You could always tell when a company switch their priority from B2C to B2B. Notion felt different when it was first released but in the last few years new competitors were able to replicate what they've done and make it better and faster (e.g. Craft) while notion focused their energy on teams/enterprise features.
I really can't understand where Notion is going. They come from b2c, made b2c free pivoted to b2b smb and started saying more and more that they are a b2b enterprise company (even though their vision is not really compatible with that). And now they buy a company which is clearly in the b2b smb/b2c space. Confused
No idea, been happy with joplin app to be honest for personal note making. Simple enough and captures most use-cases cases. Just not as elegant as notion, but optionality is great
Seconded with respect to Joplin. It's the only solution I've found which lets me sync iPad notes & photos & videos to my linux boxes & android. Perfect for dumping screenshots and adding context to them and for copying pages down for later reading / annotation. Oh and it's all E2E encrypted through dropbox (I want to get it on a personal cloud soon too, but alas the chefs never cook themselves gourmet food). The only "missing feature" is the lack of an in-built ability to "share" but as a personal journal I think it's perfect.
Having a team in a different timezone from the main cluster of office timezones can be a win for ops-related activities, but I've found as an employee it risks work-life balance because people want real-time help (example: UTC+8 workers asking questions to UTC-8 workers). I've explored switching to a smaller company like Notion, but it seems offices everywhere is becoming the norm, so it's difficult to find roles that don't require cross-timezone collaboration.
Perhaps a remote-based company, like Gitlab, would be preferable for you? You get the global distribution while, I imagine, also having the respect to work hours since the company started with that distributed structure.
I can see remote-based companies becoming more of the norm, especially post-pandemic, rather than multiple-location startups/corporations.
If any Notion manager is reading this: Please stop spending endless dollars on youtube stars and affiliate marketing. Almost every Youtube star that has a channel on productivity (Thomas Frank, Ali Abdaal and a dozen others) makes paid videos about Notion. By doing that you don't get organic growth, and obviously your platform cannot handle all the new users. Whenever I try to link a page to another by hitting `@` sign, I wait literally seconds until I get recommendations. That's why I switched my writing projects to Roam and other alternatives and use Notion only for task- and project management.
This is obviously uninformed and likely bad advice to divest their marketing budget from presumably successful channels.
But the advice to invest more in engineering is spot-on. It’s clear that Notion went through a period of hypergrowth and likely generated a lot of tech debt, but I’m hoping they’ll pay it off over time.
In particular, as the parent comment mentions, anything involving search or autocomplete has horrible performance. There are also some questionable UX decisions that I personally find annoying, like defaulting to opening a page in a modal rather than the current window.
A good starting point for a roadmap would be the Notion subreddit. Most of the time I Google for a specific feature, the top result is a post in that subreddit requesting the feature in 2019.
I think the point about performance seems relevant in my experience.
This is a problem Slite seems to be facing as well. We used both for a while and actually gave their teams a lot of feedback. They were very grateful and communicated well, but moved very slowly and performance decreased quite a bit over time. We ended up focusing most of our planning/note taking/scheduling efforts in Linear instead. Much, much different but it works well enough while remaining extremely speedy and productive. I do miss a lot of what documents had to offer our team. I don't miss fiddling around with slow documents which didn't offer all of what we needed (and might never offer it).
I'm not sure why but most document-based apps like this seem to develop terrible performance. I suspect it's genuinely a difficult problem; I don't think I can 'make Notion in a weekend' by any means, or Slite for that matter. I trust they're doing their best.
I also know these tools suit some teams incredibly well, too.
Honestly I think this is because Notion, Slite are mostly frontend apps at the core. And thus attract talents who are strong in frontend, and the culture is biased toward front end (actually in Notion it is even biased toward UI). And thus they neglect backend due to their culture which leads to performance issues.
I agree that you can't do Notion in a weekend, I have been working on something similar and it took me 8 months full time to have something that starts to look ok.
But that's also why I'm not bearish on having good performance in that kind of app. Notion made very dubious choices regarding their data model which explains why it is slow. Slite did not, but I thought that Slite had better performance though
You are absolutely right that building a performant rich-text-editor for large document is indeed a very difficult problem. Mixing real-time collaboration put further challenges on api design and server processing. It's a whole different level of engineering challenges compare to building a performant CRUD web app...
I am wondering how your team does note taking in Linear - are you guys create one issue for each document? It doesn't support collaborative editing, right?
I should have been clearer. We essentially abandoned note taking and began storing all of our tasks in linear in a more granular way. We also all began participating in our issue management more, as it became sort of like the core of project management for us.
Looking at linear can give you a very clear picture of where the team is right now, what we’ve been doing, and even what we will be doing. Our issues are a place where we discuss implementation decisions, relate issues together in various ways to provide more clarity, link to external resources relevant to issues, and we organize them into projects and cycles as well.
The goal was to convert a process we already used into a more robust and useful process which might make note taking redundant. It has mostly worked.
Since we work in software and we’re a small team that’s intimately familiar with most of our code (or at least what the code does), tooling and practices like version control, idiomatic naming conventions, and supplemental commenting in code can helpfully serve as sufficient documentation for the team right now.
It’s a much different thing from real-time collaborative documents though and I do worry that as we grow, it won’t benefit less technical roles we’ll need to support the team. That’s where something like Notion becomes very compelling to me.
I didn’t realize how much Stockholm Syndrome I had with Confluence until we switched to using Notion for our game design documents. It’s fast and responsive, which somehow in 2021 Atlassian still hasn’t figured out how to replicate with any of their products.
Switching pages and search are infuriatingly slow on Notion. I still love the rest of it, but my god switch to using a local cache for searching or something please
If all you know is JIRA then Notion feels like a breath of fresh air. Like it's not fast, but I never really expected blinding speed since Notion pages are so dynamic. But it's also not JIRA's click on something then wait a few seconds for the UI to catch up on a many thousand dollar laptop.
After fighting the move to Jira/Confluence for years, my company finally migrated away from Notion & Clubhouse. I couldn't be happier. Notion was great when we were <5 people, but it feels like a toy compared to Confluence.
What am I missing out on? I get Confluence has lots of enterprisey features for sysadmins but as an author it has always been a terrible experience, especially for code. There's so much friction to actually creating documentation that nobody actually does it or if they do never bother to update it.
With JIRA and Confluence, there is never just one JIRA or Confluence. It really comes down to the configuration. And there are hundreds, if not thousands, of different configuration options that could be built into your particular implementation which may make it sing, or make it like a bad CAFO.
I’ve been part of a team doing JIRA and Confluence configuration. We saw on,y the tiniest bit about the configuration process required to make it work, and we slammed that hood right back down and decided we were never going to look under there again. Well, not ourselves. But we did hire a JIRA and Confluence expert to come in and help us make it as optimized as we could get.
I’ve also been a customer of bad JIRA and Confluence configurations. And when they’re bad, they can be really bad. But, as a customer, you don’t have any control over those system configuration options.
It’s like saying that a hammer is bad. Well, which hammer did you use? There are dozens or hundreds of different types of hammers out there. How did you use this hammer? What did you use this hammer on? Where did you use this hammer? Were you trained in how to use it properly? Did you actually use it properly, or were you using it in a way that was not consistent with its design?
Confluence's biggest value to me is on the Product/Project Management side of things, not necessarily code documentation. Being able to embed Figma docs, client requests .docx files, link to tables/epics/issues, and produce Gantt charts all in one place has been absolutely critical to taking our team from "boutique software studio" to "fast-growing product agency."
I find it brutally slow. At first I was a big fan but over time I've mostly stopped using it because I just couldn't stand how slow it is (using it in browser on a laptop).
I hang on in the hopes they will address the problem.
Confluence is too often used in use cases it was not design for. That includes being used by companies with less 50 people. This probably contributes to its criticisms. But Confluence will almost always beat Notion when the company reach more than 150 people.
None that I'm aware of. Thing to understand is that Notion and Confluence are vastly different products.
Notion is more for sharing a set of documents that are often used. And thus create some hierarchy of content without right management or structure. Works well if you are business owner or a team, or a small company. Or if you want to onboard noob users into documenting their work. And Notion is very good at that
Confluence works better to manage a lot of documents, give rights, structure content, organize. Confluence is not very good at it, but this is a difficult task and competitors don't do better
So depending on where you are at, you can pick the one which suits you best. They are others less popular tools than Confluence and Notion but still are in the two categories described above
Been using Notion for over 2 years now, and unfortunately I must say I am not going to be using them moving forward. You end up with a soup of documents each with their own structure, search is terrible, creating is easy sure - but finding the right content sucks.
I'm not sure what the solution is, but after putting Notion through its paces I know this isn't it.
Indeed, there is no other tool out there automatically linking documents for you, as far as we know.
The idea is that Saga helps you resurface connections and ideas without having to do the manual work yourself.
This allows for a more serendipitous discovery of knowledge while you're crafting content or researching a topic.
Areas where we see great promise are:
- analyzing interviews and notes for product and user research
- automatically generate company or support wikis from docs
- discover insights while writing meeting/team notes and documentation
Currently beta testing realtime collaborative editing and we'll start pushing towards integrating with other tools after that.
The search is the part that really infuriates me. I find it pretty useless at finding exactly where I've mentioned a term or phrase before, compared to Obsidian or even Craft
Seems like overkill to get the integrations into a single product.
Surely, buy 25% shares and seat on the board. Make a contract that Notion integrations are advertised first and everything else is encouraged to work with it.
That way automate still has a larger target market and provides a channel into Notion sales.
This kills automate's growth. I wonder what the price tag was.
From Automate.io's announcement [0], rather than Notion's, they will continue to operate independently. It doesn't appear that it's being assimilated to be a Notion-oriented product, but rather a closer relationship between the two while diversifying Notion's business.
I guess time will tell, but I imagine it's safer financially for Notion to let Automate continue operating as it has been while working more closely to bring first-class integrations into Notion and improving Notion's API.
Buying only 25% sounds good from Notion’s perspective but is absolutely the worst possible deal for Automate’s shareholders. The value of the remaining 75% Automate shares would tank after that deal because Notion basically owns you with their 25% shares, board seat and preferred contract.
I start to believe that all-in-one tools is eventually wrong for your work process. It's not specialized, limited, not modular, for particular workflow; you bend your whole organization's teams into it.
But too many services also introduce data integration problems (usually via APIs, 4 services may need 3 pipes). I wish there were "Managed Database Table as a Service" that provides authorization and authentication for apps/services to connect to. SaaS products connect to available db tables that user provides (assume B2B here), now business can choose a bunch of SaaS integrated together via database, get rid of all apis work.
Imagine Design tool, Issue Tracker, Git host, CMS read and write to your managed DTaaS. Painless automation extension. All teams use tools made for them specially.
I’ve happily shifted to FSNotes after tasting all flavors of alternatives- FSNotes has hit a sweet spot for me, Apple systems only maybe it’s only limit, if fully cross, I can slip back to Joplin, which is good but for some reason or other never hooked me strongly (am always looking for notational velocity replacement- thinking I’ve finally got it)
Never heard of FSNotes. Looks like it could replace Bear for me. While Bear is quite cheap, I'd like to have as little subscription services as possible.
Is automate the same as IFTTT and Zapier?
There are many such firms (I think). Is there a benefit to buying a particular one?
I am sure they are hard to build, but could Notion just build one?
I used IFTTT religiously a couple years back and I tried Automate.io for Notion and Google Sheets about a month ago, and I've got to say that Automate.io has a much more intuitive design for creating the automations.
Please someone help me get Notion. It's slow, it's missing big features like offline mode and localization. What is the attraction to this app? I've tired it 3 times now and I just don't get it.
For me, it's the mix of markdown documents and Airtable-like databases. It's much more productive than the various Excel-based "trackers" and Word documents in multiple folders that my team uses at work. Being able to automatically link relevant procedures and documents to specific work items, keep track of the status of those items, and having an all encompassing, interlinked "homepage" of all the relevant information related to my job keeps my cognitive load minimal.
I've used Obsidian and Dendron for a lot of this previously, but the real killer feature of Notion, IMO, is the databases. I'd kill for a local/offline-first alternative that also has mobile support, but I have yet to find anything as easy (other than Craft, but it's Apple only and the web version is still in beta).
The first is the keyboard shortcuts. The forward-slash shortcut for adding blocks is both simple and powerful. Along with AutoHotKey, I'm able to format and navigate around without ever leaving the keyboard.
The second is the block based system. With the block system, it's really easy to reformat a page or move items to new pages. For example, if there's a bulleted list that needs to be moved, I can just grab the top node and move the whole thing at once (because the other nodes are nested blocks)
I'm sure they have good marketing but that's far away from why I use it. At this point my whole life is in Notion. It's by far my endgame note taking app. The value is that it's so dynamic and infinitely nested and can absorb any messy unstructured thoughts or notes I have without having to stop and think about where it should go.
Like say I make myself a todo list using a List database. Need to set a reminder for myself about some part of it? Just add it in the list item with @. Have some documents or code output that you want to remember? Just throw it in there! Crap, have a billion tabs open from researching and have to stop for the day? Just create a list inside the page and throw all the links in there. Need to take notes on some of those links because the SO answer wasn't quite right, just add it right that list item. All the context for the card is right there in the card. It's a project management board that actually bings value to me as a dev. It's not the thing I have to use to track time, it's a thing I want to use because it's where I can store all my thoughts instead of having to have two systems and keep them in sync which is always a chore.
I did the same for my personal wiki; however, I don't think Obsidian is currently set up to handle the type of group wiki/task management that Notion is often used for.
I love Obsidian, and it's exactly what I was looking for. Notion has a slightly different usage for people, so it's not always an easy switch.
Recently did the same. I wish Obsidian had some of the nicer looking UI elements (such as editing a table without switching to markdown). I plan to stick with Obsidian for now, but am looking for something else since Obsidian is too limited(but the devs are great)
As an Indian I'm super excited that Notion's first overseas engineering office would be located in Hyderabad, India as a consequence of this acquisition!
The offices in Dublin and Tokyo are sales and customer success outposts. Hyderabad will be the first office outside the US with an engineering presence :)
