That's like asking "can you name a product better at being Notion than Notion?".
Rephrase the question as "what problems do you have which Notion is trying to solve, but you think there are better solutions on the market?".
Personally, I prefer plain-text where I own the content, so Obsidian works great. When I need to collaborate on something in realtime, I usually prefer a more focused tool, like Google Sheets, Trello, Excalidraw.
For that feature set and flexibility, I can't. However, for individual use cases I can.
Note taking: Bear, Apple Notes, Obsidian
Project management: Jira, Linear, Height
Wikis: can't think of any
IMO the flexibility and feature set Notion offers makes it a jack of all trades, but master of none tool. Maybe the sum turns out to be greater than parts for some people but for personal use I haven't enjoyed it. Fwiw I felt the same way about Coda. So it's a general comment on this category of "all in one" doc tools.
Bear is really bad. The fact it uses some kind of Markdown but not really is insufferable. Can you even make proper tables in Bear now? It wasn't even possible for _years_
Apple Notes is good enough but doesn't support code blocks properly, that's a deal breaker for me. Also it can't really be shared with people not on iOS/macOS. It's also really bad for writing structured documents: you get 2 title levels, and you can't generate a table of contents.
I didn't fully try Obsidian because I didn't like its general UI. I really liked the graph philosophy it tries to push but couldn't make it work for my notes.
I think Bear is great. Bear provides the exact UI for notes that I was looking for. I take simple straightforward notes as if I was writing on paper slips with a Zettelkasten-like organization. Apple Notes is the only other app for mobile and desktop that has that level of simplicity. In my opinion, if you need advanced formatting and editing features you're not making a note, you're making a document.
I'm not in any way associated with Notion but I find Notion way better than what you've listed _for me_.
I love Notion because it makes it easy to organize lots of notes and has a good search feature. The databases are super useful, I have a bunch of them and I use the template buttons to auto-create new entries. I also use the template buttons to create new entries for my daily and weekly planning & review to make sure I check off all the things I need to do.
For example, I write blog posts on programming, startups, and mental health. I have a database with ideas for each of those three things. Then I have a centralized database where I link to those other databases so I can see which ideas I'm most inspired to write about in a centralized queue.
If you're interested in things like meal prep, using the gallery to show recipe idea pictures, then you can link a database of shopping needs to a database of meal ideas to automatically create shopping lists and meal prep ideas.
I acknowledge that some people have the opinion that you can spend too much time futzing with your tool and not doing the work enough. I respect that for some people something as powerful as Notion is a distraction. For me, my mind races and I take tons of notes and do tons of planning and I find Notion very helpful for organizing everything in a way Apple Notes could never be. I think people need to be respectful of differences on this topic.
I'm someone who's always hated Jira at work because I felt like we spent more time planning than doing work. But with Notion, I use it very quickly for the most part, there was a learning curve but it mostly just helps me out and stays out of my way. The keyboard shortcuts are amazing too, I like automatically adding different colors to my documents using them.
I do like Bear for Apple Watch and I still think Trello has a better mobile UX for boards/cards, so I take notes in those two apps then organize them into Notion. I also think it's funny Notion advertises habit tracking on their SF billboards since I think habit tracking is one of the only use cases Notion is terrible for (disclosure: I'm building what I consider to be the Notion of habit trackers).
But overall I think people are being incredibly uncharitable to Notion in this thread. Maybe it's a little overhyped, maybe performance could be better, maybe some people prefer more minimalist tools (my wife still likes pen/paper and whiteboards over all these things). But to me, Notion is still an incredibly well-designed tool that's incredibly powerful.
