*yes, some people do pay of course, but the dichotomy between B2C and B2B revenue is vast
B2B is much more profitable and you can set much higher prices for your products.
One of the best parts of Notion is it a actually works pretty well on every platform. So that's not very helpful.
What parts of notion are you claiming are fast and responsive?
In my experience using the web app is very slow, and search is monstrously slow. We still use it but slowness is our chief complaint for the platform.
I hang on in the hopes they will address the problem.
<100 employess : Notion clear winner
> 150 employees : Confluence clear winner
But the advice to invest more in engineering is spot-on. It’s clear that Notion went through a period of hypergrowth and likely generated a lot of tech debt, but I’m hoping they’ll pay it off over time.
In particular, as the parent comment mentions, anything involving search or autocomplete has horrible performance. There are also some questionable UX decisions that I personally find annoying, like defaulting to opening a page in a modal rather than the current window.
A good starting point for a roadmap would be the Notion subreddit. Most of the time I Google for a specific feature, the top result is a post in that subreddit requesting the feature in 2019.
This is a problem Slite seems to be facing as well. We used both for a while and actually gave their teams a lot of feedback. They were very grateful and communicated well, but moved very slowly and performance decreased quite a bit over time. We ended up focusing most of our planning/note taking/scheduling efforts in Linear instead. Much, much different but it works well enough while remaining extremely speedy and productive. I do miss a lot of what documents had to offer our team. I don't miss fiddling around with slow documents which didn't offer all of what we needed (and might never offer it).
I'm not sure why but most document-based apps like this seem to develop terrible performance. I suspect it's genuinely a difficult problem; I don't think I can 'make Notion in a weekend' by any means, or Slite for that matter. I trust they're doing their best.
I also know these tools suit some teams incredibly well, too.
Using Apple notes until I find a good alternative.
I'm not sure what the solution is, but after putting Notion through its paces I know this isn't it.
[0] https://saga.so
I've used Obsidian and Dendron for a lot of this previously, but the real killer feature of Notion, IMO, is the databases. I'd kill for a local/offline-first alternative that also has mobile support, but I have yet to find anything as easy (other than Craft, but it's Apple only and the web version is still in beta).
Also, it's just generally a good note taking app IMO.
- a Kanban Board (abandoned Trello)
- a Confluence replacement
Now I love it for task- and project management.
I use it in combo with Roam Research. Roam for writing, Notion for task- and project management.
The first is the keyboard shortcuts. The forward-slash shortcut for adding blocks is both simple and powerful. Along with AutoHotKey, I'm able to format and navigate around without ever leaving the keyboard.
The second is the block based system. With the block system, it's really easy to reformat a page or move items to new pages. For example, if there's a bulleted list that needs to be moved, I can just grab the top node and move the whole thing at once (because the other nodes are nested blocks)
Like say I make myself a todo list using a List database. Need to set a reminder for myself about some part of it? Just add it in the list item with @. Have some documents or code output that you want to remember? Just throw it in there! Crap, have a billion tabs open from researching and have to stop for the day? Just create a list inside the page and throw all the links in there. Need to take notes on some of those links because the SO answer wasn't quite right, just add it right that list item. All the context for the card is right there in the card. It's a project management board that actually bings value to me as a dev. It's not the thing I have to use to track time, it's a thing I want to use because it's where I can store all my thoughts instead of having to have two systems and keep them in sync which is always a chore.
Surely, buy 25% shares and seat on the board. Make a contract that Notion integrations are advertised first and everything else is encouraged to work with it.
That way automate still has a larger target market and provides a channel into Notion sales.
This kills automate's growth. I wonder what the price tag was.
I guess time will tell, but I imagine it's safer financially for Notion to let Automate continue operating as it has been while working more closely to bring first-class integrations into Notion and improving Notion's API.
Lean automation is asking to grow a little fat at the middle so that it’s easier to view and control data flows.
If this is true, it is a great success for the Automate founders.
[1] https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/automate-io/company_...
I love Obsidian, and it's exactly what I was looking for. Notion has a slightly different usage for people, so it's not always an easy switch.
I can see remote-based companies becoming more of the norm, especially post-pandemic, rather than multiple-location startups/corporations.
Any insight into why this particular company?
But too many services also introduce data integration problems (usually via APIs, 4 services may need 3 pipes). I wish there were "Managed Database Table as a Service" that provides authorization and authentication for apps/services to connect to. SaaS products connect to available db tables that user provides (assume B2B here), now business can choose a bunch of SaaS integrated together via database, get rid of all apis work.
Imagine Design tool, Issue Tracker, Git host, CMS read and write to your managed DTaaS. Painless automation extension. All teams use tools made for them specially.
