These are “chores” added to the user experience.
I also made this site for people to share their Notion pages: http://notionpages.com You can use that to get a better sense of use cases for Notion.
We've been building it for 2 years, happy to answer questions.
Having said that, I do think it would be cool if signing in with your personal gmail account gave you a personal non-team wiki.
On the integration side of things I'd wish for GitLab and other chats (don't like slack).
I'm afraid it's not easy to test your app without Slack/G+ Account and would be grateful if the project could "open to the free software world" a little more.
Thank you either way for sharing and keep up the good work!
1) explicit support for Kanban board-ing tasks and similar to-do management
2) collapsible blocks
3) substantially smoother linking to, or embedding, notes within notes
Notion is just as sleek as Evernote for small independent notes, but these two features allow Notion to scale much better for projects that require an inter-related network of notes with substantial breadth and depth.
- The "database" type that give a table view over child pages has been great for organizing recipes. I can quickly filter by {protein, core ingredients, cooking time, etc}
- The same again for blog posts
- Free-form writing for talks & other notes
- Shared to-do lists, which I used for organizing an apartment move w/ my partner
- Search works great - across titles, labels and document content - with a quick Ctrl+P.
- The web-app is fantastic. The Electron app on Windows is solid, although sometimes takes a while to sync after being minimized for a while.
Being able to export everything into a reasonable format was a requirement for me, and they've had that for a while. I'm OK with having "some" element of lock-in for the convenience, provided I can get my data out in a structured format. There's _always_ a risk something might be deprecated or shutdown.
Edit: After testing, seems not too bad. Reconciles non-conflicting edits just fine. But apparently, in the iOS app, search doesn't work in offline mode!
Edit 2: It seems like "attachments" (files like PDFs, and also images) are not stored offline, either. In the iOS app, clicking on a file or image brings up an S3 URL inside an embedded web browser.
- Quip (https://quip.com)
- Airtable (https://airtable.com)
- Taskade (https://taskade.com)
Notion is primarily hierarchical note taker/wiki.
The closest product is Quip but Quip is like Google docs - each page is its own thing. It's not hierarchical.
Airtable is a database. Notion has similar functionality, but not as rich and their tables can be just part of the page, like a picture.
Taskade is a task tracker. I use Notion for a similar purpose but it's not the primary functionality of Notion.
The Next Wave of Work Management Software https://hackernoon.com/the-next-wave-of-work-management-soft...
I'd gladly pay for a desktop application of this where I kept all of my notes and todos with local persistence that I could backup, migrate and move (similar to something like Notational Velocity), I like this, but I guess so far OneNote remains my personal champ in this regard-even though I have to tie it to OneDrive across my pc and surface.
Edit:
Although feverishly refreshing the thread and looking at all the praise...maybe I'll give it a more thorough shot for a couple of weeks.
I use org mode for: my tasks (gtd style), food log (using org columns), notes (easy export to any other format), habits. Alongside beorg for iOS for quick capturing on the go, I cannot imagine I would be any happier elsewhere.
http://happenapps.com
Been using it for a work journal for a while, and it's pretty reasonable. I used to use RedNotebook before that, but I finally got fed up with the lack of Markdown syntax.
It's a bit less than ideal, overall. I would like to see you be able to assign a custom output format, so for each index and section kinds it would be nice to automatically create paginated sections that you want for specific layouts. I've tried this and it only sort of works, but expects them to be the pages as your lists.html or index.html, and can't paginate a path.
Also, built in client-side search. I'm working on Mermaid.js, Chart.js and Reveal.js short-code integration next.
Gollum also seems to have powerful customisation features like macros and YAML front matter, but I have yet to make use of them. For now, Gollum suits me as a simple, free alternative to Confluence. Notion is obviously a far more powerful product.
Why is it every time something like Notion is mentioned, there is always someone who wants "local, self-hosted, Markdown"? Just build it yourself.
This clearly shows you have no understanding of the product at hand. Notion is so incredibly powerful that Markdown doesn't even scratch the surface here.
In other words: you're not willing to pay enough for such a feature to make anyone capable of building it make it for you.
There just aren't enough people like you to support self-hosted $4/month product and you're not willing to spend $2000/month for self-hosted version.
So your options are not using the product at all or using hosted, incredibly cheap, version.
And many people don't have the time or skill to "just build it yourself," so when something awesome like this comes along that looks really appealing, you get people asking for self-hosted options.
You can either log-in with Google account (which you most likely already have) or via 2fa mechanism where they send an expiring login link to your e-mail address.
There are no password and therefore nothing to hack.
Why not? Is there something wrong with wanting a local, self-hosted tool? Or wanting to pay for it instead of building it yourself?
For some people like me that's a basic condition to even consider a tool.
Do you publish the progress of this project you're working on for interested persons to keep track or should we wait until you're ready to unveil it?
https://gitlab.com/equalos/equal
I've been trying to get it into a nice state, but it is a process.
The problem is that making a good interface is a though and long task. It's not done with crapping something together which then barfs out some file. That's people just can't build it themself, because it would be months and years to reach a good quality.
The demand for local&selfhosted on the other side is clear: people don't trust the companies. Companies peek into your data, sell them to other, or just disappear one day. With something under your control this will not happen.
There also might be a valid demand from those who would want to use the features of a collaboration suite like this for internal projects but find themselves beholden to internal or even client-demanded security/data retention policies.
Personal data notwithstanding we have data we put in our company wiki that is simply not allowed to be hosted on cloud services without lots of red tape and compliance certifications. Offering a on-prem option, at least for us, pushes all that responsibility onto our ops team, and Notion gets paid about the same but without the hosting costs.
Their personal plan is $4/month.
Maybe one in a few hundred people (let's say 500 for easy math) would want self-hosted version.
Are you willing to pay $2000/month for a note-taking application? I doubt it.
Not to mention the support burden of trying to figure out why something doesn't work on your self-hosted installation.
That economic reality is why on-prem, self-hosted software is almost exclusively a very expensive, enterprise software.
Companies can justify paying a few thousand a year for installation and a salary of an in-house employee to manage and maintain it.
Individuals can't.
If the on-prem version does not exist, I’ll never even try to convince them to switch, since we aren’t going to store anything sensitive on someone elses infrastructure.
So we stick with Confluence. Which everyone hates, but is still the best solution around.
Self-hosting nerds like myself would be able to get by on a no-support 'community edition' for like $10-15/mo.
(It can store files, but isn't especially smooth about it yet. For personal notes of all kinds, it is the most efficient, effective, flexible thing I know of. The FAQs link to a discussion comparing it with emacs org-mode and others. It has fulltext search, some finicky but very functional import/export, a nice numbered-outline export to text, and a journal/activity log.)
I have noted to look at Notion, and Trillium, to see how much they overlap and if we can collaborate. I have been quite slow lately though, hoping to get more done sometime relatively soon.
I've found it to be more responsive, and to my tastes, it has a better UI. I'm not a big fan of the emoji/blank file image that is necessary with every Notion entry.
[1] - https://www.nuclino.com/
One is the migration path from Evernote. If you look at all the current notetaking apps, none of them seem to have capitalized on the fact that there are lots of unhappy Evernote users out there who would kill for a smooth, painless migration path. Instead, these apps ask you to export your Evernote notes as HTML, something which Evernote only lets you do for a single notebook at a time. I have lots of individual notebooks, so this would take forever. Plus, you lose folders and images this way. Why not just write a small app that scrapes the whole Evernote database? Last I checked, it's an SQLite database!
The other is the lack of offline search. This isn't a dealbreaker, but it seems pretty suspect for an app like this. Losing cell service completely is one thing, but shouldn't it be "offline indexing first" anyway? Obviously it has all my notes synced at all times. I want the search to be lightning fast even if I'm on a slow connection.
It seems like "attachments" (files like PDFs, and also images) are not stored offline, either. In the iOS app, clicking on a file or image brings up an S3 URL inside an embedded web browser.
Tools I have replaced with Notion:
- Todos & Planning: Evernote, Workflowy, Text Files.
- Notes: Google Keep, Text Files.
- Work Wiki: MediaWiki.
- Collaboration/Project Management: Confluence, Trello, Asana.
I also use it for pros and cons lists, inspirations and moodboards for design and so on.
One thing that would be quite helpful in Notion is to have some sort of "marketplace" where users can share pre-made templates. I am not sure if they have an API for extensions yet, but that would be awesome.
I made a list earlier (using Notion) of some next-get productivity platforms that caught my eye if anyone is interested:
https://www.notion.so/Next-gen-Productivity-Platform-Researc...
It includes both these all-in-one type of tools along with nice project management and spreadsheet/db tools like airtable.
There are some gripes I have with it, notifications are still hit or miss despite talking to support about it multiple times - they’ll be delayed or missed altogether if you’ve recently opened the iOS app or have the desktop app open on another computer. Search still needs some love. It should probably weigh recently opened pages higher. And I’d love it if the Mac app was native instead of electron based.
Their team is pretty responsive when messaging them so that’s a huge plus.
- not showing today on top like it used to, unwilling to change or add an option (same as above, database views are awesome)
- forcing us into a flow that didn't really fit the way we worked (notion lets us have a completely custom flow)
- no good way to have documentation stored in
- limited ability to document tasks, like images inline with the description, code blocks, etc.
Security Alert: New device signed in to my@email.com
This is a concern. How are they doing the signup that google is not recognising my computer? When signing up as there is no redirect to a google sign in page, for all I know they have just created a fake google sign in page and stolen my credentials.
https://www.notion.so/willchatham/Terms-and-Privacy-28ffdd08...
They encrypt your data at rest, have their stuff audited by a third party quarterly, and give the employees some amount of security training.
The thing I am curious about is that to log in, you don't have a password. Rather, then send a temporary login code to your email address. Not sure how I feel about that.
This just removes the email + password altogether and requires that you have explicit access to the email. So it takes the end-all-be-all access criteria of the other solution, but removes the possibility of them being able to have a weak password, and also removes the issue of them having to store and transport passwords.
My only issue with Notion is that I feel it’s hard to get stuff out of it, especially on mobile. I sometimes type draft documents with it that I really don’t want to share as notion links, and I haven’t figured out how to export them on a phone - I usually have to go to my computer and export the markdown/process it then share...
Apps like Bear on the other hand, don't try be a smarter paper and end up being great at their limited use case.
Maybe, for enterprise customers it has some value, but as a personal user I didn't find much utility in it.
I posted this in hopes of people posting stories and discussions about their experiences and thoughts about the product - which you very well delivered, thanks.
[0]: https://www.notion.so/evertheylen/Notation-e7a4f861a5ed4d14a... [1]: https://www.notion.so/evertheylen/Notion-Inline-Math-9c5047a... [2]: https://www.notion.so/notionhacks/Notion-Hacks-27b92f71afcd4...
We are more focussed around a tool for building SaaS products, fast. However, we are planning to build a Notion-like app using BudiBase, for management of the project & business.
Sign up for updates if you're interested!
Website is a bit vague on detail right now... a few features:
- Design your own data model: create typed fields, data validation rules, object relationships, indexing & scaling options
- HTTP Api for all CRUD operations, based on your data model
- User Management & User Role definitions
- Generated UI, with the ability to drop in your own UI wherever suits
- Fully pluginable backend, for integrations
- Output is a Single Page Web application, with an HTTP Api & data storage. Web app will be mobile ready (PWA).
Biggest positive: The variety of formats & integrations. I use “toggles” and tables a ton. This was the main reason I switched and it’s enough of a differentiator to keep me around.
Biggest negative: Notion doesn’t handle a large volume of notes well. There is no easily accessible metadata, no tagging, no way to see a table of notes sorted by create date as far as I can tell.
Other observations:
It’s terrifyingly easy to delete a note and not realize it. Notes show up as a line item in their parent note; a simple press of the delete button and a note is gone with no warning
Sharing is also a little funny. Shared notes show up in a separate workspace and are easy to forget about.
Also, no offline support at all... if you aren’t connected, you can’t do anything on the desktop or iOS app.
vs Confluence it is much faster. We did end up with Confluence, but that wasn't my first choice.
vs Samepage it just felt a lot more modern. That might be harsh, but we only had a limited time to eval all the options.
vs Quip, well, it's Salesforce. The sales was spammy and you just know how hard the sale will be if you've ever used the core SF products.
Best OS with a combo of Bookstackapp and a ticket system that I forget the name of now. No integration between the two, and no support.
The reason it lost in the end was it was the only one that didn't have draw.io integrated and we do a lot of diagramming. But, as I say, really nice and I would have preferred it to Confluence.
Notion has made it much easier to keep track of and refer back to my old notes. For example, I used to draft emails in an unorganized OneNote notebook. If I needed to find an old draft, I'd have to use search and hope that I remembered the right keywords. With Notion, I make all of my email drafts a subpage of an email page, which makes them much easier to find.
I've been using Joplin for about a year, it works. Could be better, but does the job
With Notes and tasks, it is quite personal, so any issues in the interface are seen as worse, eg we are more likely to accept a slightly shitty interface when paying a bill or logging on to a corporate system than a product we use daily.
Everything is a "block" and blocks can be nested and attached together to create pages/subpages, tables, kanban boards, calendars, etc. It's a very nice way of working and everything loads fast. The sharing links are nice too.
Only feedback would be fixing some UI issues that can be a little too sensitive, with an errant keypress or misclick changing everything.
It has full read/write support for Notion data, with a local data store that live-updates async when data changes on Notion, including callbacks. And you can manipulate database entries using classes with columns mapped to slugified attributes.
The closest I've found is Workflowy, but it's just that bit too basic.
I store all web clippings in Evernote and hope to find what I want one day.
I bookmark heavily into an online service, and wish my tag vocabulary was better constrained (but full text search helps).
And finally I mind map on paper; none of the digital ones have quite cut it.
One day there will be a PIM to rule them all. One day.
I'd love to create an ipad app with pencil support to just draw the mind-map and allow unlimited nested depth.
zenkit.com tries to combine a table/kanban/mind-map visualization, but it's not quite what I want.
It seems like we are all on a quest for a Holy Grail.
The Kanban-style board a lot of people love does nothing for me unless using it for pure, strict Kanban. Sorting mixed stuff into 3-4 columns doesn't help, unless ensuring I am always progressing through those tasks. It loses the relationships between items which I see.
I plan to draw/write up my ideas this year. If you permit I'll keep in contact with you via email.
Nope, no idea how that would work, other than when I'm mind mapping I would have it work like Workflowy, where you can focus on each node in turn -- so you can zoom down to a node, and have an entire mindmap off there. Zoom to one of its nodes and be in another mind map.
Personally I think individuals need to just accommodate to shifting every now and again to new tools as they become available.
If I'm listening to a talk, I'll be jotting down the key concepts in the map, just like anyone else would do with bullet points. But I'm then linking them together, where their talk jumps between ideas. Connections are the vital part.
The closest software to what my brain thinks like is https://www.literatureandlatte.com/scapple/overview. A key thing missing is representing the same information in multiple views; that's something virtually all tools miss (Coda.io et al are starting to add it - but multiple types of list-view of the same info, nothing more wild)
Realtimeboard works well for me, but ends up lacking organisation because it is totally visual and nothing structured beneath the surface.
I can definitely see how filtering out some of that information can help focus on a specific node and immediate relationships. Comparing against other seemingly unrelated maps could be interesting as well.
On Android also works smoothly even on my low capacity line at home.
Security aspects raised by others is a concern - there is enough secure storage solutions out there it should be high on the roadmap to address that so there is encryption at rest (and at REST :-D ) . Data should only be accesible to team or public. Nobody else, ever.
My 2c.
Still coping with it with a better clue as to how to deal with it.
The antidote for me is to figure out this (with the help of pen and paper): a list of what are the absolute basic needs I want out of productivity apps. For example, I tried to find the best tools for my personal knowledge management. My criteria (or deal breaker): cross device (iOS and MacOS); easy to export and share in common formats to others; no need for collaboration features; I can throw in any file without worrying that I need to import or convert format. Upon examining the list, I figured out that I want a tool that’s more like a file management system with full text search ability.
A bigger and prior than “basic needs for productivity tools” question that took me some time to figure out last year between October and November is what my workflows are, what kind of communication I need between different apps. For example, I need a central tool to search all my files (preferably full text) in a project, yet I need editing features in specific apps (Photoshop, Mindnode, Numbers).
Last point is to be content. I was on a constant quest for finding the holy grail of all-in-one app to no avail (I experimented with Notion on and off for almost a year but ultimately decided that it’s not for me). And when I look back, my real need disguised as “finding the perfect tool” is actually to master the knowledge that I picked up from life and work, and the best way is really just to routinely index, review and edit my knowledge scattered around in the files (adding and deleting) and write reviews of what I learned whenever possible.
P.S. I grow more skeptical of tools that need internet connection to function (i.e., beyond syncing) because: can’t cope with my need to take down notes fast (therefore I went with Drafts for times like this); files cannot be loaded in places where internet connections are not great (surprisingly a lot of places when you’re on the road a lot); you can’t control which features they add or take down (for their own reasons).
I use Notion.so personally and professionally and must say its totally changed my game. Notion.so feels like a personal digi Marie Kondo.
My prediction: In five years time, most of us will be using Notion.
Like many others id like a version I could host myself locally, id happy pay for a licence to do so, and no id not expect any support at all. granted i'd expect yearly or monthly licences that had user limits, 10,50,100,enterprise.
Sadly i suspect that the reason there is no own-hosted version, be it paid or free open source is the fact that notion has been built around services like AWS/DO/RS for scalability and was never designed to be able to run in a single container and use a local datastore be it a MongoDB or (Ms/My)SQL(lite) database.
I may consider paying but not knowing where my data is stored, in what country, if it is encrypted or not or truly who has access is always an issue for me, as I'm sure it is for others.
Still a great service well worth checking out.
I have an urge to willfully resist entering monopoly scenarios. I prefer the ability to evolve process through a non-linear opportunity space (though I of course want to insulate the majority of others in my communities from being forced to grapple with that full infinite opportunity space :)
Here's my work in progress: https://imgur.com/a/LKY7RlP
I wish they had ticket numbers (I like to put ticket numbers in TODOs in the code for more context; I think it leads to more TODOs being done). I had to hack them in using timestamps and hashes.
The ability to see tickets assigned to you (and not in closed status) would be useful too
I started using Trello.
Im always a bit surprised that programmer invest such an amount of time into recreating the same software again and again. Notes&Task-Manager are all more or less the same, and most of them are not something which a programmer really should use. Those people are handling code and data for other people as natural as a cook his knife. And yet when it comes to their own data they always go for the stale and static, the dumb solution which can is so different from their normal self. Why is that?
Some problems however:
Desktop app takes a while to load. I understand it's electron, but so are Slack and VSCode. I am ready to keep it open on Mac. But on pressing Cmd+W, it closes the app, though not quit. Re-opening from that state is still slow. No other electron apps do that.
Offline experience on mobile isn't good. When I am in subway and want to jot down something quickly, it searches for internet for a while before allowing me to do anything
I run PageDash [1], a personal web archive service, and that is also the No. 1 ask. While I can understand it, for any startup to focus on self-hosting from Day 1 is probably a shot in the foot, unless I have an open-source model from Day 1.
Just a cautionary note.
[1] https://www.pagedash.com
>Requires Google contacts to be shared to sign up
>Can't export my data
>Extremely slow on mobile (iPhone)
>Updates stalled, seems abandoned
>No Linux electron app
And I'm only half way through the comments.
I cannot recommend this product and the team behind it enough.
This guy gets it.
Groove is one of my favorite examples of the damage done by Microsoft in the 90's. That product would STILL be useful today, 20 years later. I still wonder: Did Ozzie make the product just to get acquihired?
Is there anything that does this out there? EDIT: Now that I think about it, maybe OneNote does this in the background.
Would be cool if they had the ability to import / export structured text.
from https://github.com/fabiospampinato/notable
Slightly OT, but does anyone have some links to open source apps / tutorials from creating pages that are fairly free form like this? I'm a backend kind of entity, so the front end is a mystery.
Edit: I'm not asking in an "I'm going to make my own" kind of way. I'm asking in an "I've always been curious how other devs solve problems / create things" kind of way.
Wave is now dead(?) and Free:
http://incubator.apache.org/projects/wave.html
https://github.com/apache/incubator-wave
If they just had a way to associate shared pages with a custom domain, this could be a Medium replacement too.
Sadly, I just poured hours of time into putting all my stuff from OneNote into a self-hosted instance of BookStack. However, I like the looks of Notion so much, I am probably going to have to move again!
https://www.presonus.com/products/Notion
Presonus' product is for music but it is a software product, it is trademarked, and it is older than this one AFAICT.
Isn't it how all SaaS web apps are developed ? I sense from your tone that it shouldn't be taken seriously on the basis of it being trivial to implement.
I use these plus some vim recordings to do bidi synchronization of buffers
I particularly like how they construct URLs for documents; it always keep its ID regardless of title changes, but it also shows the title in the URL.
[1] https://i.imgur.com/NDcd6X1.png
In the past, they've been quite responsive about bugs (and even feature requests).
Somebody please take what they’ve done, fix the annoyances, and turn it into Git.
A single central source of truth is long long overdue
Thoughts?
From what I've seen, there are only two things I still prefer Dynalist for: Zooming into nodes (minor issue, since in Notion you can quickly turn a node into a page and "zoom into" it) and contextual search (major one, global search is a real pain if you have lots of data - but you can still make up for it by being more organized than I am).
As for everything else, Notion is a clear winner to me.
I guess that answers the question why this feature has been 'in development' for close to 2 years now.
No links, buttons, or anything (that I saw in my 5 min of checking it out).
I JUST got my cofounder to regularly use Trello, though, so I'm not going to make him switch to this. Not yet.
Sure, it's self-promotion, but highly pertinent.
Did you publish a roadmap, that would allow us to differentiate it from something more like evernote?
Thanks for your feedback though.
No I haven't published a roadmap. I don't liken jumproot to evernote much.
To illustrate my point, see the Viewer node types in the demo. You can see that it allows composition of documents using the node structure. Was super handy in university.
It's friction-less, but with some rules/ideas in place to help you.
Well done Notion team, 100% satisfied
Would love to try some time but can't imagine porting all my notes (and knowledge base) from Evernote that I've accumulated over the years. Too exhaustive.
I crowdsourced a bunch of workflows and product suggestions on Twitter: https://twitter.com/TZhongg/status/1067234359915163648
all I do is talk about Notion with my friends tbh. if anyone wants free $10 credit, here ya go: https://www.notion.so/?r=02c3100209a54c48b22e19771ba4c916
If you're familiar at all with Basecamp, 10 seconds on the page makes it clear how different it is. If you're not, I guess I don't understand why the question is asked.
In a nutshell, the biggest philosophical difference between the two is that Notion is "free form" while Basecamp has a sort of built-in workflow.
(Take this with a grain of salt, I haven't used Basecamp since shortly after they rolled out the new interface and it was much more limited then than it is now. And I've only briefly used Notion.)
Notion is sort of a wiki, with built in to-dos and spreadsheets. You can build your own workflow or adapt an existing template to how you work.
It can’t even cache online
One question though, if it's electron based why in the world isn't there a Linux Desktop client?
Basically it's free to start with limited data/upload and then a small ($4) monthly for a personal subscription that is unlimited. Team and Enterprise subscriptions from there.
Would that not make them money?
Don't get me wrong: Coda looks like a fantastic product. It also has features that Notion doesn't have, like built-in support for charts inside the document.
If there was no Notion, I would give it a serious try.
But Notion just fits my use case better.
The biggest difference is that Code is like Google docs on steroids: the UI is structured as a collection of separate documents. Which makes perfect sense in an enterprise scenario.
Notion is hierarchical. It's just an infinitely nested collection of pages.
It makes for a different (and for me vastly superior) user experience.
But ultimately both products have free tiers so you should try them both to see which fits your use cases better.
Is it that hard to make something in QT that doesn't eat up a gig of RAM?
TLDR: Notion does not own your data, nor do we sell it to others or use it for advertising. It's your data, period
If it were a desktop app with a local sqlite DB then, yes, definitely (for single user). If I could run a network security and host it on my company intranet, absolutely.
1000 blocks == 1/3 of Moby Dick?
that sounds like a terrible deal compared to evernote and all the other apps this promises to replace
> terrible deal
God forbid that anyone ever charge for their software.