I enjoyed Notion at first for certain tasks, but it became much less enjoyable as everyone tried to force everything into emoji-laden Notion docs. The Notion spaces used by the Product and Program managers I worked with in the past few years have become a collection of half-finished documents that are always out of date, hard to find, and often superseded by some new Notion page they created but forgot to tell us about until we had spent weeks following the old one.
In a way, Notion has come to occupy the same space as Jira for me: A tool that tries to be everything to everyone and gets abused by people who feel like using as many features as possible is a best practice.
I’ve had better success lately asking people to step outside of Notion and instead work in an old-fashioned shared Google doc. It’s amazing how much more productive we can all be when the tools are simplified to exactly what we need and people don’t feel like they need to sprinkle emojis and checklists and other features into everything just because they can.
I don't get why Notion is so popular either, but your complaints about it seem like a skill issue on the part of your managers. I see this a lot too, but in my experience it happens no matter the medium - Google Docs, Figma, Jira, etc. People who don't obsess over keeping it organized eventually spaghetti their documentation all over the place. I wouldn't expect the kinds of people who need to be convinced of the worth of refactoring and getting rid of old code to also understand that out of date documentation needs to be updated or it is often more harmful than just deleting it.
people also use jira as a support ticket system.
Sprint planning system.
Kanban system.
I’ve seen it set up so that it can track work across kanban teams and scrum teams.
Jira has deep integration with bitbucket, confluence, and GitHub.
It can manage your CI pipelines as well.
Jira is an anything app with a bend towards project management.
Setting up jira workflows is a whole career.
Source: I worked at Atlassian for 5 years and they use jira as the backbone for _everything_. It all flows into jira.
people also use email as a support ticket system. Sprint planning system. Kanban system. I’ve seen it set up so that it can track work across kanban teams and scrum teams.
Email has deep integration with bitbucket, confluence, and GitHub.
Email can manage your CI pipelines as well.
Email is an anything app with a bend towards project management. Setting up email workflows is a whole career.
Source: I worked at Google for years and they use email as the backbone for _everything_. It all flows into email
Another anecdote added to the "I don't get notion" pile.
I just don't get notion. I use Apple Notes for everything id use notion for + scratch.txt on every project folder root. (i've used notion, quip, gdocs, dropbox paper)
Notion lives rent free in my mind because while im indifferent to it, people seem to LOVE it. and that's so fascinating.
even this article, I upvoted it because the conversation about notion is interesting, the article itself is a dud after reading it.
we live in a world where Notion is a multi billion dollar company and i have no idea why—now that's interesting!
God I hate notion. The way it splits columns until you have like two horizontal inches to type in, the rubber-band linking of documents, just the total lack of opinionation outside of templates..
I might be strange but I just really vibed with Confluence and I’d be happy with it if people would commit to it.
lol you reminded me when i very first onboarded to notion i kept trying to write something and the magic paragraph thing kept popping up and im like WTF can i just… i'm trying to… wtf… and i wanted to try to use it, so i looked up the magic and i kept trying to magic and it just went zero to a million i guess in my understanding. no idea how to get collapsible sections.
I felt very dumb. Like i just want to write this thing and it wants me to be more magical about what i'm trying to write and fuck it's just text, get the fuck out of my way.
i think it's just there are notion users and then there's everyone else. I recovered in my self love again. I use txt files in my ancient sublime editor :)
Apple Notes is pretty close to perfect for me - it's just missing Markdown support and backlinks.
I did just figure out how to link notes together with the '>>' shortcut, which is a game-changer. I've tried a bunch of other apps, but I always come back to Notes.
Great points i also agree with. That's Apple being Apple. I'd want an open format for sure.
Thing about Apple Notes is in spite of the open ideals, if you're in the apple ecosystem, it's just easily there, on all devices, very unassuming and simply, and that's so so very valuable.
It's the long view that gets me. Over the last 20 years, if i'm in the Apple ecosystem, notes are there, synced across everything, and it's just text. and it's simple.
You say that, but there are tons of features in Notes. They're just successfully kept out of your way until you go looking for them, so when you just want a note that's what you get. This is progressive disclosure, a longtime tenet of Apple GUI design.
A relevant and somewhat meta example: This year they added disclosable sections, which were previously a differentiator for Notion. That's in addition to handwriting selection and editing, voice memos, collaborative editing… Not to mention it's still a regular app and you can have as many note windows as you want.
Notion is popular because it is infinitely customizable. Want to draw in your Notion database? Done. Want to do Kanban? Easy. Gantt Charts? Child's play. Whatever you want Notion to do it likely can be and it is available on any device you want and you can share it with your team so working with other people is not a pain in the ass like it is with most plain text note taking.
Humans naturally love to twiddle knobs and move things around. Notion attaches that behavior with money making through an affiliate program. Result is a billion dollar company.
I've often thought that, looking historically, Notion only exists because product innovation in Google Docs is decoupled from revenue growth for Google Workspace. Putting a draggable handle, at the user's election, alongside every paragraph in Docs, and adding a customizable shortcut for search across docs, would go a long way towards Docs being 90% of what Notion's value proposition was as of a few years ago. But most startups using Notion already had Google Workspace for email anyways, so there was no growth story there for Google to invest in this mandate.
Now, Notion's done a lot since then. If you want a knowledge base that can also have semi-structured tabular data, and portability in that data, it's hard to beat. Notion AI, pulling from disparate sources with the context of the current planning document, is really neat, too! But not every company will want to pay the per-head cost for this, unless it can replace other existing tools.
And when it comes to spaces like CRM in that context, looking at https://www.google.com/search?q=notion+crm&udm=14 ... there's a lot that could be said about Notion's (lack of) SEO/advertising there, but more concretely, a CRM solution nowadays has to bring a wealth of integrations as a near-prerequisite, and Notion doesn't have a mature story there - nor can they easily, because different customers will have different data models that make it hard to have a standardized notion of "what fields can I count on to be present for an Account."
Notion is a really powerful system. If it didn't already have a $10B valuation, it would be in tremendously good shape. But it has a long way to go to find the areas of growth it needs to grow beyond $10B.
It’s just too bad Notion AI can’t see data stored in databases, which is arguably Notions biggest value add and differentiator. So given that it can’t use that data with AI queries really limits the usefulness of it.
I like Notion but I share the sense that it's not really targeted at my use case anymore. I think I could essentially move everything into Obsidian and lose almost nothing in the process.
I just use it for taking notes and writing stuff down. I like how easy it is to drop an image, video, or document into a notion page, but I've only barely used features like databases which seem to be the big selling point, and none of my usage of those is really anything that couldn't just be a plaintext table in a markdown doc.
One of these days I'll get up the gumption to crawl through, excise what's worth keeping into Obsidian , and cancel my subscription. But not today, lol.
I started as an Obsidian user, and generally I like the fact that it's just Markdown, but markdown tables really suck, to the point that I simply ended up avoiding them at all costs, and I used OnlyOffice's Excel equivalent in parallel to Obsidian for a while.
But Notion has good tables by default, so I can have both good tables (and tableviews) and normal text files in the same app.
I could have tried Obsidian plugins, but I suspect that it would have been a time sink, and Notion offered everything in a neat package, so in the end, it won.
I will say that Obsidian's tables have gotten a lot better in terms of reflow, sorting, etc. At some point Obsidian might add some additional config to their tables to allow users to manually control column widths, etc., but it would have to be non-standard markdown - like how you can scale down images by adding a width parameter.
I just migrated everything out of Notion into Ibsidian. Notion was unusable after more than a few hundred items in a DB. I migrated to using dataview and lists in Obsidian and haven't had a problem since. And it works offline.
I use it for my workout logbook and cooking/recipe log with hundreds of entries.
You can click "export to markdown" on a notion page, you can click "import from markdown", but those two markdown dialects are totally incompatible. Most of the time notion can't even read what it exported.
The notion web editor for me has very noticeable lag, so I really want to just be able to write some text somewhere to represent a notion table or whatever, but there's simply no supported way to do that I'm aware of.
I mean, it's fine, using a i7 core at 100% at all times just to produce text at a 2 second delay is totally fine for a text editor, I'm sure notion's doing its best.
Don't buy into all the crazy around it. It's a Markdown editor with some organisation features. If you read Reddit, people treat it like some sort of second coming, making sure EVERY NOTE THEY TAKE is linked at least one other, tagged, etc. Like somehow that makes notes better.
I was confused at first too but once I realised most of these people are insane and it's a note taking app, it's very easy simple and quick to use. I love it.
It's a pretty simple note organizer for markdown notes. That's literally it. Vaults/folders/subfolders are 1:1 representations of the folders on your physical computer.
It's WYSIWYG, so even if you don't know markdown, you can just use standard shortcuts like Ctrl-B to bold something, Ctrl-I to italicize, etc.
But it's only as valuable as the notes that it contains. If you are a fastidious note taker (for your projects, work, etc), like to ontologically tag things, and appreciate building inter-related knowledge (like wikipedia links), then you'd be hard pressed to find a better substitute even compared to other heavy hitters like Joplin and Logseq.
It's just ("just" in the good sense) a fancy Markdown editor with a bunch of plugins, including for most of the core features (which are just bundled-in plugins and can be turned off).
At its simplest, it is a UI to markdown files. When I was first looking into it, it seemed very tightly coupled with the zettelkasten method which I know nothing about. At first I thought that I was missing something but have since used it as just a markdown note app.
I will asked ChatGPT to output responses in a note form in markdown so I can copy/paste it in.
You can wrap code with:
‘’’elixir
Code here
‘’’
To get syntax highlighting
For basic notes, the ones that come with most devices imo are very good. Apple notes, Samsung notes, Onenote, all very good. So good I find it difficult to recommend anything else to people, like Notion still doesn’t even have proper pen/stylus support. Obsidian to me fits a good niche of being extensible with plugins but I get why some people can’t get into it.
Notion shines with database use, and was how I used to write my blogs and connecting the API directly to my site to auto update. I’m surprised you’re a paying customer and barely use the database stuff!
I think once I started using databases it made other note-taking tools seem primitive in comparison. It's hard to explain why, but it just allows you to organise and categorise hundreds of notes seamlessly.
I also really like how it treats everything as blocks, that's another thing that I can no longer live without.
If you're not interested in features like this, then yeah. Obsidian would be a good use-case.
So far, the only weakness I've found with Obsidian are the tables. Someone needs to build in a killer tables feature. Obsidian is an Electron app; it shouldn't be too hard to build a stripped down version of Google Sheets.
Unfortunately, it's nowhere close to Notion tables or spreadsheets in general. Formulas are very primitive (eg aggregation is either sum or mean), the syntax is confusing, and you have to manually re-evaluate them. Tables are Obsidian's main weakness to me.
It still blows my mind that Google Docs still haven't taken over Notion's business altogether. I have used Notion for ~6 months for my own company, ended up going back to Google Docs because it was not worth it. I am sure there are a billion other uses of it, we weren't using any of its database-like features, just as an internal documentation platform, but still fascinating to see a business thrive on the lack of innovation of a giant.
In practice, Google could put a tree-like organization of docs on the sidebar, make the search a bit comfier, and make draggable blocks, and get 80% of the Notion users. I guess they don't have a financial incentive to make docs better, but I would gladly pay extra to have everything there.
I guess someone could build a browser extension that adds that UI to Google Docs, or eventually I'll go and do it myself.
This is a fun piece of creative writing, but I’m not quite sure of the point it’s trying to make about Notion. Is it that Notion is no longer cool? That might be true but isn’t the most insightful comment. Is it about Notion the company languishing in some way?
Notion is jumping the shark by moving from being a notes organization / mini database product to trying to compete with Salesforce and Hubspot. Just completely a different sector / product.
This is an issue for all the low/no code tools. Every meaningful problem has a first class SaaS product that solves it well.
Notion/Retool/Airtable/Coda/Etc are fighting over a cursed long tail and their employees are slowly going insane trying to generalize asymptotic industries. The “AI” rebranding has no doubt made them want to put a gun in their mouths.
Often this happens when companies raising more funds when there are no funds available for that sector. Suddenly it's not cool to be a car rental company, they also need to become a logistics platform or bank.
It's middle aged and not exciting anymore? Doesn't know what else to do so it buys a sports car (adds AI). Just guessing but I know I am much less excited about notion than I was 4 years ago and maybe that's the point or maybe that's just how it resonated with me.
I imported a friend of mine's Notion into Fraxinus, some software I wrote that is a bookmark manager and a webcrawler and an image sorter and a search engine and annotation system and a visualization tool and is likely to get merged with my YOShInOn RSS reader and model trainer (might eat all my side projects that aren't about images and VR.) It's a tool for understanding, organizing and harvesting a collection of documents (so I got some insight into how he uses Notion.)
In his case, he uses it as a CRM for prospecting and it really isn't that bad at the business development end where you don't have a lot of people doing a structured process. But if you could somehow add some structure to notion, in the UI or with some AI interpretation of the text, or both, I could see Notion becoming a CRM or something else, think of something like a spreadsheet for notes.
Of course it might not be Notion that does it, it might be a startup that does it, it might be an established company. Saleforce is a good comparable because you can customize Salesforce to build many kinds of application but you still need programmers to do it. Is somebody in 2024 going to build a system which is as flexible, maybe even more flexible, but doesn't need the programmer?
There’s far more for Notion to lose “training customer data on AI” than for Notion to gain. Like if an AI feature ever disclosed private information of one customer to another, that would be a huge blow to the company.
The closest thing to that that makes sense for us is building “learn to rank” style search models to improve search results, but this is not usually considered “AI” and is typical for any product trying to make search good.
Thanks for the Anytype rec. I have similarly been looking for a good alternative since they turned on AI features you can’t easily opt out of. And I’m not some anti-LLM zealot — I use them every day.
I’m not even worried about them training on user data. The more immediate problem is that if you accidentally type something in the Ask AI box (which is very easy to do because it looks like search), the page you’re on and god know what else is sent to god knows where. When I use LLMs, I like to know which one I’m using and exactly what I’m sending them.
I felt their AI integration was very cavalier and it completely changed my opinion of them as a company. On top of that, the YouTube and Tik Tok productivity grifters thrive on the ecosystem of template BS that Notion seems very happy to encourage. I guess they can’t help it but it is not my vibe. I also want something more stripped down and programmable. Obviously a programmer is not a typical consumer.
Not that I expect them to fix it at this point since it seems to be a known issue, but just in case anyone from Notion is watching please fix the macOS app’s CPU usage. On a brand new M3 MacBook Pro each tab takes about 10% of one core _non-stop_ even in the background. I have to constantly cull tabs or my machine becomes noticeably less responsive.
It seems that Notion is a kind of product that tries to solve issues from many areas, so it has everything that almost solves a meaningful problem for the user, but not quite. So the burden is on the user to go that extra mile, who will have to search for templates, memorize how non-standard tech works just to setup and maintain a system that only the maintainer knows how it works.
Some people use Notion for research and academic writing, which is the same use case for my software (https://getcahier.com). By specializing on this specific use case, I've been able to: offer a standard data model that's widely used in the field (bibtex), innovate in the PDF reader in the direction that my users need (by adding scrollbar markers for the relative position of highlights), and provide clear instructions to users on how to use the software. In principle, learning to use the software is learning how to perform an activity better - in this case, formal or informal research. When working with a software that's too general the user will always have to ask himself an additional question: "now, how do I make it do what I need?".
As the mathematician Hardy used to say, a beautiful theorem is one that is not too specific but also that is not too general - it has to strike a balance between the two.
That's sort of the draw. I don't need the best bug tracker, I need a bug tracker that I can get pretty much whatever I need to do done in. I don't need the best wiki, I just need to be able to write reasonably formatted docs with syntax highlighting and links. Notion explicitly isn't the best at any of these things, it's maybe an 8/10 on the best of days. But it's priced at an 8/10 and the search works across the whole damn thing, and nothing that it does is really all that bad.
On the other hand, Confluence does really just one thing. But it doesn't do it especially well, and there's lots of things that it can do that are bolted on haphazardly. Go ahead, try to embed that Loom video. I double dog dare you to try to configure it to show Git commits from GitHub. IMO something that isn't good that's purpose built is actively worse than something that does everything pretty okay.
I use Notion because I have to, not because I like it.
Other teams still use Confluence. People said Notion is a lot better than Confluence. Well, I agree I'd rather use it over Confluence, but that's a very low bar for comparison.
For ages they didn't have a find-and-replace feature. I just checked, it looks like they've finally added it in the last few months, but this is the first I notice.
They claim you can export stuff as markdown, but if I export as markdown, edit and reimport, I lose half of the formatting – even basic formatting which is part of the markdown spec.
Their native format (which their API exposes) is a bunch of extremely complex JSON blobs. I thought about writing a tool to let me download stuff, edit it in a sane text editor, then reupload it, but when I saw the complexity I just gave up.
Actually today's Confluence is much better than Notion in my opinion.
It has a built in Figma style diagram/flow-chart editor which is handy for architecture documents, infinite array of plugins and the interface is simple, clean and focused.
Notion has become this kitchen sink app where even editing a table is a convoluted mess of an experience.
Hasn't come up much here, but part of the appeal is that Notion is extremely flexible. You can create a regular old company knowledge base, but also feed in/out things from a ton of other systems and organize them.
Notion's main strength and stickiness imo is as a hub.
notion was the beneficiary of the mass exodus of users who felt betrayed by evernote's weird pricing change many years ago. they had a great evernote importer which made it easy to migrate and then grew way beyond the elegant simple product they once were.
a new notion is lurking somewhere waiting to ride in the wake of a growing disgruntled pile of notion users
Notions kinda funny. It has this stickiness among a college aged, tech savvy demographic that’s not generating any revenue for them but has garnered a massive valuation relative to their revenue.
They want business from me, a tech savvy technical leader in an enterprise who mostly doesn’t care about what they offer. I want all my docs to live in Git, the way it does in Google’s g3doc.
We use Notion and, while it seems better than Confluence, I’ve never actually authored a single thing in it. It has no overlap with my goals. The world should be accessible from my IDE, and if I were them that’s where I’d really focus: a bi-directional sync and a first class VS Code plugin for whatever their file format looks like.
I don't think is as big of a deal the author is making out to be - such pages are usually written out of SEO considerations.
If there's a conversation within a company about getting dedicated CRM software and they're already a Notion user or strongly considering Notion for their wikis and documentation, getting the word out there that Notion can also function like a reasonable CRM replacement can help close that deal or prevent a conversation about how Notion might not meet their needs.
We’re all glorified relational DB when you think about it lol
Notion was one of THE new tastemakers. Every startup copying their designs, now there’s AI generators to make “notion style art”. To see their new pages and additions have such clunky copyrighting is disappointing and I hope just temporary, not a sign the tastemakers have left the company.
Notion defnitely had something to it when it only had to be a documentation platform. It was fast, clean and elegant, and that helped to forgive the missing bits (table support or plantUML kind of plugins)
But now that they've added a ton of features requested left and right, and effectively presented Notion as a one-stop solution to every documentation problem, I don't see much taste and elegance persisting. Not that the people you know lost their taste, more that it doesn't matter if they have to say yes to absolutely everything to keep being a one-stop solution that does it all.
In my or people started changing the way they write to stop triggering Notion features, and on the other side figjam and spreadsheet documents are coming back even as it could have been a Notion page.
There's definitely a shift IMHO. Notion will keep being used, but it might not be the first choice when other simpler options are available.
I really don't. Notion is one of those tools that entrepreneurs gravitate towards for it's simplicity, and then engineers rip out for being a parasite. At the end of the day it's an overpriced CMS that can very easily be replaced by any number of different alternatives. Their "taste" is just as overrated and overpriced as Apple's is.
We switched from Google Workspace to Notion around 2018. It worked really well as a company wiki. A lot of the exec team lived in there.
The most painful part, the part that led to us switching back, was how painfully slow Notion was. Thanks to Electron, it used an obscene amount of ram, and a lot of opportunities to jot an idea down, or file something in the right place, were lost because of that slight lag.
Like being forced to cold-start Chrome to visit any website.
Knowing it would feel tedious to open Notion made me reconsider if the idea was worth writing down at all.
I just want an AI assistant that can organize things for me in some kind of note taking /wiki/something… it needs to take raw data and make it useful… you know like an assitant would, specifically around projects etc…
Not sure what the point of this is. Every company I’ve worked at stores everything in notion. Managers and ops people keep it up to date and organize processes in there.
I’ve gotten out of the habit but I could definitely see how in a set of dependent code reviews one might want to be able to update a sequence of statuses in a matter of minutes to land a bunch of changes back to back to back, plowing through using a CLI or keyboard shortcuts.
Oh, wait. I guess it's a supported use case. I uh... take it back... I guess...
> If you don’t want to use a dedicated CRM platform or start from a template, you can use a no-code platform like Notion to build a knowledge base or team homepage and modify it to fit your CRM needs.
Yeah, I guess some people will think that's a good idea.
Saw it happen first hand for project management: Notion started promoting the Task Board/GANTT like view of the databases as a fully supported use-case, and the bean counters came straight away to ask if we really needed a dedicated ticket management system.
As our use case was relatively simple it was borderline doable, and our dedicated system went away, even as we knew there will be rough edges. It's not great, but not bad enough to justify paying a full license price for a more polished product.
It's always amazed me that Notion got as popular as it did. It's not exactly user-friendly nor technically cappable (not having API or any kind of external integration for most of its existence).
There seems to be a group of nerds that's apparently pretty huge and have enough decision making power that it was able to tap into.
In a way, Notion has come to occupy the same space as Jira for me: A tool that tries to be everything to everyone and gets abused by people who feel like using as many features as possible is a best practice.
I’ve had better success lately asking people to step outside of Notion and instead work in an old-fashioned shared Google doc. It’s amazing how much more productive we can all be when the tools are simplified to exactly what we need and people don’t feel like they need to sprinkle emojis and checklists and other features into everything just because they can.
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