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.
A real shame as I really need something like this in my life - both personal and professional.