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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 :)
But, in general still find Notion to be way better than other solutions for both taking down and rearranging information.
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.
Also the ability to nest documents, insert tables that are easy to manage and again formatting is a solved issue.
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.
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.
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.