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!
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 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.
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.
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.
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...
Notion's main strength and stickiness imo is as a hub.
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.
a new notion is lurking somewhere waiting to ride in the wake of a growing disgruntled pile of notion users
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.
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.
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!
Yes it’s decluttered but it’s not a very sticky product.
> 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.
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 wish I had a 70 million/year mid-life crisis funded by web-based notepad.
It's been somewhat maddening switching from Confluence.
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.