In a way, Notion has come to occupy the same space as Jira for me: A tool that tries to be everything to everyone and gets abused by people who feel like using as many features as possible is a best practice.

I’ve had better success lately asking people to step outside of Notion and instead work in an old-fashioned shared Google doc. It’s amazing how much more productive we can all be when the tools are simplified to exactly what we need and people don’t feel like they need to sprinkle emojis and checklists and other features into everything just because they can.

Now, Notion's done a lot since then. If you want a knowledge base that can also have semi-structured tabular data, and portability in that data, it's hard to beat. Notion AI, pulling from disparate sources with the context of the current planning document, is really neat, too! But not every company will want to pay the per-head cost for this, unless it can replace other existing tools.

And when it comes to spaces like CRM in that context, looking at https://www.google.com/search?q=notion+crm&udm=14 ... there's a lot that could be said about Notion's (lack of) SEO/advertising there, but more concretely, a CRM solution nowadays has to bring a wealth of integrations as a near-prerequisite, and Notion doesn't have a mature story there - nor can they easily, because different customers will have different data models that make it hard to have a standardized notion of "what fields can I count on to be present for an Account."

Notion is a really powerful system. If it didn't already have a $10B valuation, it would be in tremendously good shape. But it has a long way to go to find the areas of growth it needs to grow beyond $10B.

I just don't get notion. I use Apple Notes for everything id use notion for + scratch.txt on every project folder root. (i've used notion, quip, gdocs, dropbox paper)

Notion lives rent free in my mind because while im indifferent to it, people seem to LOVE it. and that's so fascinating.

even this article, I upvoted it because the conversation about notion is interesting, the article itself is a dud after reading it.

we live in a world where Notion is a multi billion dollar company and i have no idea why—now that's interesting!

I just use it for taking notes and writing stuff down. I like how easy it is to drop an image, video, or document into a notion page, but I've only barely used features like databases which seem to be the big selling point, and none of my usage of those is really anything that couldn't just be a plaintext table in a markdown doc.

One of these days I'll get up the gumption to crawl through, excise what's worth keeping into Obsidian , and cancel my subscription. But not today, lol.

In practice, Google could put a tree-like organization of docs on the sidebar, make the search a bit comfier, and make draggable blocks, and get 80% of the Notion users. I guess they don't have a financial incentive to make docs better, but I would gladly pay extra to have everything there.

I guess someone could build a browser extension that adds that UI to Google Docs, or eventually I'll go and do it myself.

Other teams still use Confluence. People said Notion is a lot better than Confluence. Well, I agree I'd rather use it over Confluence, but that's a very low bar for comparison.

For ages they didn't have a find-and-replace feature. I just checked, it looks like they've finally added it in the last few months, but this is the first I notice.

They claim you can export stuff as markdown, but if I export as markdown, edit and reimport, I lose half of the formatting – even basic formatting which is part of the markdown spec.

Their native format (which their API exposes) is a bunch of extremely complex JSON blobs. I thought about writing a tool to let me download stuff, edit it in a sane text editor, then reupload it, but when I saw the complexity I just gave up.

It has real-time collaboration and support for diagrams (drawio, excalidraw and mermaid).

It can be tempting to want to do it all, but I am focused on building a great wiki and documentation software.

GitHub: https://github.com/docmost/docmost

Yes, lots of things can be done in Notion, but most of them are done better elsewhere with dedicated tools.

I think it's core functionality as a team wiki (aka a confluence replacement) is the one thing it does best and better than most competitors...

They want business from me, a tech savvy technical leader in an enterprise who mostly doesn’t care about what they offer. I want all my docs to live in Git, the way it does in Google’s g3doc.

We use Notion and, while it seems better than Confluence, I’ve never actually authored a single thing in it. It has no overlap with my goals. The world should be accessible from my IDE, and if I were them that’s where I’d really focus: a bi-directional sync and a first class VS Code plugin for whatever their file format looks like.

Some people use Notion for research and academic writing, which is the same use case for my software (https://getcahier.com). By specializing on this specific use case, I've been able to: offer a standard data model that's widely used in the field (bibtex), innovate in the PDF reader in the direction that my users need (by adding scrollbar markers for the relative position of highlights), and provide clear instructions to users on how to use the software. In principle, learning to use the software is learning how to perform an activity better - in this case, formal or informal research. When working with a software that's too general the user will always have to ask himself an additional question: "now, how do I make it do what I need?".

As the mathematician Hardy used to say, a beautiful theorem is one that is not too specific but also that is not too general - it has to strike a balance between the two.

If there's a conversation within a company about getting dedicated CRM software and they're already a Notion user or strongly considering Notion for their wikis and documentation, getting the word out there that Notion can also function like a reasonable CRM replacement can help close that deal or prevent a conversation about how Notion might not meet their needs.

However, Notion kind of gives me the vibes Evernote cult of the ancients we have forgotten.

That being said, I used Notion on early days as my brain-dump for everything until I found that my needs are just putting some text and images, then I moved to simplenoteapp(also from forgotten stone age) and substitute with Bear or Apple Notes.

Much like how SharePoint at most companies turn into a zombie wasteland of random unorganized documents, this also happens with Notion.

All of these types of products need their customers to effectively have someone dedicated to curation, organization and do librarian task - to maintain a good hygiene.

Otherwise, any type of team collaboration tool will get unwieldy super fast.

There seems to be a group of nerds that's apparently pretty huge and have enough decision making power that it was able to tap into.

I know a few people at Notion, and one thing I can say is that they have taste, in the way Apple has taste. I think this shows in their product.

Notion's main strength and stickiness imo is as a hub.

Notion is like Excel. It isn't or wasn't meant to be used in certain ways, but its simplicity and flexility meant 99% of the world is running on Excel. From SMEs to Fortune 500s. Because that is what normal non-tech users, from managers to exec know how to use and understand.

There are a lot I dont like about Notion. Mostly on performance. But I valued it a lot because that is how 70% of my team understand and can continue to work together.

The most painful part, the part that led to us switching back, was how painfully slow Notion was. Thanks to Electron, it used an obscene amount of ram, and a lot of opportunities to jot an idea down, or file something in the right place, were lost because of that slight lag.

Like being forced to cold-start Chrome to visit any website.

Knowing it would feel tedious to open Notion made me reconsider if the idea was worth writing down at all.

In some cases, it was!

a new notion is lurking somewhere waiting to ride in the wake of a growing disgruntled pile of notion users

> Streamline your customer relationships with Notion's CRM Templates

It's a joke, but it's also not a joke.

I mean, come on. Is notion really pitching itself as a CRM?

It's not a CRM. Anyone who uses it as a CRM is an idiot, bluntly.

...

https://www.notion.so/use-case/crm

Oh, wait. I guess it's a supported use case. I uh... take it back... I guess...

> If you don’t want to use a dedicated CRM platform or start from a template, you can use a no-code platform like Notion to build a knowledge base or team homepage and modify it to fit your CRM needs.

Yeah, I guess some people will think that's a good idea.

I might be strange but I just really vibed with Confluence and I’d be happy with it if people would commit to it.

I see it at similar to Figma in the sense that both tools are cloud-based and free, and their users love yapping about it.

But Notion has good tables by default, so I can have both good tables (and tableviews) and normal text files in the same app.

I could have tried Obsidian plugins, but I suspect that it would have been a time sink, and Notion offered everything in a neat package, so in the end, it won.

Notion shines with database use, and was how I used to write my blogs and connecting the API directly to my site to auto update. I’m surprised you’re a paying customer and barely use the database stuff!

I also really like how it treats everything as blocks, that's another thing that I can no longer live without.

If you're not interested in features like this, then yeah. Obsidian would be a good use-case.

A bit more of a learning curve but that's an absolute no-go when a tool contains the inner workings of my brain. Plenty of comparable private options.

Intellectual capital is rapidly being migrated from workers to shareholders under the guise of "AI".

Imagine a world where C-suites no longer rely on or support creative minds.

EDIT: They may say they don't train on user data currently but there's nothing stopping them in the future, especially if they are moving upmarket.

In his case, he uses it as a CRM for prospecting and it really isn't that bad at the business development end where you don't have a lot of people doing a structured process. But if you could somehow add some structure to notion, in the UI or with some AI interpretation of the text, or both, I could see Notion becoming a CRM or something else, think of something like a spreadsheet for notes.

Of course it might not be Notion that does it, it might be a startup that does it, it might be an established company. Saleforce is a good comparable because you can customize Salesforce to build many kinds of application but you still need programmers to do it. Is somebody in 2024 going to build a system which is as flexible, maybe even more flexible, but doesn't need the programmer?

Our public API format is not the "native" format used by the Notion editor. The overly-nested format we designed the public API is aimed at supporting statically typed programming languages like Java or Golang that do not have (tagged) union types natively. Instead we represent each option in the union type as a nullable field pointing to a nested object. This makes the structure much easier to decode in these kinds of languages, but does make it more verbose.

For a hypothetical typescript union type:

    | { type: 'plain', text: string, format: Formatting }
    | { type: 'link', text: string, href: string, format: Formatting }
    | { type: 'page-mention', page: { id: UUID, spaceId: UUID }, format: Formatting }

    {
      plain?: {
        text: string,
        format: Formatting
      }
      link?: {
        text: string,
        href: string,
        format: Formatting
      }
      pageMention?: {
        page: {
            id: UUID,
            spaceId: UUID
        },
        format: Formatting
      }
    }

It has a built in Figma style diagram/flow-chart editor which is handy for architecture documents, infinite array of plugins and the interface is simple, clean and focused.

Notion has become this kitchen sink app where even editing a table is a convoluted mess of an experience.