Notion is not an example of delightful software and it is very much one of the most reproducible apps ever. I don't know how they managed to make it fashionable amongst startups, but it's certainly not because it's an innovative product.
When leadership tells us our job is to replace Microsoft Office. I say it's not
This is Libre Office's job. While I truly admire this community’s work.
If I ever get anywhere close to their level I’ll consider myself lucky. They do important work and I hope they continue for may years .
I’m not trying to replace Microsoft Office because work has changed.
As it came online, it became collaborative.
What’s replacing Microsoft isn’t perfectly similar alternatives to text editing, spreadsheets and slides which are tools that were made for formatting more than content editing.
These were meant to be printed to be shared.
What’s actually replacing Microsoft Office are tools like Notion.
Nowadays content is created in real time with 4, 6 or more pair of hands typing at the same time. ⌨
The way we actually replace Microsoft Office is by building products that follow the change in usage like Notion has been doing.
That’s what we need to do as an opensource community.
Adopting Notion won't do in times like we're living as states (hell, all of us!) we need strategic digital autonomy.
The product of our collaborative work is knowledge, we can't have it siphoned because it's sitting on an American server.
Notion has been leading the content over form revolution for a while now.
But revolutions are our thing right ?
We like to start them, but it's way more fun when they spread to the whole continent
Notion is some kind of Kanban board, isn't it? I think the point of the parent is that such boards were not invented by Notion, and writing a webapp that essentially allows you to move post-its between columns is not exactly innovative. Which is fine, if it works. We don't always need innovation (actually most of the time we don't). Notion just seems to be super popular for just being a webapp of post-its.
No, it’s not. But I wouldn’t be surprised if it has a Kanban board.
It’s a proprietary cloud-based wiki with support for every more or less mainstream feature (multimedia, databases, AI integration, collaboration, etc.). It’s a bit sluggish and doesn’t have a good mobile story, but if you don’t mind the proprietary aspect, it’s otherwise a polished product.
Notion has a very flexible data model. We use it mainly for documents, but it also can contain databases, which can be viewed as kanban boards, timelines, etc.
It's much more generic than that. It's highly flexible and intuitive hierarchical information organization software. At least that's how I'd describe it.
The innovation isn't the organized structures themselves either, but rather the intuitive non-technical interface for rapidly and concurrently updating both the information and structure. You can build a lot of Jira-like features but it doesn't dictate much of how you do that.
It does have a highly customizable Kanban view of their more generic database structure where each object is itself a page which can be filled with anything and everything else Notion has to offer (including more databases). Databases can have many views, structured as calendars, tables and a couple other forms I don't use, and each view can have its own set of filters, etc.
It kinda looked at Jira+Confluence and asked "what's the simplest fundametal software which can be used to build everything they have to offer"
> very much one of the most reproducible apps ever.
It isn't. The proof is simple: there aren't many reproductions that *tick all the boxes*. And no, "a directory of markdown files" isn't even close, it ticks two, maybe three of the dozens of boxes that notion ticks.
Joplin (my daily driver) and obsidian (can't get to like it) are closer, but certainly not there - though these alternatives tick some boxes that notion doesn't tick. Edit: But most of all, what "boxes notion ticks" very much depends on your (teams) needs and usage. A feature you may deem unimportant or even an anti-feature may very well be what keeps a lot of people on notion because no alternative has it.
The closest I have seen and used is appflowy. In some areas it ticks boxes that notion doesn't. But it's also "0.x" version software: self-admiddetly not 1.x stable software. And this has been in the makings since nov 2021, so over three years. Over three years of development to get to a point that it's on-par-ish with Notion.
If it takes a team three years to reproduce "the most reproducible app", it's clear that this app isn't that reproducible at all. And that's just reproducing features (amongst witch UX and UI). Reproducible also includes familiarity: It's almost a no-brainer to get a team on notion and to have management pay a pro licence. It's much harder, to impossible, to do this with [insert any alternative].
The other thing Notion has that’s tough to replicate is the network effects. Enough “influencer” type people use it that there’s a pretty rich universe of readymade and shareable templates and workflows available for other users. These can be replicated in similar applications, but that takes work.
The fact that it got popular with productivity influencers seems pretty key to its initial and sustained popularity, even if it’s performance and the general clunkiness of its interface is frustrating.
That's really gross. I guess then everyone thinks they need to use it because all these startups use it, but it's really just a simple notepad app with many alternatives.
I have no interest in defending Notion or anything but... have you actually used it? It's not even close to a "simple notepad app." I mean, that's what it started off as, and you can use it that way, but "simple notepad app" is ludicrously wrong.
Yep. And I've hated every second when I needed to write something with it. The editor of Notion is horrible, compared to Zed, Vim, Emacs et.al. The markdown import has been broken for years, and it is not easy to export your writeups for storage outside Notion
I'm really happy I got our company out from using Notion. We just do markdown in Linear, which you can copy and paste from an editor easily.
No, they use it because it was cheap and useful, and switching tools to something newer that's actually better has to not just be better, it has to be so much better as to justify the time and costs required to port a bulky knowledge base from one platform to another.
It's really just standard "voluntary lock-in": any knowledge system you decide to use locks you into that knowledge system simply because you're going to be generating tons of content in it, which may at some point need to be migrated, and the longer you use it the more of a hassle that'll be.
And if it feels a bit gross (it's not, really, it's just what happens when someone has a good sales pitch) they're not holding your content hostage like some other platforms *cough*zendesk*cough*.
it is very much one of the most reproducible apps ever
Would love to move to an alternative that also works in the browser, got any suggestions?
I haven't found one that does what Notion does. I genuinely want to get off their AI training grounds but cannot. Your comment reeks of condescension because you are not the target user.
Acknowledging you want a web-app browser based alternative and this won’t answer your question, feel free to ignore.
But as for general notion alternatives, and actually if you prefer to go in the other direction away from web based—Hands down would recommend Obsidian.md above any other open source alternative.
While it's not 100% "batteries included" like proprietary apps (though this gap has narrowed considerably), Obsidian truly shines if you're even slightly inclined toward customization. It's "hackable to the core" — you can build practically anything on top of it, which satisfies open source purists. Yet for practical users not looking to build their own software, Obsidian still punches above its weight — it's highly functional and polished out of the box, requiring zero setup to be immediately productive.
The integrated community plugins library lets you extend vanilla Obsidian to match most proprietary software, including Notion's "databases" functionality (arguably Notion's best feature), LLM integration, and much more. Since these plugins are themselves open source, they too can be customized beyond their original design. It's the perfect blend of freedom with valuable functionality either built-in or one click away.
What initially drove me from Notion to Obsidian wasn't the customization aspect, but the need for local storage and non-cloud syncing for sensitive data. It's egregious that Notion still doesn't support this outside their Enterprise license. I almost overlooked this by simply not using Notion for sensitive data, but the final straw came when I lost access during Notion's service outages. Even though these were infrequent and brief, being unable to access my data when needed was unacceptable. Arguing with devs about local storage and offline functionality only to face that situation made me realize how absurd it was that Notion doesn't even provide a cached version when offline. Without internet, Notion is essentially a brick — your data exists somewhere in the aether, just not on your device. That's bananas.
After switching to Obsidian and solving the local storage "problem" in 30 seconds, I gradually discovered more functionality and have since customized it as my central organization and research tool. Couldn't recommend it more highly.
I'll stop my rant now — Obsidian speaks for itself and doesn't need my endorsement, just as Notion's shortcomings are equally well-established.
Obsidian is on a fundamental level a very different app to Notion (you already mentioned the web app, databases, ...). It is also not even close to being "hackable to the core", it is not open source. That title belongs to Emacs.
It depends on what subset of Notion you use. Nothing (including Notion) is perfect for me. I'd like to build my own eventually, but I'm currently using Obsidian which doesn't hit your "works in the browser" requirement.
One option, which is open source and self hosted, is Trilium[sic], found at https://github.com/zadam/trilium It's open source, so if it's close to what you want, you might be able to adjust it to meet your needs.
Other commercial options include Realm, Tana, and Craft. With varying degrees of "AI".
I really like the UX of Tana for building out graphs of pages with properties, but it's slow to start up, doesn't support math, etc. So it's mainly a UX example for me.
Google Docs isn’t near the same as Notion. Not even close.
Notion treats information as a repository and keeps things indexed, searchable, and has some ways to automatically sort things, has ability to seamlessly create different types of documents and weave them together and so much more that Docs lack.
Docs doesn’t even have native markdown support last I checked
You can use Markdown in Google Docs, but it automatically gets converted to rich text. (When you copy/paste rich text out of Google Docs, there's also a "Copy as Markdown" option, but it'll default to a particular Markdown syntax that may not be the one you refer.)
please name some open source (or lower priced) alternatives that support: comments on documents, database functionality to a similar level, publishing websites, scripting for properties. I'm very curious!
Heh. I remember back in the comp.lang.perl.misc days, where newbies would show up and ask "What's the best IDE for Perl development" and all the longtime greybeards would reply "Unix".
When it came out, block-based editing and always-on wysiwig were novel, and Notion was definitely more delightful than the existing “internal wiki” software category (Confluence etc.)
Notion's data model is incredible, actually. You can embed almost anything into it, and make it work across your knowledge base.
Databases work like spreadsheets, and you can embed pages inside them, too. In fact, every row is a potential page, if you want.
While I prefer Obsidian for my technical (public and private) knowledge bases, life organization, and specific help pages I create for relatives live in Notion, and it works really well. Being able to script and formulate things allows great flexibility.
What I'm not very comfortable yet is "ejecting" from Notion, since the data model is so convoluted, what they give you as a package is not very convenient, yet.
Evernote had the best mechanism, giving you an XML file and an official XSLT to read/verify/transform what they give you. However, Evernote feels very underpowered when you start to use formulae and automation across your database.
the data model is banal. just a tree with limited "type" strings for the special things. it's literally no different than any other file format. and they make it as difficult to export as all the other companies
What I do is clearly written in my profile. Tangentially, do somebody has to be employee of $CORPORATION to like $CORPORATION.$PRODUCT?
Banal is boring, boring is good. If they can do useful and novel things with banal and boring things (which they can from my experience), it's doubly good.
They give a Markdown and CSV version of the stored data, which is not that bad, IMHO. Still doesn't beat Evernote on that regard, though.
As with all tools, Horses for Courses, YMMV & moreover, Caveat Emptor.
so they store the data in a tree with special types for text or images... and output only a csv or markdown for you outside? honest question, how does this make the data model relevant? internally it's the same as Microsoft word even, and you can't benefit from it as it export without the structure.
Several companies have tried to "reproduce" Notion and have failed. I don't like or use Notion but that is just extremely ignorant of the USP behind it. Dunning–Kruger much?
