I love the idea of Notion, and I love what the team is trying to do, and I love almost all of Notion.
Unfortunately, it's too slow, at least for me. For a tool like that I need it to be a frictionless as possible, and Notion (for me!) is just a bit too annoying for me to put up with after extended usage.
If you value features over snappiness, Notion may be great for you though. It's an amazing concept! And I certainly understand why they'd choose the tech stack they did...
Joplin, obsidian, etc. and other open source note systems I've used all suffer from the same problem: bad writing experience.
I can't be the only one who believes this...writing in a 2 panel markdown+preview side-by-side view is just horrible and backwards.
And I like the idea of markdown! Of course I want the ability to export to markdown for portability to the web. But for the love of god, don't make me surround my words in 4 character markup to make them bold, and then show me a second panel next to it so I can "preview" what bold looks like. Didn't we already solve this with 1980s word processors?
Hell, why don't we create a 3 panel writing view? On the left you can write in binary, in the middle you can see live base64, and on the right you can preview what it will look like to actual humans. Awesome!
The only good implementation of writing in markdown I've seen is Typora or Bear, which abstracts/fades away the markup after you type in a single view.
Notion also solves this by only allowing you to select from semantic HTML styles (ie. H1, H2, H3, etc) but you see what the final text will look like in one view. When you export, generating markdown is trivial since you're already using a markdown-esque set of options to style your text.
The whole point of Markdown (in my opinion) is that the formatting is a function of text that you can see and edit. The entire state of the document is visible, and there are no formatting operations you have to learn, just regular text editing operations like backspace, copy, paste, and so on. For example, if you press backspace, you always know exactly what the result will be: it will delete the character to the left of the cursor.
This is not so in rich text editors; when you press backspace, it changes both the document and invisible internal state, and you can't easily predict what will happen simply by looking at the screen; you need to be aware of the invisible formatting structure, or perhaps a recent history of things you did, or it might be entirely impossible to tell because it depends on some invisible state that was created weeks ago and saved in the document file.
For this huge advantage in predictability and simplicity, Markdown sacrifices formatting power (you can only do a limited set of things like headings, lists, bold, and italic).
That's why Markdown tools that hide the markup are, in my opinion, the worst of both worlds: you sacrifice formatting power, and you sacrifice editor predictability. After the markup is gone, how do you edit it? How do you unbold something, or change the indentation of a list? If there are separate commands for all that, then there was no point in using Markdown.
Markdown isn't just text though, it also does images. Which is when the argument about rendering falls apart IMO. I really would like to see the image i am working on. Describing a chart/graph when all i see is  isn't really that great.
> there are no formatting operations you have to learn
I see it as the opposite. If you give a 2 panel markdown editor to any non-developer human they will be baffled at how to do any formatting with it. Rich text editors are intuitive, that's why they've dominated computing for the last 30-40 years.
> you can't easily predict what will happen simply by looking at the screen
Huh? In rich text you see what everybody else will see. In 2-panel markdown you need the second panel to see how your final text will look to the rest of the world because you can't predict that easily when writing in an esoteric markup.
> For this huge advantage in predictability and simplicity, Markdown sacrifices formatting power
I wouldn't call requiring a second panel to preview how the actual text will look predictable or simple. It's a rube goldberg machine. On the other hand, I think the best thing about markdown is the restrictions to formatting. It forces you to write in semantic HTML.
IMO, Notion, for all its sluggishness, nails this part. They provide the intuitiveness of a rich text editor, while restricting the amount of styling to a markdown-esque set of properties so what you write will be easily portable to the web.
The mentioned Bear and Typora solve this by showing you the "raw" Markdown at least when your cursor is there. So anytime you edit, you're editing in text, as you mention. But you don't need a second "display" panel to do that.
Both tools do it differently. Typora shows it when your cursor is there, but otherwise hides the Markdown. Bear always shows the Markdown but applies the corresponding style to it.
I think you express the precise reason why I prefer markup formats like Markdown, ReDoc, and LaTeX. I get to write markup which completely eliminates the need to click around menus and buttons or do app-specific keyboard shortcuts for formatting.
Rich wysiwyg editors also seems to have issues where the visible editing and internal formatting state breaks or behaves in weird ways. Like when you insert links and it automatically formats it as a link in some cases, and not in others.
Edit: Personally I always though the split view was okay as long as the compile times weren't too bad. Having a markup editor and then a view of the result is what I do for coding, so why not when writing stuff as well.
Typora is great. But I also tend to use it in "source" view where I can she all the markup.
The point of markdown is literally that things don't hide. Wanna know if that semicolon is included in the italic styling? You will see it right away. Wanna know if a link has an old URL or is pointing to a weird domain? You see it.
This alone makes it worth it. Forcing the whole thing back into a WYSIWYG-editor will just mean that markdown becomes unreadable. A bit like when people used MS Word to write HTML.
> I can't be the only one who believes this...writing in a 2 panel markdown+preview side-by-side view is just horrible and backwards.
It's called markup and a matter of efficiency. With richtext I need to mark the Text and click some button/menu-item OR learn a gazillion shortcuts for every little syntax-function. With Markup I use the same keys that I use for writting text, because the syntax is internal to the text, not some hidden external thing.
Of course it's possible to make a hybrid, something that displays richtext instantly while still working with syntax. But this is hard and cumbersome. Nonthless, Obsidian has it on their list as a longterm-goal, so maybe in some years we will see it.
> With richtext I need to mark the Text and click some button/menu-item OR learn a gazillion shortcuts for every little syntax-function.
Cmd-B for bold is exactly the same number of keystrokes as shift-8, and is exactly the same amount of cognitive load to learn. (You can also apply styling both on selected text and for text about to be typed, unlike plain text environments like this textfield I'm using now where you can't do shift-8 on selected text.)
When you get into the more esoteric syntax, it's still a tie: look how often even Gruber gets the Markdown link syntax wrong, and he designed it.
FWIW, Joplin allows you to have a single panel "raw markdown" view, and you can just assume it'll all render the way you want, and maybe double check at the end. I find that works well for me. As you say, previewing what bold looks like offers minimal value. :)
Joplin also has a beta single pane WYSIWG view which is like, I believe, Typora or Bear (markdown in the backend, but you type in what is effectively the preview window). I haven't really tried it out yet though. If it works well though, it might solve your concern though.
Slack & notion make me close my eyes while typing, just because the delay between key press and pixels lighting up is so long that I get confused. It's like speaking with a 400ms or so echo of yourself being played back. Hugely distracting.
When writing longer things on either, I find myself firing up vim to copy paste afterwards, just because it's impossible to get into any kind of flow in these apps.
VS code also falls into this category by the way, albeit less severe.
For notion specifically, the total lack of keyboard navigation within a page (PgUp/PgDown, Space, Shift+Space, nothing works!) as well as the fact that wherever I click I will make immediate changes to the document (even if I just want to deselect some text or so) just makes the editing hugely frustrating, slow, and anxiety-inducing.
Seriously, if one day I wake up and write my boss that I'm outta here, notion and slack (and asana...) are way up there on the list of reasons.
I'm sure you have some efficiency built into your life that makes you more fragile.
(I don't use vim/emacs etc.) But you're saying that running water is a not a good idea because what if you have to go and get water from the well every day when the water stops running. You'd be so annoyed...
> Slack & notion make me close my eyes while typing, just because the delay between key press and pixels lighting up is so long that I get confused. It's like speaking with a 400ms or so echo of yourself being played back. Hugely distracting.
That reminds me of this blogpost [1]. It's definitely possible to optimize the input latency of rich text editors in the browser: they just have to be close to the metal of the 'contenteditable' browser api.
Oh this makes so much sense now, thanks for sharing. I only recently had to look into react for the first time (not a web dev at all) and was shocked by the depth of call trees and render processes for even simple tasks.
No wonder these things are so unusable. But I guess slack know who they're targeting? People who won't notice the latency because when the pixels show up they're still busy finding the next key to press, or trying to find the right button for the text formatting... /s
I feel all of this is why email is dead. It's not because Slack or anything killed email. It's because Gmail (and other web clients) killed email. They made it dreadfully slow to do anything in. Go download Thunderbird. I haven't used it in 10 years, so it could be worse today. But I remember it being a joy to use. Or the Agent usenet/email reader.
It’s funny that I recently started using the Mac desktop mail app and outlook app and they are so quick compared to gmail (or outlook.com).
I had forgotten how nice it was to quickly go through email and remember how quick gmail was when it launched. A colleague said “it’s just five seconds to open and load an email, that’s not a lot of time.” But that adds up.
That’s an extreme amount of time… GMail and Outlook are both horribly slow and I can’t understand how anyone wants to use them. Outlook even manages to be slow with their desktop app. Not as slow as either web app, but still a noticeable delay.
how do you open an email in 500ms even locally on your desktop? do you use spotlight or something to find and open it? asking since even when i am in thunderbird, it takes me way longer than 500ms to open an email
More than 500ms to open an email? One that's already stored locally?!
If that is the case, I advise you check what's taking so long, I get nothing like it with my thunderbird setup.
Given, I disable html formatting where I can, that might make a difference. But even on my 2009 i5 desktop with hdd storage it doesn't take that long to load the actual email.
It takes me longer than 500ms to find that email.
if we are talking about browsing a list of emails already on the screen and i can simply use a shortcut to go to the next email, that is instant in thunderbird/gmail.com
/fastmail.com. that just isn't my use case most of the time.
opening an email is always longer than 500ms, rendering it isn't in any system i use. hence i am not sure what we are talking here. if we are talking opening, then the 3seconds initial bootup of gmail isn't worth talking about imo.
the bottleneck for me at least is always finding the email and thunderbird is by far the worst unfortunately.
Email started "dying" long before GMail even was a thing. AOL and ICQ startet it, Twitter and Facebook continued it and now it ends with Whatsapp, Slack and Discord. And I doubt that Whatsapp/Facebook/Discord are significant faster than Gmail or Slack, so this can't be the reason.
E-Mail is just a transport-protocol, poor in ability compared do other solutions and rather complicated, especially when it should be made safe.
Whenever I read a comment that says "email is dead" I feel it is my responsibility to point out that ~it doesn't have to be this way~
The email standard(s) are great. Powerful, decentralized, and damn near universal. It's just that we live in a world where a Duopoly has taken over most of what we consider to be email.
If this comment resonated with you, I am working on something you might be interested in. Feel free to DM me for details.
Totally agree. As a software engineer, I was always excited to try new notes apps and to "really stay organized" this time. But I always ended up falling back on either Apple Notes or Sublime because everything else was too slow.
Decided to build an app where it's fast to start writing but is also set up to keep your notes sane over time. The app has a built in scratchpad where you capture notes in small chunks, like texting yourself. Then you triage the notes into categories later. https://youtu.be/xRxn4iiWZUM
Haven't used it in a while, but I always found Trello to be extremely snappy. Once of the things I really liked about it, and that competitors like ClickUp and (more tangentially) Notion are missing.
I really appreciate trello and it’s fast enough as long as you don’t need to open multiple cards side by side. Trello is optimized for certain workflows, in board view or single card view.
In a text editor, you would just have multiple windows, panes, splits ... and it’s just fast to jump, reference, copy/paste, etc. On trello, you need to reload the full board in another tab or lose context.
First time I've seen Joplin--can it handle multiple users partying on the same pages at the same time?
EDIT: apparently not, according to [ https://joplinapp.org/conflict/ ] -- that's a bummer, it rules it out for my use cases :/ I really don't think a filesystem-based sync mechanism works great for a collaborative tool, which is much of the value of Notion to me. It seems really cool for single-user, never-shared stuff, though.
Agreed with the slowness. I absolutely love using Notion, but my #1 complaint is that time-to-note is too slow. I wish that were a northstar metric for them. One thing Notion excels at is allowing me to refactor quick notes into increasing levels of structure, but that first step of getting information into the system from my brain is the biggest gap.
As someone who wants to replace a bunch of stuff in Jira with Notion I have never really perceived performance problems, but I guess it isn't the snappiest.
Is no-where close to the completeness (and complexity) of Notion, it works as WYSIWYG editor, no Markdown.
But it is very fast (hosted in Europe but underneath does basically nothing), with search, free if you don't want to pay, and it will stay since I host my personal notes on it.
It seems to me that we need local and sync for this to work well. Make your changes locally and either sync behind the scenes automatically or when you push 'commit'. Many applications (like notion and a bunch of the other browser based applications) go the cheap SaaS route. One central database behind a web service and every frontend only displays an instantaneous view of some part of the data. That's not collaboration - you want to be able to work offline (at high speed) and then sync when you are ready. Multiple people should be able to work on the same artifact at the same time (and deal with conflicts at the point of the commit). While the sync works well for google docs, I think the experience of working on a single shared resource is bad. (All part of the problem we are trying to solve over at https://terminusdb.com/ - giving a native versioned DB so you can build collaborative apps)
agree wholeheartedly - trying to solve that problem in a general way so nobody else has to have the headache (but, as you can imagine, there is a lot of complexity and detail in getting to something general and usable)
> For a tool like that I need it to be a frictionless as possible
Friction can be at different levels. All text editors especially the ones we are used to are friction less when we want to quickly open a new file and jot down something. But then, many higher levels things you want to do with chunks of text are not straight forward. You'll have to use plugins or write your extensions which sort of do what's required, but then they become clunky.
Doing the following things in a text editor is very clunky
1. Drop files from a file browser
2. A wiki that you'll stick to and not want to switch every month.
3. Write reasonably large documents that you'd actually also read in a text editor.
4. Have the same experience on all devices
5. Tables that are pleasing to the eye.
6. Visuals cues that enhance understanding of the content.
7. Select a bunch of text and convert them into pages or todos or tickets.
Page load, painting, uploading, everything. It's all very very slow. I use Notion very heavily at work, and until March of this year personally. In early 2020 I switched to Roam and I can't go back now. Roam is so amazingly fast it's like they're cheating or something. I wish every app would adopt the way Roam does it. Load everything up front.
But, everything is slow these days. Aside from Roam, HN and maybe a handful of native iOS apps, I can't really name any app/site that I use on daily basis that isn't painfully slow.
Roam takes a while to startup. Once up, it's quite fast to switch between pages. A bit like an IDE. It's still browser based I think, and there are no native apps for Android and iOS. So I feel constrained when I'm not at the desktop.
Notion mobile apps are quite good, so I never have to tell myself I'll do something when I go to my desktop.
It solves the same problems for me. Because Roam is almost like a markup language, you can make it do a lot of what Notion does. Especially if you use Notion purely as a personal wiki + task manager.
Notion is much better for businesses IMO. Like I said above, I use it for my startup. Specifically for task management, and even for our public docs site, ex: https://docs.haekka.com/
A bit of everything. Nothing is SUPER bad, it's just always, always a little slower than you'd expect/hope. UI lag and page load are the big ones. Not terrible, just...you can tell it's a big pile of JS written by a team that has prioritised features and graphical design over raw performance.
I think it is all relative. Notion feels so much faster than Quip. Quip takes forever to start, stop, search, etc. it is nearly unusable. Search in Notion is so much better too.
Maybe I should avoid anything faster than Notion so I don’t get spoiled.
I've never understood the draw of Obsidian. Their website makes it seem like the "graph view" is their big differentiator, but why is that useful? Why is it useful to know how various topics are vaguely related, and view a giant web of it? Or is their marketing just confusing me.. and really it's just a markdown editor with linking?
Linking is a big thing in knowledge-managment. There is a new hype weaving around ATM to rediscover functionality which exists in old tools for decades already. Graph-View pokes in that area. Similar reasoning for the tag-view and search.
But Obsidian has more points speaking for it. It works on local files/folders with well known types. No special formats involved which lock you in. Recently it started development of it's plugin-API which already started gaining some useful plugins from the community. And overall it's quite polished and userfriendly, not many quirks and corners which stay in the users way.
Graph view sounds ideal Zettelkasten but in practice the graph becomes chaos once you get to a certain number of notes. It's more useful to have a local view of a notes' links and backlinks, like https://traverse.link/ does
there’s a style of note taking called zettelkasten, recently popularized by a service called Roam Research, that is ALL ABOUT linking notes together and traversing the note graph. obsidian is targeted at that use case.
I've been waiting for their apps to be snappier and have better offline support for almost 2 years. I'm so glad to have found Joplin. It also supports E2E encryption so damn well. Support for plugins was also recently added and that's a big plus.
I had no doubt the top few comments would be critical of the post as usual... but Joplin? I can't wrap my head around this one. I've used Joplin for years and I can't figure out how it would replace Notion.
I wasn't using Notion for it's collaboration features, but as a personal wiki/knowledgebase/note taking application.
Basically, I want an app I can run on my desktop and phone, I can shovel every random thought, link, idea, code snippet, etc. into it, and I can find it quickly.
Joplin does this. Notion does this. Notion also has a lot of other features Joplin does not, true, I just didn't care about any of them. :)
Have you ever tried using that Wiki inside of Microsoft teams? If you want to talk about slow.. dear lord, it's like every action I do is manually being forwarded to a country with cheap labor to approve my action before it's approved in the dtabase.
Whoever is on that product team is either grossly incompetent or terribly understaffed. It’s one of the worst wikis I’ve seen. (Sorry if you’re reading this MS employee!)
I wonder about that and came up with incompetent or team bloat. Since there are so many single person passion project wikis that are OSS, I can’t understand how even if they had a single decent dev working on this it could suck so hard.
I think that the wiki in Teams is not intended to be used but is rather there to tell someone in a position to buy who wants a wiki, but doesn’t use them, that the product has a wiki.
I tried using it and just basic stuff like linking to the wiki from various places is so difficult. I think the (incorrect) assumption Teams makes is that users are super stupid and only use Teams and nothing else, and only use what they are explicitly trained to use.
I have some serious data privacy concerns with Notion. The excruciating slowness of the platform in all its forms and iterations is also completely unworkable.
A real shame as I really need something like this in my life - both personal and professional.
I looked at that for about five seconds, then closed the tab when I realized it was hijacking the scrolling and wouldn't let me just read stuff at a normal pace.
G Docs and Confluence are VERY different products, in my view. One is about documents and one is about information sharing. You better pick early which one you're trying to be.
I don't see a way to self host it. Are you willing to consider it? It seems like you're targeting a particular niche and not having it open source or self hostable seems like a mistake.
Well the primary benefit of Portabella is end-to-end encryption.
The reason for e2ee is so you don't have to trust the provider. If you're hosting stuff yourself why wouldn't you trust your own infra? As long as you've got a TLS connection to and from your servers + encryption at rest, client side encryption gives no particular benefits.
Looks nice !
Sorry I couldn’t find the help, is there a way to format tables in the documents ? (sadly for me “portobella table“ is basically impossible to web search...)
Can you elaborate on what some of those data privacy concerns are? I’ve centralized more and more in Notion and I’m admittedly a layperson when it comes to really understanding what questions I should even ask to judge the security of something like Notion.
The fact that Notion staff technically has unrestricted access to all user and account data legally prevents me from putting the vast majority of my work-related items on there.
On top of that there's so much tracking going on that even Facebook would be jealous.
And that's just the tip of the iceberg. Check out their T&C and Privacy Policy:
Not sure how this is different from something like Dropbox (which stores stuff on S3 iirc). So technically, you can have Dropbox people looking through your stuff, and you can also have Amazon people looking through your stuff. Obviously, if this ever happens without a good reason, employees that do this can get fired and/or sued (and the company itself might also be held liable). Everything is also logged, so there's a paper trail. I skimmed over both the T&C and the Privacy Policy and it doesn't really seem that Notion breaks from this norm.
All of those are blob/file based, when the service provider needs to offer services like search and ways to make deeper inferences between pieces of data it's pretty much impossible to have all the encryption handled client-side.
I'd be interested to see examples/arguments where it works though.
Not sure about DropBox, but AWS has alot of protections around what goes into S3. I have worked with them to address issues that come up in the service, and they couldn't access our data, even when we would have been fine with it. Had to copy it somewhere else for them.
Addendum: I know I'm being very critical of Notion here. I just want it to be good so I can actually use it. Because, let's be honest, despite Notion's shortcomings no other solution has even managed to get close.
If your going this route, there is also https://www.bookstackapp.com which sits on top of Laravel, is open source, self-hosted, and free. Just sharing.
Haha. I’m definitely sounding a bit that way. Though, it’s opensource, so nobody needs to be sold on it.
We’re too deep in Notion internally to jump to something else now, but if was going to try anything else, given the Linear.app team’s track record, this would definitely be my first evaluation.
I've checked out Outline but that was some time ago. Its featureset seems limited to just regular notes. Definitely well put together, but the version I tried really wasn't a replacement for something like Notion.
While this has become a thread for talking about alternatives, has anyone found a solution with a premium Latex + markdown experience? So far I've found VSC to be the best experience.
Typora is the best WYSIWYG editor. I can't stand split edit-preview editors in my notes, and nothing has done as good a job as Typora while also being local-only and open formats.
Not sure what would be considered premium, but Joplin supports KaTeX. The surprising thing about Joplin was just how much I would really love the Joplin Web Clipper browser extension. I can clip screenshots and web pages and they insert right into Joplin.
Beyond that, I use Syncthing (highly recommend if you're on Android) and I sync my Joplin notes between my PC, laptop, and Android. It works flawlessly.
I don't use Joplin because it botches my Latex, and I don't really use fancy Latex. Same with Obsidian and Zettlr. I keep going back to VSC but I'd like to see what a truly first-class technical notes experience would look like.
I share your concerns, that's why I made sure they are GDPR compliant before becoming a subscriber. If you're not based in the UK or EU, say you're in the US... well good luck. Swiss cheese has fewer holes than US privacy laws!
Having said all that, as a user of Notion I've been incredibly impressed. Their support staff seem friendly and responsive and they keep making the product better and better.
My only gripes are the weird password email confirmation of the mobile app login, and that I can't use it as a Zettelkasten.
Other than that, it really is fantastic. The Kanban and other features meant that it's replaced other apps I was using for both work and personal. It really is worth a try.
GDPR Compliance is nice and all, but as long as their staff has the ability to access my data, I just can't legally host most of my business data on that platform.
Other than that and the terrible performance I love Notion and I really hope they get this sorted. I'll even keep paying for my personal account (drop in the bucket, I know) in the hopes that they will.
For me GDPR was a make or break. I know I'm putting faith in Notion staff to follow GDPR guidelines because if they accessed my information without an extremely good reason it would be a breach.
The only other option would be for me to create my own solution, and while I could do that, I don't have the time or the desire to do it.
I think you got to be careful and read the TOS and know what you're in for. For example, I stopped using the free version of Grammarly after I found out they weren't GDPR compliant and their support wouldn't confirm if they were going to be GDPR compliant. A year later I evaluated Grammarly again and they were, so I subscribed to Grammarly premium.
However some companies are so egregious in their lack of respect of privacy that I will never trust them again, for example Facebook. Others are so impossible to get away from, like Google, that I limit my exposure as much as possible.
Bottom line is be aware of how your privacy will be handled and make sure you're conscious of the trade off decisions you're making.
For private individual usage this should be enough.
In the case of business data governance, though, the legal requirements for storage, security, and privacy go far beyond GDPR. The difficulty there is that even small things such as contact info, appointment locations and dates, timelines, etc. are covered by those contracts.
Notion is a great tool and I recommend it as a solid "all-around" personal-wiki / notetaking tool.
That being said, the fact that it's electron-based means it's not always as snappy as I'd like it to be when I want to quickly capture a thought -- sometimes the "page" has to reload, even when I'm using the desktop app. I also notice that like slack, it suffers from the same in-line text formatting woes, which can be infuriating if you're trying to escape out of a code block or something.
Still, it's a good tool, and this is a neat feature I'm excited to try.
> That being said, the fact that it's electron-based means…
At my current job, management jumped into the Notion wagon some time ago, then told IT to force-install the desktop web application in every computer. The moment I realized it was an Electron app, I stopped using it. Nowadays, I sporadically open the web application, which is one click away from my browser bookmarks.
Safari executes JavaScript code much faster on my computer than Chromium, so the experience of typing and navigating Notion is much better on the web (native browser) than on the other web (hybrid Electron). The same thing with Slack. It is much more reliable in the native-web than in the hybrid-web/desktop Electron wrapper, which continuously restarts and consumes an unnecessary amount of memory that other more essential applications (Docker, IDE, debugger) could use.
Totally agree. I switched from the Electron app to Safari and everything is much nicer and I use it more. I admittedly don't have the most modern computer but this scrolling through a page of text should not be sluggish and unable to maintain a normal frame rate.
Self-answering to some degree, it looks like WKWebView on macos is similar to safari but may be behind on version number (presumably updated only when the OS is updated) and thus slower.
I find the same. For my workflows the performance gets in the way. I saw another similar tool the other day by the same guys that did Linear (which I love) that looked awesome. If we weren’t deeply embedded with Notion now I’d give it a try.
Indeed. We switched to it a few months back and I couldn’t be happier. The interface is lovely, especially for a power user. Performance is killer. We actually had a call with them about their architecture and borrowed some ideas for our own product.
Always a complaint about Electron on here. Frankly, Notion and it’s ilk would not be nearly has great or feature rich without Electron. It perhaps wouldn’t even exist. Trust, it being an Electron app is a good thing for you, despite its limitations.
> Frankly, Notion and it’s ilk would not be nearly has great or feature rich without Electron. It perhaps wouldn’t even exist. Trust, it being an Electron app is a good thing for you, despite its limitations.
Google Mail (Gmail) is very successful despite not having an official desktop application, even though Electron and other web wrappers exist. I am confident that Slack, Discord, Messenger, WhatsApp, Notion, among other web applications, would exist without Electron, and the features would be the same.
If you are a macOS user and want to have a better experience with hybrid web applications, I highly recommend Fluid [1] or Unite [2]. They both create wrappers for web applications using WebKit, which performs several times better than Chromium on macOS.
That's far from being the truth. The only benefit electron brings is one codebase which can server multiple device-platforms. Without electron you would need separate clients for desktop, mobile and web. But what notion is offering in terms of features is not so special. Can be easily done on desktop with classical GUI-frameworks. I know it because I already did things like that 10+ years ago.
> Notion and it’s ilk would not be nearly has great or feature rich without Electron
I’ve been using Notion _hard_ for the last couple of months and only just realised people use it outside of the browser, so I’m not going to agree with that
You don't get a productivity boost with electron over something like XAML. What you get is the ability to reuse your web code in an app, access a few more APIs and call it "native".
Most apps today are so bloody slow they are unworkable. Remember your program absolutely positively have to respond in under 100 milliseconds or won't be perceived as instant and will thus be a hindrance to thought, rather than a benefit to it.
You’re absolutely right. If the performance boost afforded by native apps was more important than the feature set provided native would be winning over electron. But it’s not. If you think I’m wrong you should be excited because there is a massive market opportunity for you.
> You’re absolutely right ... If you think I’m wrong ...
Is there really a right and wrong yet? There are so many note taking and project management apps, it’s unclear there is yet a dominating leader in usage or tech design.
Moreover, native seems to be losing some traction on the desktop, but on mobile?
Notion seems to be one of those companies going wide before they go deep. By my count, they want to be a:
* Todo list / task manager / long-term planner
* Blogging/publishing platform
* Internal wiki
* Note-taking app
One of the more cynical takes I've heard is that this is the result of an incredible product sense without the necessary direction to support it. Regardless of the reason, they seem to be releasing features without a coherent narrative of how they grow the company's placement and who their target user is. Previous companies which have done this (e.g. Evernote) grow really quickly with a lot of user-love and then stagnated in growth without a clear sense of what to do next.
With all that said, I'm a happy notion user, so maybe they're onto something...
I wonder if internally they have that sense of direction (e.g. they want to compete head-on with Monday) and, if so, how scoped it is (e.g. do they want to replace ALL internal tools / do they think that's tractable)?
They've raised $68.2m they no longer have the option to make a really great product that follows the unix philosophy. They have to do anything they can to attract enterprise customers which is where the real investment-justifying money will be, and for the most part that means having an infinite list of features at a competitive price.
Granted, for selling out to VC they've still done a good job with design and product. But they have one path through their self-imposed blizzard and the footprints leading the way are clearly marked "Evernote".
Notion inherits more from the “cathedral” philosophy (Xerox PARC) than the “bazaar” philosophy (AT&T Bell Labs). Read more here: https://www.notion.so/about
Yes, and I believe a lot of startup advice is to do one thing well (serving a specific market) before trying to branch out. Or are you saying they're trying to throws things at a wall to see what sticks with enterprise customers?
On paper they've already done the whole MVP/product-fit phase and are using the money to fast-forward into $100m-$1B ARR territory. This thread is talking about a relatively minor update as part of that phase, and leading people to point out the various flaws in their product with the corollary that they aren't really worth $100m-$1b territory in the first place.
Then again who knows, surveymonkey is an example of a company that nobody thought would "get there" and yet they did.
By my definition in a platform/product sense unix philosophy = not trying to do all the things and being happy about it. But yeah, same idea basically.
> Previous companies which have done this (e.g. Evernote) grow really quickly with a lot of user-love and then stagnated in growth without a clear sense of what to do next.
Evernote is one of those tools that I really wanted to like, but actually using it was an endless stream of disappointments. They're always reaching so far to implement grand features that the core functionality was constantly buggy. I'm sure they've improved since I last used it years ago, but I gave up before they could stabilize it.
Dropbox is another example of a tool that started out nearly perfect in its simplicity and laser-like focus on doing a few things well, but continues to get worse and worse with each additional layer of features. I was so much happier with Dropbox when it integrated transparently into my filesystem instead of trying to force their UI into everything. Now, even clicking the button to open the Dropbox folder launches a customized Dropbox file browser UI instead of just taking me to my Dropbox folder.
> Now, even clicking the button to open the Dropbox folder launches a customized Dropbox file browser UI instead of just taking me to my Dropbox folder.
Just use your regular filemanager? All the new features are just additional, on top of the core-functionality, which BTW is still top-notch and stable as ever. As long as this does not change, who cares with what they attract new customers.
I do love Notion, I think it's a great tool - but it almost does _too_ much.
I spent ages trying to build out a To Do list, added different views, filters, an inbox for it, categories etc. then ended up giving up and just using their out of the box kanban style board in exactly the same way I'd use Trello.
I suppose it's on me, the user, to learn how to use all these different features properly but then that's more investment than I have time for, for a To Do app.
Similarly with say Tasker for example on Android, you can literally automate anything on your phone yet I rarely use it for anything. I don't think I would outright say too many features are a bad thing... but are they?
I think too many features can absolutely be a bad thing. By allowing everything, you have to cycle through every possible solution to a problem to settle on the best one. With a more limited/focused feature set, landing on the best solution -- even when it doesn't quite match up to what you'd choose in the feature-rich environment -- is much easier. This difference can add up a lot over time, making a simpler tool easier to use because it takes less cognitive effort to find optimal solutions.
Fabulous that Notion now have Gantt charts. Only things that are missing for planning heaven now is being able to declare dependencies and timelines moving automatically on schedule change.
Anyone have insight into how they built this? Custom Gantt solution or you think they bought one?
There are no good and free JS gantt libraries, but many, many paid ones. I've been trying to find a good one for Portabella (https://portabella.io) as they're an essential part of project management platforms, but no luck yet.
Did you evaluate them and consider all of them to be bad? I ended up building my own because everything looked too flexible for my use case. I only needed basic layout/time tick marks and zoom/pan.
This is such a phenomenal update! I’ve been waiting for this feature for ages. Our company uses Notion for managing objectives in a hierachical structure that all need to be looked at in different timeframes. Our Campaigns are measured in years, missions in months, projects in weeks, milestone in days and tasks hours. Being able to easily change the granualirity of the timeline views make it so we can actually use it for all levels of our system.
Now if only Notion could add the option on adding requirements/logic to parameters I will have very little I feel I can’t do in Notion.
Like many others here I've tried more or less all of the productivity services and only one of them has actually stuck: Discord.
I made a server called Diary, accessible only by me, and I have a few different channels like work-log, life-log, d&d session notes, joke ideas, etc. I also feed all screenshots I take into a channel, and set up a chrome extension that sends whatever page I'm on to the web-log channel as a link.
You just set up a bot on your server, and give the extension the URL the first time you activate/click it.
Edit: To be clear, it activates on user action, i.e. it doesn't send all my history to the channel. I did try that for a while but it just made a lot of noise that I never combed through. This one suits me much better; just right click and send to discord.
it's a long awaited update for the Notion community. Beyond the timeline view, they introduced the ability to hide database properties in card view, so that doesn't obstruct content, which btw, adding content to a database record in a vertical UI is one of the best Notion features, so they made it so much nicer.
With Slack, Discord, Spotify, Postman and Code I don’t think I’d have room for another excruciatingly slow/sluggish Electron app on this 2014 MBP with its mere 16GB of RAM
I see a lot of nice recommendation for note taking apps, but for me the 2 biggest features that I need are
1. No vendor lock in. I can’t lose access to my notes because of random account bans or the company going under or w/e. Also plain markdown, no nonsense proprietary formats.
2. Platform independence, I work across mac/windows/ios on home and work.
So I ended up using a git repo with markdown files. I use Noteable and Typora on mac/win. No need to import/export anything they both work with plain markdown files on the fs with tags as markdown front matter (I sync manually with git). For mobile I use GitJournal which basically has the same features and it can automatically sync with a git repo.
You might like obsidian. It’s a note taking app that’s markdown based and saves files in a local folder. Allows you to do cool linking between pages and stuff. Even has the auto push to github plug-in. Only disadvantage is that unlike typora wysiwyg functionality isn’t implemented yet.
I’ve been using Notion quite a lot the last 1.5 years at work and I’ve got similar gripes as others have already written about.
My major wish, and this has been on their roadmap for a while now: an API.
Question: how many of y’all use Notion in the desktop client version (which seems a bit faster) vs. in the browser where you can have multiple tabd open?
For me notion is much faster in browser than on the desktop client for some reason. Scrolling in some tables is butter smooth in firefox and super laggy on desktop (chrome sits between both) on my 2014 mbp.
I initially thought i would prefer tabs, but I find it faster to alt-tab between the browser and the desktop client when working with both, so its unfortunate that it's laggy sometimes.
If the Notion timeline view had more granularity (hours and not just days), it would become a great tool to plan novel scenes! (I’m using Aeon Timeline for now, but it’s clunky and doesn’t get any updates. I’d switch to Notion in a heartbeat!)
Exactly my first thought! 20+ years ago I had to write a bunch of VBScript that would generate Project files from Lotus Notes and Access data. (Ahh. Enterprise software at it's best!)
Timeline graphs are one of those things that look pretty in presos, loved by some execs and completely inaccurate the second they're created.
Your best bet for that at the moment is to use one of the unofficial Notion APIs and write an article-to-static-HTML converter and host it on your own site.
In Notion, data is stored in generic "database" form, which is basically a table. Different views –– like kanban boards, calendar views, and gantt charts –– are layered on top.
A "new type of database" means that they've added another type of database layer to Notion. It is a perfectly reasonable way to phrase it.
Congrats to the Notion team, you've made a phenomenal product! There's some incredible product sense inside your company.
My only problem with Notion seems to be that it doesn’t play well at all with SEO. Google doesn’t index my blog which is hosted on Notion; presumably because it’s all rendered client-side.
Unfortunately, it's too slow, at least for me. For a tool like that I need it to be a frictionless as possible, and Notion (for me!) is just a bit too annoying for me to put up with after extended usage.
If you value features over snappiness, Notion may be great for you though. It's an amazing concept! And I certainly understand why they'd choose the tech stack they did...
...but I'll stick with Joplin. :)