Just in case someone might need it: I reverse engineered their API and wrote (an unofficial) client for accessing the data: https://github.com/kjk/notionapi
It's for Go but one could easily port it to any other language. It's just HTTP requests and some light processing of JSON responses.
I use it so that I can have my blog content in Notion. In a daily cron job I download the data from Notion, convert it to HTML and publish on Netlify as a static website. This script is open source: https://github.com/kjk/blog
Used notion for about 6 months, but stopped for two main reasons:
1. It's extremely slow on even a new iPhone - about 6-7 seconds until I can start typing a note. By then I forget what I wanted to write. It's basically a webview of a very heavy web app, so it's not snappy at all.
Bear is "just" a personal Markdown note app. No folders, no support for anything other than text/images, no collaborative editing, no support for multiple workspaces. The tag model is nice, but pretty limited.
Notion's raison d'être is collaborative, structured text: Workspaces for sharing and editing documents, with a rich set of embeddable objects (for example, you can embed Github gists and CodePens). It also has some pretty powerful Airtable-type database support where you can treat pages as records, and then view/sort/filter them in different presentation modes (gallery, board, etc.). Like Airtable, this lets you build mini apps such as task boards inside pages.
Bear's in the same space as iA Writer, Apple's Notes, etc. Notion's closest competitors are probably Google Docs, Dropbox Paper and possibly Quip and Milanote.
I didn't know about Bear. Just had a look on their website and the application and user experience looks pretty stunning.
However, I am not quite sure it justifies paying for this service when Apple Notes has got a lot better in the past few years (I also feel confident in the privacy approach of Apple).
Out of curiosity, what features make you use Bear and not Notes? I take a lot of notes, and if something can make my life easier, I would seriously consider making the move.
Lillie from Notion here again - this upcoming release is going to seriously help with speed as well as improve usage offline and on unstable connections. This is one of the reasons we've been working on it for so long!
There is something about Notion that makes it feel very well-made and coherent. It’s one of the few apps I use with this inherent feeling of quality (off the top of my head Sublime Text/Merge, Beyond Compare, Things fall into this category of intangible greatness). Every interaction is delightful, and the app scales really well from basic note-taking to decently complex databases with grouping, filters, relations, templates and permissions. It comes with really good real-time collaboration.
On the flip side the software a bit slow to start and uses a lot of resources—it’s based on Electron, but I encourage everyone to try it (the demo on their website is cool!).
This is as close to “painting the back of the fence” as it gets.
Hmm, I cannot seem to create an account without sharing my Google contacts; which I see no need to do and it's needless friction.
I get into a loop of clicking checkbox "I don't want to share my Google contacts", then being rerouted back to login page and requested approval to share my contacts.
Pricing wise, I wish these types of apps didn't have such a steep escalation as soon as I want to share. $4 for individual, but $8/team member, which means wanting to share this with my wife is four times as expensive as just using it myself, with limited to no appreciable improvement.
Same here — I cannot create an account with a password. If you try to go in and do an email signup, they will punish you for it by emailing you every time with a new password, until you suffered enough that you'll relent and give them access to your Google account.
Not a great first impression — especially not after their support tells me that this is for my own security.
> wanting to share this with my wife is four times as expensive as just using it myself, with limited to no appreciable improvement.
I would hardly say "no appreciable improvement". IMHO it's appropriate to price products based on the value derived, not the effort to implement each incremental "feature". And the ability to share is the most human feature. We are social creatures. To share and collaborate and be relational is to be human :)
So the price jump feels fair to me. We can get near full-knowledge of the product at a reduced price point, but to be human with the tool, we get hit with the real cost :)
EDIT: I also don't like the actual pricing structure, but that's only because I would rather participate in co-operative systems, and dislike capitalist ones. The above comment is my putting myself in their shoes :)
Note: Notion's free plan actually provides unlimited users. But it only allows 1000 "blocks" (a heading, paragraph, file etc. counts as a block), so I imagine two users sharing notes would run out of space fast.
There is a way around that. First of all, if you and your wife have two free accounts and share workspace subtrees with each other, you can double the free content limit.
And if you pay for just one personal account, you can still share content with a free account. This is very close to having two people sharing one paid account, feature-wise.
Its really easy to sign up for a Google account for stuff like this, and I have multiple accounts on gmail anyways in case I dont want to share my important personal email.
I am uncomfortable to put all personal thoughts, diaries, etc into a non-self-hosting place.
Can they dockerize this and sell that so I can self-host the docker image instead?
for people that is not tech-savvy, what about they buy a docker-container-hosted-by-the-vendor-company but can encrypt the contents in a way that nobody else can peek into the content ever?
It looks like they use FullStory, so employees can probably see everything you're doing. I'd be surprised if they were recording without ever watching the recordings.
(FullStory records what you do in your browser. It records all DOM elements, so all your data is being recorded and sent to a 3rd party.)
There's a reason nobody really does this: there's just no money in it. Nylas mail is a good example of this: it offered the ability to self-run it and pay them for the license, but nobody really did. I wonder what they would need to charge to make it feasible? $1000 a year? It makes me pretty sad, but it's just such a distraction for a company of Notion's size and stage.
I miss the days when you could buy a piece of software -- like, physically buy a license that allows you to use it in perpetuity on your own terms. Then, if you want to pay for some hosted features, it makes sense to have a subscription. But the default cloud subscription dependency business plan immediately turns me off to any product. I've got too many damn subscriptions, and I can't take on any more.
> For a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem. From Windows or Mac, this FTP account could be accessed through built-in software.
With https://collect-app.com I'm indeed trying to build such a tool that is not requiring any service and giving you back 100% of privacy and data control, right now. But it is in a very early state yet. But I would love to get some feedback on the idea.
I love the product, but the login workflow is awful. Why innovate on logins? We've solved that problem.
Specifically, the login is a randomly-generated one-time code sent to your email address. Notion says this is more secure than them storing a username+password, but that's a dubious argument. They've also said this is two-factor auth (lolno). A side effect of this is that Notion is unusable on my mobile device since I have no email on it.
I really hope they implement a more traditional login system. Until then, I'm sticking with Evernote. :(
If you like Notion but are looking for something open source, similarly polished and more wiki-focused then this will be up your street - http://getoutline.com
We've been building it for 2 years, happy to answer questions.
For me, Notion replaced Evernote and I haven't looked back. Three features that have been particularly useful for personal productivity are
1) explicit support for Kanban board-ing tasks and similar to-do management
2) collapsible blocks
3) substantially smoother linking to, or embedding, notes within notes
Notion is just as sleek as Evernote for small independent notes, but these two features allow Notion to scale much better for projects that require an inter-related network of notes with substantial breadth and depth.
Same, I tinkered around a bit and so far really like the semi-free form nature of how this looks and feels, plus the dirt simple, out of your way/distraction free interface is something that could easily line up with how I scribble down notes in my pocket journal, but am averse to signing up to another account somewhere for my obsessive checklisting and note-taking.
I'd gladly pay for a desktop application of this where I kept all of my notes and todos with local persistence that I could backup, migrate and move (similar to something like Notational Velocity), I like this, but I guess so far OneNote remains my personal champ in this regard-even though I have to tie it to OneDrive across my pc and surface.
Edit:
Although feverishly refreshing the thread and looking at all the praise...maybe I'll give it a more thorough shot for a couple of weeks.
This is one thing I've wanted. A local app that lets me store all my data with markdown syntax, syntax highlighting, in local files and directories, specifically for macOS although a cross platform app would be fine. One that doesn't require an account or the internet at all for it to work. I've wanted this kind of app for many years (and wouldn't be opposed to making it if no existing solution is all that great at it).
I'm pretty happy with Gollum (https://github.com/gollum/gollum/wiki) for this. Your data is just a Git repository containing a hierarchy of files. You run Gollum to fire up a local web server, which gives you a wiki interface to view and edit any Markdown files in the hierarchy. You can use a local Markdown editor if you prefer, as long as you commit your changes. You can choose whether to run Gollum all the time and expose the server to others, or just launch it locally when you want to browse your own repository. And you can use Git to create, push and pull branches.
Gollum also seems to have powerful customisation features like macros and YAML front matter, but I have yet to make use of them. For now, Gollum suits me as a simple, free alternative to Confluence. Notion is obviously a far more powerful product.
Why is it every time something like Notion is mentioned, there is always someone who wants "local, self-hosted, Markdown"? Just build it yourself.
This clearly shows you have no understanding of the product at hand. Notion is so incredibly powerful that Markdown doesn't even scratch the surface here.
For those just discovering Notion, it's one of the most liberating tools I've ever used, because it offers just enough complexity to configure it however you want, while still remaining simple on the surface. I just love that I can mould it around how my brain works. I wrote this guide that might be useful for anyone else in understanding its power and what you can do with it: https://medium.com/@ow/the-writers-ultimate-guide-to-notion-...
After trying many different things over the years, I wrote this: http://onemodel.org (yes I plan to move to https sometime). You can think of it something like a personal wiki + emacs org-mode, very efficient, keyboard-oriented, using postgres, but with a much larger vision than today's features, including sharing (linking/copying securely) between instances, and computability of the info for things like anki-like features. Self-hosted now but open to hosting for others. The most current code is in github (AGPL). Comments/questions very welcome, preferably via the mailing list; be patient if my answers are slow. The lists are currently low-volume, and the announcements list should always be.
(It can store files, but isn't especially smooth about it yet. For personal notes of all kinds, it is the most efficient, effective, flexible thing I know of. The FAQs link to a discussion comparing it with emacs org-mode and others. It has fulltext search, some finicky but very functional import/export, a nice numbered-outline export to text, and a journal/activity log.)
I have noted to look at Notion, and Trillium, to see how much they overlap and if we can collaborate. I have been quite slow lately though, hoping to get more done sometime relatively soon.
I used Notion for a significant period but ended up switching to Nuclino [1] - which is identical in many respects, but without the various add-ons that are unnecessary if you're working with text/images.
I've found it to be more responsive, and to my tastes, it has a better UI. I'm not a big fan of the emoji/blank file image that is necessary with every Notion entry.
Notion looks great, and I've been hoping to migrate it. There are two big problems.
One is the migration path from Evernote. If you look at all the current notetaking apps, none of them seem to have capitalized on the fact that there are lots of unhappy Evernote users out there who would kill for a smooth, painless migration path. Instead, these apps ask you to export your Evernote notes as HTML, something which Evernote only lets you do for a single notebook at a time. I have lots of individual notebooks, so this would take forever. Plus, you lose folders and images this way. Why not just write a small app that scrapes the whole Evernote database? Last I checked, it's an SQLite database!
The other is the lack of offline search. This isn't a dealbreaker, but it seems pretty suspect for an app like this. Losing cell service completely is one thing, but shouldn't it be "offline indexing first" anyway? Obviously it has all my notes synced at all times. I want the search to be lightning fast even if I'm on a slow connection.
It seems like "attachments" (files like PDFs, and also images) are not stored offline, either. In the iOS app, clicking on a file or image brings up an S3 URL inside an embedded web browser.
Notion is just awesome and I have been using it for 6 months now. It's the only app I have used so far that feels like a text editor and despite covering so many use-cases, excels at each of them and outdoes individual apps made for that specific purpose.
Tools I have replaced with Notion:
- Todos & Planning: Evernote, Workflowy, Text Files.
I also use it for pros and cons lists, inspirations and moodboards for design and so on.
One thing that would be quite helpful in Notion is to have some sort of "marketplace" where users can share pre-made templates. I am not sure if they have an API for extensions yet, but that would be awesome.
+1 for having a native linux client. I'm not sure what the process would be, but being electron based I can't imagine it being extremely hard. Right now I'm using https://github.com/sysdrum/notion-app to basically wrap a browser instance. But there's a very noticeable performance difference between this hacky solution and my friends native electron client on MacOS. Especially on my heavier pages with lots of photos. Notion has completely changed my life and workflow, but I feel like I'm starting to run up against the limits of what I can do on the operating system I'm on. I even considered reaching out to CodeWeavers the makers of Crossover to see what it would take to make a linux port, but it seems like I actually have to be the owner of the app being ported for that to be an option.
We use it to keep track of all
Of our tasks and projects. Switched to it after getting annoyed with Asana and not wanting to use something like Jira. We love how freeform it is and allowed us to create a workflow that fit us.
There are some gripes I have with it, notifications are still hit or miss despite talking to support about it multiple times - they’ll be delayed or missed altogether if you’ve recently opened the iOS app or have the desktop app open on another computer. Search still needs some love. It should probably weigh recently opened pages higher. And I’d love it if the Mac app was native instead of electron based.
Their team is pretty responsive when messaging them so that’s a huge plus.
[+] [-] kjksf|7 years ago|reply
It's for Go but one could easily port it to any other language. It's just HTTP requests and some light processing of JSON responses.
I use it so that I can have my blog content in Notion. In a daily cron job I download the data from Notion, convert it to HTML and publish on Netlify as a static website. This script is open source: https://github.com/kjk/blog
Basically I use Notion as CMS.
I described my reverse-engineering process in https://blog.kowalczyk.info/article/88aee8f43620471aa9dbcad2...
[+] [-] ohadron|7 years ago|reply
1. It's extremely slow on even a new iPhone - about 6-7 seconds until I can start typing a note. By then I forget what I wanted to write. It's basically a webview of a very heavy web app, so it's not snappy at all.
2. No offline support whatsoever.
In addition it feels like they have abandoned development or are busy being acquired (~bi-weekly updates until about three months ago: https://www.notion.so/What-s-New-157765353f2c4705bd45474e5ba...)
I migrated back to Bear (https://bear.app/) which was a pain - exporting from Notion is also not one of their best features.
[+] [-] setgree|7 years ago|reply
Notion founders, do you care to comment on this? My company recently started a paid account on Notion and I'd love to know more.
[+] [-] atombender|7 years ago|reply
Bear is "just" a personal Markdown note app. No folders, no support for anything other than text/images, no collaborative editing, no support for multiple workspaces. The tag model is nice, but pretty limited.
Notion's raison d'être is collaborative, structured text: Workspaces for sharing and editing documents, with a rich set of embeddable objects (for example, you can embed Github gists and CodePens). It also has some pretty powerful Airtable-type database support where you can treat pages as records, and then view/sort/filter them in different presentation modes (gallery, board, etc.). Like Airtable, this lets you build mini apps such as task boards inside pages.
Bear's in the same space as iA Writer, Apple's Notes, etc. Notion's closest competitors are probably Google Docs, Dropbox Paper and possibly Quip and Milanote.
[+] [-] moystard|7 years ago|reply
However, I am not quite sure it justifies paying for this service when Apple Notes has got a lot better in the past few years (I also feel confident in the privacy approach of Apple).
Out of curiosity, what features make you use Bear and not Notes? I take a lot of notes, and if something can make my life easier, I would seriously consider making the move.
[+] [-] lilmartin|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] u2386|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] louis-paul|7 years ago|reply
On the flip side the software a bit slow to start and uses a lot of resources—it’s based on Electron, but I encourage everyone to try it (the demo on their website is cool!).
This is as close to “painting the back of the fence” as it gets.
[+] [-] NikolaNovak|7 years ago|reply
Pricing wise, I wish these types of apps didn't have such a steep escalation as soon as I want to share. $4 for individual, but $8/team member, which means wanting to share this with my wife is four times as expensive as just using it myself, with limited to no appreciable improvement.
[+] [-] rolleiflex|7 years ago|reply
Not a great first impression — especially not after their support tells me that this is for my own security.
[+] [-] patcon|7 years ago|reply
I would hardly say "no appreciable improvement". IMHO it's appropriate to price products based on the value derived, not the effort to implement each incremental "feature". And the ability to share is the most human feature. We are social creatures. To share and collaborate and be relational is to be human :)
So the price jump feels fair to me. We can get near full-knowledge of the product at a reduced price point, but to be human with the tool, we get hit with the real cost :)
EDIT: I also don't like the actual pricing structure, but that's only because I would rather participate in co-operative systems, and dislike capitalist ones. The above comment is my putting myself in their shoes :)
[+] [-] atombender|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Weizilla|7 years ago|reply
* View your basic profile info (per Google: name, email address, and profile picture)
* View your email address
[+] [-] antigremlin|7 years ago|reply
And if you pay for just one personal account, you can still share content with a free account. This is very close to having two people sharing one paid account, feature-wise.
[+] [-] unknown|7 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] danvayn|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 3dfan|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ausjke|7 years ago|reply
Can they dockerize this and sell that so I can self-host the docker image instead?
for people that is not tech-savvy, what about they buy a docker-container-hosted-by-the-vendor-company but can encrypt the contents in a way that nobody else can peek into the content ever?
[+] [-] throwaway382|7 years ago|reply
(FullStory records what you do in your browser. It records all DOM elements, so all your data is being recorded and sent to a 3rd party.)
[+] [-] owenwil|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] miles|7 years ago|reply
https://mobile.twitter.com/notionhq/status/99643620080931635...
Just shipped: export your entire workspace with one-click.
[+] [-] lvs|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chpmrc|7 years ago|reply
> For a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem. From Windows or Mac, this FTP account could be accessed through built-in software.
[+] [-] perenzo|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] WalterSear|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mjulian|7 years ago|reply
Specifically, the login is a randomly-generated one-time code sent to your email address. Notion says this is more secure than them storing a username+password, but that's a dubious argument. They've also said this is two-factor auth (lolno). A side effect of this is that Notion is unusable on my mobile device since I have no email on it.
I really hope they implement a more traditional login system. Until then, I'm sticking with Evernote. :(
[+] [-] benjlang|7 years ago|reply
I also made this site for people to share their Notion pages: http://notionpages.com You can use that to get a better sense of use cases for Notion.
[+] [-] ddlec|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tommoor|7 years ago|reply
We've been building it for 2 years, happy to answer questions.
[+] [-] mxwsn|7 years ago|reply
1) explicit support for Kanban board-ing tasks and similar to-do management
2) collapsible blocks
3) substantially smoother linking to, or embedding, notes within notes
Notion is just as sleek as Evernote for small independent notes, but these two features allow Notion to scale much better for projects that require an inter-related network of notes with substantial breadth and depth.
[+] [-] creativityland|7 years ago|reply
- Quip (https://quip.com)
- Airtable (https://airtable.com)
- Taskade (https://taskade.com)
[+] [-] techntoke|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dvtrn|7 years ago|reply
I'd gladly pay for a desktop application of this where I kept all of my notes and todos with local persistence that I could backup, migrate and move (similar to something like Notational Velocity), I like this, but I guess so far OneNote remains my personal champ in this regard-even though I have to tie it to OneDrive across my pc and surface.
Edit:
Although feverishly refreshing the thread and looking at all the praise...maybe I'll give it a more thorough shot for a couple of weeks.
[+] [-] sephoric|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sjy|7 years ago|reply
Gollum also seems to have powerful customisation features like macros and YAML front matter, but I have yet to make use of them. For now, Gollum suits me as a simple, free alternative to Confluence. Notion is obviously a far more powerful product.
[+] [-] irunbackwards|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bnt|7 years ago|reply
Why is it every time something like Notion is mentioned, there is always someone who wants "local, self-hosted, Markdown"? Just build it yourself.
This clearly shows you have no understanding of the product at hand. Notion is so incredibly powerful that Markdown doesn't even scratch the surface here.
[+] [-] PKop|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zmmmmm|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] patrickg_zill|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] owenwil|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lcall|7 years ago|reply
(It can store files, but isn't especially smooth about it yet. For personal notes of all kinds, it is the most efficient, effective, flexible thing I know of. The FAQs link to a discussion comparing it with emacs org-mode and others. It has fulltext search, some finicky but very functional import/export, a nice numbered-outline export to text, and a journal/activity log.)
I have noted to look at Notion, and Trillium, to see how much they overlap and if we can collaborate. I have been quite slow lately though, hoping to get more done sometime relatively soon.
[+] [-] atschantz|7 years ago|reply
I've found it to be more responsive, and to my tastes, it has a better UI. I'm not a big fan of the emoji/blank file image that is necessary with every Notion entry.
[1] - https://www.nuclino.com/
[+] [-] keybits|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] atombender|7 years ago|reply
One is the migration path from Evernote. If you look at all the current notetaking apps, none of them seem to have capitalized on the fact that there are lots of unhappy Evernote users out there who would kill for a smooth, painless migration path. Instead, these apps ask you to export your Evernote notes as HTML, something which Evernote only lets you do for a single notebook at a time. I have lots of individual notebooks, so this would take forever. Plus, you lose folders and images this way. Why not just write a small app that scrapes the whole Evernote database? Last I checked, it's an SQLite database!
The other is the lack of offline search. This isn't a dealbreaker, but it seems pretty suspect for an app like this. Losing cell service completely is one thing, but shouldn't it be "offline indexing first" anyway? Obviously it has all my notes synced at all times. I want the search to be lightning fast even if I'm on a slow connection.
It seems like "attachments" (files like PDFs, and also images) are not stored offline, either. In the iOS app, clicking on a file or image brings up an S3 URL inside an embedded web browser.
[+] [-] etchalon|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] asadkn|7 years ago|reply
Tools I have replaced with Notion:
- Todos & Planning: Evernote, Workflowy, Text Files.
- Notes: Google Keep, Text Files.
- Work Wiki: MediaWiki.
- Collaboration/Project Management: Confluence, Trello, Asana.
I also use it for pros and cons lists, inspirations and moodboards for design and so on.
One thing that would be quite helpful in Notion is to have some sort of "marketplace" where users can share pre-made templates. I am not sure if they have an API for extensions yet, but that would be awesome.
[+] [-] drsh0|7 years ago|reply
I made a list earlier (using Notion) of some next-get productivity platforms that caught my eye if anyone is interested:
https://www.notion.so/Next-gen-Productivity-Platform-Researc...
It includes both these all-in-one type of tools along with nice project management and spreadsheet/db tools like airtable.
[+] [-] ajflores1604|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dawnerd|7 years ago|reply
There are some gripes I have with it, notifications are still hit or miss despite talking to support about it multiple times - they’ll be delayed or missed altogether if you’ve recently opened the iOS app or have the desktop app open on another computer. Search still needs some love. It should probably weigh recently opened pages higher. And I’d love it if the Mac app was native instead of electron based.
Their team is pretty responsive when messaging them so that’s a huge plus.