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?
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.