> Why is this all so buggy?

> started using some similar (but less feature rich) products

You may have answered your own question here.

At least in my experience, PMs at "feature rich" companies love to push for more new and exciting products (and what's more exciting than AI!?) and find it really annoying when devs talk about fixing bugs or improving existing processes for customers.

I'm really hoping one positive result from the current economic turmoil is a return to focusing on delivering value to customers. I remember in years long past when product people viewed solving a customers problem as the key path to a successful company. But I yes years of cheap money and forgetting about the very idea of profit have made people realize that the real customer is VCs.

One issue there I think is that Notion has had a number of investment rounds, according to crunchbase [0] they've gained $343.2M that way; that plus paying customers means they have a lot of money to burn. And investors don't like it when a company just sits on that money, they want results, they want to see growth, they want cool demos of cool new features or products.

I mean you can rebuild the essence of what Notion is with less than $1M. They don't need that money to build more features; I'm convinced that writing the code is the cheapest part of product development these days, despite developers earning five figure sums + bonuses + stock options + $15 / serving premade fruit smoothies from a squeezed bag.

[0] https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/notion-so/company_fi...

My view is that Notion is an utterly mediocre product with great marketing that also benefited from the rise of "productivity porn" videos on YT.

It probably finds success in enterprise because it can replace a bunch of tools (confluence, jira, google docs, wikis) if you try really hard so maybe it makes financial sense. But in my experience it is not better than any of those in a 1:1 comparison. Okay, probably better than Confluence.

Could you name a better designed product that has the flexibility and feature set Notion has?

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.

I'm not in any way associated with Notion but I find Notion way better than what you've listed _for me_.

But other than that, 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.

> Note taking: Bear, Apple Notes, Obsidian

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 was recently giving Coda a look and it’s got a lot of the same or similar features.

It's a bit of a different model, but Guru is pretty cool.

I would rather have multiple apps that do a smaller set of things, but do it well... than one app that does everything, but is bad at all of them.

It is not mediocre. It has flaws but it’s not bad.

It has experienced hyper growth. It is what slack is to irc in some ways.

It’s far better than google docs, confluence and wikis. Jira doesn’t do it.

I’ve looked at many options, some more developer friendly. It’s the best right now.

We started with Notion with a team of 3 people.

Just after 3 months our notes have grown too complex to the point of it crawling every time we load a page - especially if there are more than 1 person on theh page. We ended up switching to Confluence + Google Docs (depending on the use cases). Notion definitely has a nice UX but for any meaningful large document it's utterly slow - that was 2.5 years ago so maybe they've improved but our contents are now stuck in JIRA and migrating out will take too much effort :)

We address this by moving old parts of the big document into sub-documents

But, in general still find Notion to be way better than other solutions for both taking down and rearranging information.

I use Notion and don't think I was swayed by any marketing. For me, I can write a document with great formatting in a fraction of the time it would take me in Google Docs. All personal stuff I use Obsidian but for work I can type up something and share it quickly.

Re: Performance. I only use it in the browser after suffering from the Electron app. It's fast but I am also on an M1 Mac.

For me this is huge. No more random formatting on google docs from team members, notion removes this from the picture and ppl can focus on the content.

Also the ability to nest documents, insert tables that are easy to manage and again formatting is a solved issue.

That's funny, it's all the bells and whistles on Notion that my team complains about. Markdown or Notes.app is way better for composition. Notion is where content goes to stop being iterated on.

I'm sure your team already knows this but you can write in Markdown in Notion. It auto-formats everything. I'm sure it's missing some things and one of them is anything past H3(H4, H5, H6).

It’s more about the affordances. I can’t trust notion not to drop into some command system. Therefore I need to keep my monitor turned on when typing. If I can’t type with the monitor turned off, it must not be a very reliable word processor.

I like to describe Confluence as "a wiki written by someone who has never used a wiki". I feel the same way about Notion and everything it tries to do.

I wonder if it is still impossible to toggle checkboxes on/off in rapid succession without crashing the page. We discontinued using Confluence partly because of this issue in 2019, and just out of curiosity I just checked the ticket again now - closed in 2021 not because it was fixed, but because "we are closing this bug to focus on our upcoming roadmap for all Confluence users."[0]

That seems to be endorsing the exact behavior some users are complaining about with regards to Notion in this thread, leaving so many bugs unresolved while pushing new features.

[0]https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CONFCLOUD-56972

True, the Productivity Porn people is the worse aspect.

It's about noting, saving, prioritizing, organizing every little thing. It's the "wake at 4am people, run for 30 min, meditate for 20min and drink quinoa juice" people. The ones that feel the need to be clockworks of effectiveness.

And of course, the more you automate something, it will start getting in the way after a certain point.

I agree with everything. Notion is essentially unusable for me.

My “favourite” bug is that when you import a markdown document, if you have a piece of inline monospace text that starts with a hyphen, the hyphen will disappear. So, something like this:

  Use the `-v` option to enable verbose mode.

Will render like this:

> Use the v option to enable verbose mode.

A-a-and that's how you get a lot of confused people wondering, if your documentation just sucks.

In Notion’s defense, copy/paste didn’t really work at all until very recently. It’s improving.

That’s quite surprising to read for a note-taking application that launched six years ago.

How is that a defense of Notion?

Notion is Sharepoint for zoomers. It’s an okay wiki with slow UX, underwhelming collaboration, and a slew of tacked-on over-engineered features that have better alternatives elsewhere.

Any alternatives you'd recommend? I'm not happy with Notion at all, but I haven't been able to find a good alternative for my own personal use:

- Sync across all devices

- Hierarchical notes

- Note-level sharing for collaboration

For personal use I rely on GitJournal. It plays really well with obsidian + git on laptop. I haven’t automated 1-click note-level publishing; instead I have a personal website that renders markdown.

For collaboration I default to Google Docs instead.

I use Notion extensively and I have to say I have no idea which bugs you're talking about.

After searching for a good note taking app for years, Notion has been life changing for me. Honestly the only 2 issues I have in mind are:

- the sidebar shows collapsing arrows even for pages with no subpages

- there's no way to open 2 pages side by side, so I have to open 2 windows and put them side by side

> It is also slow

It's... really not? Clicking on a page takes like 300ms to load, and once you're editing a page, there's nothing that can even be slow

I like Notion - I think it's a good product and I think what they have built is really cool.

But OP is right - it's so buggy. Every time I create a new page it says the page is in the trash. Every time.

The release of Teamspaces was sloppy at best.

Some basic computing functionality like highlighting and attempting to copy just doesn't work sometimes. It's so frustrating. If you accidentally grab the block and not the content, you're screwed.

There are also a bunch of usability issues. For instance, I want a DB but I don't want it to show in the sidebar.

Again, I agree, it's great, but it's full of bugs.

> once you're editing a page, there's nothing that can even be slow

Create a new notion doc. Create a json formatted codeblock. Paste in the ~250 lines from https://gist.github.com/keeguon/2310008

Add a new made-up entry. Back-space it. Add it again.

I typed for ~10s to do that. It took notion _5 minutes_ to catch up to my typing. I am not making this number up.

Multiple minutes of lag between input and it rendering is the worst I have ever seen from any text editor.

This is for a ~250 line document, which is admittedly in a json codeblock... but still, 250 lines is nothing for a computer, how do you make it take 5 minutes to append a character to a ~9000 character string?

Of course, you'll say "nothing that can be slow" did not refer to codeblocks because everyone knows notion's codeblocks are unusably slow.

Codeblocks are the most striking example, but other things are slow. Let me give examples:

Time to type "cat" into the notion search box (from entering characters to it rendering the actual text) on a large notion workspace - 3.5s

Time for the search to complete for "cat" - 20s

Input lag for just typing regular text on a ~3000 line normal document - 350ms

350ms may not seem like a lot of input lag, but it is very noticeable to me. It causes me to make typos and generally makes notion feel bad to type in. No other webpage I use has input lag this bad.

Now, admittedly, that input lag isn't on every page for me, only about half the notion pages I edit are that bad, but it still makes me dread ever typing text into notion.

Note as well, this is not on an m1 macbook, just a 2 year old i7 (mobile) processor running firefox. Perhaps I need to upgrade my hardware so that I can run this particular text editor.

>once you're editing a page, there's nothing that can even be slow

No, once you're editing a page, there's nothing that should even be slow. Big difference. I've found that if you have a page with more than a few hundred elements (i.e. if you have an outline for a book or something) then Notion becomes unbearably slow.

Also, if you type too fast on the mobile app, Notion will just straight up lose keystrokes. Like, for example, I'd type something like "afford", and what would show up was "a <pause> rd".

> It is also slow

I wanted to build a culture of documentation in my organization, and asking many people to use an app dozens of times per day - performance matters!

We ended up with Slite and are very happy 3 years and 1,000 documents later.

Slite is not nearly as feature rich as Notion (and that's totally fine for us!), but it does what it needs too extremely well.

I have to use Notion for work sometimes and it makes me so angry. It just... it's painful trying to do anything with it. It's like the entire thing was written by junior devs who thought "hey, we can do this cool thing" without ever bothering to consider _if_ it should do that thing (like hide a toolbar unless you mouse over it... but the spot it's in is blank anyways, so now you don't know it's there unless by luck AND you don't save space). And then they implement it poorly. So there's a lot of poor ui choices that barely work. Arg.

I will play the devil's advocate to myself though... I know people that love it. I'm just not one of them.

If you like performance and have a team usage, Slite should be an interesting choice to explore.

Disclaimer I'm the founder, hundreds of team come from notion every month for this reason. Our search is much more powerful and lightning fast, navigation and doc loading is super fast as well, we put extra care there.