Notion gives you a number of options for structuring data (tables, datatypes, formatting) and collaborating (great comment/tagging system + nice doc hierarchy). As a builder I have to say that it's a really nice product. The interaction design is extremely good, but.....

IMO the biggest issue with these sorts of better-mousetrap documents/business tools is that they add another application to your organization. They're almost all slightly better than Confluence/GSuite (and I say that as a GSuite fan), but my team already runs our SSO/Email etc through GSuite and our issue tracking through Jira. Even with better functionality, maintaining another tool can turn the value proposition negative for scaling companies due to time spent on enablement, vendor negotiation, change management, wrangling of docs, security, etc.

Of course, these products like to sell/market via guerrilla, bottoms-up strategies propelled by their great design and natural appeal: the people introducing them to organizations are typically insulated from the negative logistical externalities. This allows them to dodge a top-down procurement process that would have much higher requirements. There's a whole organizational question of whether it's best for your company to accept new bottoms-up tools that incrementally improve efficiency, or accepting "worse" tools that simplify the overall logistics of running a team.

Fwiw my team also used Dropbox Paper in the early days of the product, and the story then was quite similar to Notion (we weren't customers of Dropbox's storage product).

The best way to understand notion is as a relational database. You can build arbitrary collections (tables) of "cards" and choose structured properties (columns) on them. The "body" of the card itself is a standard markdown note.

The way you can display these cards is also very flexible (views): kanban, a table, list, gallery, etc with easy to setup filtering and sorting options. You can have multiple views attached to each collection (e.g. a KanBan board for team project managment and a separate "my TODOs" list)

The most powerful part is when you start to setup relations (foreign keys) between tables, which allows you to use all the power of relational data using GUI point and click. Anyone familiar with SQL (or Django ORM) will feel right at home with Foreign key, and reverse relationships.

The reason people are so excited about notion is that it "democratizes" the power of database — to non-technical people.

The killer feature that made me switch from OneNote is that when you add dates you can set it to remind you before they pass. Some ways I've used this:

- Implementing GTD, when I move a task to "waiting" I add a date when I want to be reminded to check on it.

- I create a new table quarterly with a row for each week with columns for goals (e.g. practice Spanish or get out running 3x), then embed date reminders for each one so I don't forget to keep it updated.

- I keep a table of annual subscriptions I pay for, with the date the payment occurs, and a reminder a few weeks earlier. This way I can decide whether I want to renew (this alone has paid for the cost of Notion).

I used Evernote for years and switched to Notion like 2 years ago. I use it on a daily basis, mainly to take/read notes at work and track articles/papers I've read, but also to track movies/series/books/games I've seen/read/played (the "database" template is great for that), track gym sessions and keep a grocery check list.

While it's a good product (and now totally free), I don't really get why people are absolutely nuts about it all over Twitter. There is also like a Notion community, organizing Notion meetups and events. That's kinda beyond me. At the end of the day, it's just a note taking app.

Used Dropbox Paper before Notion. Paper is great for stand-alone documents. I even made a nice presentation using it because it was quicker than using Google Slides.

I've been using Notion for 3+ years now and I've been happily paying for it. The main reason I went away from Dropbox for organizing and writing is b/c each Paper document felt like a separate piece of work. In Notion, documents are easily linked, workspaces are a starting point and there's child documents and sibling documents that can help keep things organized. I have over 200+ documents and about 3 months ago the search started to feel sluggish and they updated their search code and it now feels pretty fast again.

It's not all perfect though, with 3+ years of use, I can tell you their mobile apps have come a long way but still don't feel as native as some other writing apps (iA Writer).

My final thoughts are that if you're hearing good things about it and haven't given it a shot, try it for a 1-2 week period and see how it works for you. Some people like the way it does 90% of the things and others hate the same things ️

It's a nice wiki with some interesting database features (a la airtable). Writing in it is pretty nice because it's basically markdown.

I'd stopped using it because it was too easy to outgrow the free plan. Now with unlimited pages I'll give it another shot but I'm still not sold on its benefits vs storing all my notes locally in plain markdown files.

I'd also recommend Gitbook. They've improved their search features recently and I'd say they're on a similar level to Notion.

We used it for our company wiki. Wanted to use Notion but for 500 users the Notion quote came out 15x more expensive so it was a no-brainer!

> Anyone mind giving me a TL;DR on the value proposition/use case of Notion?

Have you ever used Confluence? If not, have you ever used any Atlassian products? Atlassian is all over corp structures, and everything they make is painful to use without a training course or the desire to immerse yourself in boring-as-shit documentation. A lot of corps jumping onto Notion are jumping off of Confluence.

>Have you ever used Confluence?

Yes. Is Notion a Confluence competitor?

I guess I'm struggling to understand it because my aforementioned friend talks about how he uses Notion for basically every possible use case under the sun (probably even some where it's not meant for that but he found some way to finagle it). Based on that knowledge, I still don't really know what Notion is meant for other than being just-another-note-taking-app-that-supports-markdown-and-embedded-pics.

I don't think it's especially great at note taking. I'd prefer a different directory structure for that.

The love for it makes more sense if you think of it as a really simple website builder. You can have a database of pages with structured data, unstructured data, and nice layout. That sounds simple, but it covers a lot of use cases.

If you check out communities talking about Notion, you'll see the layout stuff is huge. You might even think it's overboard, to the point of productivity porn. But if you're the kind of person who cares about that (think the girl in middle school who took notes with 6 colored pens) or you want to make something pleasing to use for a tiny organization, you can end up falling in love with it.

>to the point of productivity porn

I think this is what's mostly caused some confusion for me, so thanks for taking the time to explain it a bit. I've seen tons of stuff about how to customize Notion to fit personal preferences and specific layouts, and that kind of drowns out the actual discussion about what those customizations/layouts are used to accomplish.

I really don't mean to be rude, but why don't you just read their homepage (and the one posted here)? It should answer most of your questions. (Hint: It really is _way_ more than "just-another-note-taking-app-that-supports-markdown-and-embedded-pics".)

https://www.notion.so/

Because I have read their homepage (multiple times) and I find it to be nothing more than marketing speak that doesn't actually explain what it does or what it's good for, nor does it convey actual human experience using the product (which HN is excellent at discussing).

"With Notion, all your work is in one place" is a terrible descriptor of a product.

Uhh... Have you tried reading past that? They literally list pretty much all of the most important features right there (though I believe not all of them). They even show which services each feature replaces. It's true there is marketing speak sprinkled throughout it, but all in all it's the opposite of the "nothing but marketing speak" trend most services follow.

Yes. Here are some excerpts from the (very minimally descriptive) page:

> Write better. Think more clearly. Get organized.

Totally useless in terms of explaining what the product is.

>A simple, beautiful writing experience, with 30+ types of content to add.

Great, so I can... write things in it? What are these 30 types of content? It doesn't even give examples.

> Turn your tribal knowledge into easy-to-find answers.

How does it do this? No explanation given.

> Kanban boards, tables, lists, and more.

"and more"? And more what? This is what I'm trying to get information on.

> Lightweight and flexible.

Flexible how? This phrase is meaningless to me.

This is one of the more marketing speak ridden websites I've encountered.

If someone made a post on HN asking people to compare and contrast, say, AWS vs Azure, would your response be "just go read the AWS website duh"?

Take a look at the other comments in this thread and ask yourself if the Notion website conveys even half of the insight that the other commenters have provided. Those comments are the entire point of HN, not "just go read the website".

I just read it again and it's true there's a lot of marketing speak, but it seems you've been blinded by it and ignored all of the rest.

It's great to have these questions and insightful answers. The thing is you've said your friend is nuts about it, but apparently haven't bothered to ask them the same questions you're asking here. Not only that, you do seem to be fairly interested in knowing what it's about, but you don't seem to have read anything about it at all, so maybe you could have at least followed the hacker spirit and... I don't know, scanned for the links on the top of the page... and formed a basic opinion?

https://www.notion.so/product

https://www.notion.so/wikis (I've just seen you can even try a live demo without signing up)

https://www.notion.so/projects

https://www.notion.so/notes

(There are more, but I believe you get the idea)

>so maybe you could have at least followed the hacker spirit and... I don't know, scanned for the links on the top of the page... and formed a basic opinion?

or I could ask about it on a forum that is dedicated to discussing topics exactly like this? As you can see, other commenters have given some great insight that is infinitely more helpful than "just go read the website", and is definitely more insightful than the website itself could ever be. I thank them greatly for their insight.

To be clear, I didn't say you shouldn't have asked. I just suggested you inform yourself minimally before you do. I believe this is better for everyone involved, but ymmv.

I feel like you're nit-picking this to depth. Most of the answers you've mentioned may not exist on the homepage but within one click. Under the Product menu, there's a bunch more contextual detail.

I'm not sure why you would expect the main page to list, individually, 30+ types of content. Do you similarly complain that the homepage for Lightroom doesn't say that you can edit the following parameters on an image:

* Lens Correction - Chromatic Aberration, Profile Corrections, Distortion, Vignetting

* Basic - Color Profile, White Balance, Temperature, Tint, Tone, Exposure, Contrast, Highlights, Shadows, Whites, Blacks, Texture, Clarity, Dehaze, Vibrance, Saturation

* Transform - Auto, Guided, Level, Vertical, Full, Rotation, Aspect, Scale, X Offset, Y Offset

* Tone Curve - Regional and Global Highlights, Lights, Darks, Shadows, Point Curves

* HSL / Color - Change hue for Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Aqua, Blue, Purple, Magenta. Change saturation for same. Change Luminance for same.

* Split Toning, Highlights (Hue, Saturation), Shadows (same), balance between two.

* Details: Sharpening (amount, radius, detail, masking), Noise Reduction (luminance, detail, contrast)

... and so on.

Or do you settle for "Wide ranging, comprehensive non-destructive image editing"?

> What are these 30 types of content? It doesn't even give examples.

There are, just off the main page.

I'm just not sure what you're expecting is at all reasonable of any product. The main page draws you in, and the Product page breaks it down by use context. You're certainly entitled to "I don't want to have to go to any additional pages", but that doesn't work for anything more than the simplest products.

> Yes. Is Notion a Confluence competitor?

Yes. I don't know why you're getting such convoluted answers from others.

Notion is basically an app framework with a standardized UI surface and a couple of apps built in. So it’s not surprising that your friend is using it for almost anything the same way you can use Ruby on Rails to build anything.

It doesn't really have very good integrations as of now. Like GitHub, GitLab issues etc.

>Anyone mind giving me a TL;DR on the value proposition/use case of Notion?

There isn't one.

Notion blasted the Youtube Selfhelp/Productivity space with sponsored videos to get a buzz going and now are moving to continue their growth story by offering a free tier.

It's designed to convert your productivity into minuscule parts to convince you that you are achieving goals. Akin to playing a game.