This article reads like an ad.

Perhaps I live under a tech rock, but I have not heard of notion before today. And I don't like that it is being shilled.

I envy the person who has been able to avoid Notion advertising in the past ~5 years.

Rare is it that I am envied.

Obsidian I've enjoyed, but find it difficult to become fluent with it.

It is almost unbelievable to me that anyone who's been able to become aware of & use a niche app like Obsidian has never come across Notion. Obsidian is definitely a power-user tool, which one would usually use after considering the other options, with Notion being almost as default as a choice as Evernote once was.

Additionally, a lot of apps now are even using it as their support bases. It almost feels unavoidable at this point.

Not sure what to tell you. A sharp new developer I respect a lot pointed me towards Obsidian, and so it goes. Other than that, my recent search history shows the past few years are focused on python, pola.rs, Rust, data science, databricks, Oracle, Postgres, DuckDB, and the legal and administrative aspects of running a business, with the occasional dataset documentation search.

This is equally bizarre to me, and I haven't used either. I definitely hear about Obsidian more on HN and at work because coworkers use it.

But knowing what Obsidian is and not Notion is sort of like knowing what Markdown is but having never heard of Microsoft Word.

Couldn't have said it better myself. Seems kind of weird to me, but if the poster is telling the truth, it's like buying an iPhone and never hearing about the iPad.

There's two of us! Although Obsidian only made it to awareness for me - I haven't used it. But I hadn't heard of Notion.

Could you explain obsidian to me? It just looks like a markdown editor with hyperlinks to me

That is my take too. For R&D/tech transfer I have found it useful, but I haven't had my socks blown away yet.

I had never even heard of Notion before I started looking at Obsidian.

The website is Technology Review. If course it's an ad.

This isn't an endorsement for Notion, I also dislike it and use other tools. I can see why some do however, it's a solid second brain organizational tool, somewhere to place things "long term" and keep them. It's a less "active" tool, which is also why for some people I think Notion is the wrong solution but for others works great. Think: internal team documents in one central place (less active) vs updating your app's documentation multiple times an hour (more active), the latter of which is not what Notion is good for at all. Also I will say, with their API you can technically hook up whatever databases you have within Notion for use, so it can easily become a place to store your blog notes and use them without copying/pasting. But again, blog notes are rarely changing so you see the pattern here I hope.

I also don't get the notion template hype on gumroad/etsy/producthunt/etc. You can create them yourself within seconds, but that's the nature of the "productivity industry", you get big bucks for the mere idea that your product will make their life easier/faster.

> the latter of which is not what Notion is good for at all

why?

Especially since you can share notion webs publically per page. Perfect for latest documentation, job postings, etc.

Depends what kind of documentation. General team docs? Yeah great those barely change. Same with job postings, outside of an "active" toggle, there's not much that changes for them. Everything else? You waste too much time dealing with notion lag. A lot of the integrations also suck and are far too limited in what they do.

One final note on docs, one of the best moves in recent years is expressing difficult concepts through interactive content. Notion cannot handle this at all. Static or nothing on notion!

A couple reasons. It's operationally too slow, and when you're working on teams (larger than 1 per role), this makes notion a hassle to update. For devdocs, the larger developer community has already rallied around open source tools that provide easier management through github. The current sharing options are also not good enough to support that use case.

Essentially, the more you update a notion page, the more unbearable it gets.

I use Notion as a personal work notebook. I like it for its lack of rigidity and fixed structure. I've always struggled with tools like Trello because they have a specific model that you need to fit your usage into. Then again, I'm not a Notion power user, nor do I make heavy use of templates outside of a few I've designed myself, so I'm definitely not one of the "hype"rs

You and I I believe are the same type of user.

I barely ever used databases. I have a journal with my daily work todos, notes about technology, company, people I want to keep. It's god for that I can share content with my friends/coworkers, it does already way too many things for me.

Yup, this is me too. I use Notion every day so I'm a fan in that sense but I'm also on the free personal plan so I guess I'm not a customer. But I love it for second brain purposes (especially with Readwise) + being the homebase for all of my text.

(I work for Notion)

Notion is also "basically just a bunch of lists", plus with titles. Pages in Notion are a title, and a list of blocks. Text blocks are a title (the text of the block) and a list, it's indented children.

We also have boards like Trello, and you can drag and drop list items between boards, pages, paragraphs, everywhere. Maybe you could see it as everything you like about Trello, but applied to more modalities of content.

What are you talking about? Notion is clearly not just a bunch of lists like Trello is.

The implementation of the Notion can be bunch of lists, like Trello. However Notion's UI doesn't pass this feeling.

It can be, if you want it to be.

https://www.notion.so/templates/kanban-board

I use this all the time, alongside my other personal databases and such. I wish there was an open source or self-hostable gizmo that was as flexible as Notion is.

Semantically our data model is an infinitely nested hierarchical tree of lists, although the UI might not look or feel like "just a list".

Our editor is more like an "outliner" than a traditional word processor, and before January 2022, you could't even select text across multiple blocks. We rebuilt the editor to work like both an outliner and a traditional word processor at the same time. You can still "feel" the tree/list structure when you select and drag multiple blocks around, or use indent/dedent - you can't indent a block multiple times within another block because that doesn't make sense in the tree structure.

I wrote a bit about turning our outliner into a word processor here: https://twitter.com/jitl/status/1483918085384028163

And also about the data model itself here: https://www.notion.so/blog/data-model-behind-notion

Thanks for the detailed explanation. But you do understand that from an enduser view, this doesn't really matter? What the original commenter meant that they like the simplicity of Trello, because it's just a kanban board. Notion is much more flexible than that as a user.

Yep can confirm.

I just don't like recreating a kanban board in Notion, it just seems too complex and cluttered, I don't care about all the other stuff, I love trello for how simple it is, but I keep finding different ways to use it, the simplicity is the key as it allows me just to dump what I want into it and use it however I wish, Notion is just overwhelming for me.

Thanks for letting us know about the details, honestly not being able to select text between blocks was wan of the UX deal-breakers for me, seemed like a way to avoid -exporting- your docs or whatever not allowing to copy the document fully easily. Glad its solved

Ah, so it mirrors the NLS internals

We're inspired by the greats (https://www.notion.so/about). Our Github code review bot is named doug-engelbot

Did anyone actually go over the NLS internals docs over at bitsavers? I went through them, it is impressive how much mileage they got out of the '68 designs. Still parts missing that no one seems to want to add to their new outliners.

The underlying data structure is really just a list of typed elements. But the interface is also hiding this pretty well, to the point that it becomes a bit messy on the corners, making it hard for new users. Trello in that regard is significant cleaner in its representation, but also more limited.

I tried Notion once to replace a Trello board, but couldn't find a way to have cards with checklists inside.

I'm confused, people have said Notion is a relational database. Is that not the same as "trees of lists"?

I thought a relational database like MySQL or whatever is formally more powerful than trees and list structures.

Weird that nobody’s mentioned it yet, but the main value proposition of Notion is that is uses mini-relational databases instead of tables. It’s like Airtable baked inside of a note app.

It has a ton of downsides like being slow, not having offline access, and no E2E encryption, but there are few tools that execute well on the approachable database concept. I wish there were more, because the standard approach of doing bizarre spreadsheet hacks to achieve the same functionality is much less intuitive to me.

The reason there’s an entire weird industry around Notion is not surprising to most people here: relational databases are useful. Unfortunately, most database tools are too unapproachable or cumbersome for most. Notion and Airtable wrapped a good UX around creating semi-primitive rdbs and here we are.

Be sure to mention that if you dare venture down the path of learning about this mysterious mini-relational database, emerging with useful knowledge will cost you three quarters of your sanity and the soul of your firstborn.

It’s not quite that bad, but every. Single. Time. that I’ve been intrigued about notion’s advanced features, I’ve slapped myself two hours later and said “get back to work; you could spend your whole life learning about this. Or at least your whole weekend.”

For me it's one of those learn it once and get it over with. They really are powerful and if you spend one weekend on learning, it should be enough to go a long way.

Atlassian's Confluence is apparently launching databases as a feature soon. The screenshots I've seen look very similar to Notion.

The best thing about Notion is that it’s not just (EAV) relational databases — it’s that freely mixed with unstructured rich text, including collaboration features like love editing and comments.

I've put some thought into how cool it would be to have a feature similar to Notion databases within Obsidian; probably not integrated into the markdown document, but similar to their new Canvas feature, separate files next to markdown documents which map to SQLite databases with a standard schema that you can browse right within Obsidian. Feels like something an add-on could exist for, but doesn't; and/or I hope its something the Obsidian team is thinking about now that Canvases are shipped.

Obsidian is at the moment not really well-equipped for this task, even though some extensions tried to implement it. I think the major problem is that freetext like markdown simply sucks for managing structured data. And even though there is something like dataview, which enable some level of database-like behavior, it's too limited at the moment. But, there is a successor(?) to dataview in work which aims to be more like notion, and Obsidian seems to have some features on their roadmap which might also be helpful in that regard. So may, in a year or two the situation will have improved?

But frankly spoken, I don't think Obsidian is really a good solution for this. IT should be the other way around, based on a structured format like JSON, and enable a freeform-document which can be extended. Notion is doing this, and while their internals kinda suck, it's far easier for them to move their goals and improve their app.

Dataview can get you part of the way there, but it’s not an easy learning curve and requires a lot of consistent metadata management. Also Obsidian somehow has a worse mobile experience than Notion, which is also a no-go for me when I need quick data entry.

I remember Federico Viticci at MacStories doing some crazy stuff with extensions and Siri Shortcuts that could address those problems, which might be worth exploring if it’s important enough to ya. I have no desire to go down that path.

I'll second this. I use Obsidian and don't find the Canvas useful at all, but would love a structured way to query data from my vault.

Make.md is trying to solve this, you could take a look, I tried it, but it's still not stable for my use case, but apparently they have people who use it successfully.

You would have loved filemaker back in the day.

Filemaker is underrated. Long ago they came out with Bento which was supposed to be Filemaker for personal use. But it didn't last long.

Both Filemaker and Bento both lacked the out-of-the-box document writing feature. It makes Notion very easy to start using. In fairness both Filemaker and Bento were aimed at very different use cases.

Could you expand in more details?

That's exactly how I felt about Salesforce over many years of customizing it to basically be a UI on top of a relational DB with a nice import tool and some workflows built in.

But apparently it's out of vogue now and Notion and others are the "web 2" versions of that with more Javascript.

> Unfortunately, most database tools are too unapproachable or cumbersome for most.

This always used to be Access and Filemaker's appeal, but they've been so widely and thoroughly derided over the years you wouldn't know it.

> I don't get the notion hype, I just don't like it.

> I don't get what I am missing.

100% agree. Notion doesn't work like my brain when it comes to documents, formatting, structuring — I ended up spending most of my time configuring systems and formatting than actually inputting information & accomplishing things.

I've tried a few times to get into it, and see what others see in it. I just can't.

> I ended up spending most of my time configuring systems and formatting than actually inputting information & accomplishing things.

I end up feeling this way about a lot of “productivity” tools like notion, obsidian, and ESPECIALLY Arch browser. I don’t want to have to learn how to use a tool that I’m using to do something fundamental like visit websites or take notes. Give me the barest abstraction possible over these features.

Do not ask me to make extra decisions to do basic things like open a tab (decide between 3 levels of ephemeral and how it relates to other tabs). And don’t automatically close shit on some arbitrary schedule which can’t be disabled!

Ironically, the best productivity tools I've used in & for the past ten years has been Things, and my Moleskine notebooks. Incredibly simple system, and while both can be considered a bit expensive, the work every time, without fail, in a way that makes sense and creates the results I expect and require.

I've found the simple things that are high quality work the best for me, in almost all aspects of life.

Me too. I spent New Years Eve reviewing my journals (wife was sleeping) all the way back from 2013 and found some very enlightening arcs that would not be available with transient data. Some things just need to be read rather than presented.

Subjective counterpoint to Arc browser; I spent all of 10 minutes getting used to it, and it’s been a game changer ever since. I can’t actually use chrome/firefox again. That’s wild! Maybe it just fits with the way I use the web naturally, but moving to other browsers is like moving back to tabless IE after getting used to tabbed Firefox. Automatic (very important) Picture in Picture mode, and their way of organising/deleting tabs is a game changer.

> I don't get the notion hype, I just don't like it.

Remember Evernote ... that was going to change your life once upon at time.

Are any of these things bad? Not really. Will any of them change your life ... almost certainly not, unless your life is making hype content on social media for these products and you manage to become a fully fledged "influencer".

I think it's okay, I use it because it was the first polished app I could read and edit notes from so many devices.

But the idea Notion is a 100M business, let alone a 10B valued company is madness.

You are not missing anything. It's stupid, but hey, some people are paying for that stuff and and some people are making money out of it. Who are we to judge.

I’ve been meaning to try trello, notion is just so slow

Kanbanflow > trello. Same thing, just nicer interface imho