Seeing Notion ranked so highly makes me wonder what other people do that's so different from me. I try to like it (I was an early paid adopter, and now my company uses it so I must too), but there are so many points of friction that most of my effort is spent fighting it rather than using it.
Does the general typing latency not bother people? There's a noticeable delay between pressing a key and seeing a character appear. Other apps, Electron-based even, don't seem so slow. But then you type something like a/b and you realize why it's so slow. About half of the things a technical person might type while writing notes or documentation result in some "helpful" popup which must be canceled. I have a long laundry list of usability issues, but from all appearances their company has been growing and selling but not making good on the promises of addressing feedback.
My team and I use google docs to get the initial collaborative concepts down, and then one of us manually creates a Notion page with the more permanent result. I sincerely wish to find a collaborative writing/spreadsheet/drawing suite that was open source (paid service even) that could come close to the utility of gdocs.
From an investor standpoint, a marketing-first, usability-second (third, fourth maybe?) approach is clearly best. All you need to focus on is that next round of funding that pays off the previous round with a nice profit.
Notion powers literally 90% of my business productivity. We use it for todos, project management, kanban, wiki, writing, knowledge base, employee onboarding, and more.
I agree it's slow and the mobile apps are terrible. But I haven't found anything better yet.
I'm not sure how close can it get, but ONLYOFFICE products have been good to me so far. AGLPv3, good docx / xlsx compatibility, free for personal and there are paid business plans.
I've seen ONLYOFFICE used on Nextcloud instances and I haven't seen Google Analytics loaded up. Do they provided a cloud/hosted version that has it? But agreed - I was impressed with ONLYOFFICE.
They have lots of different offerings. I looked at personal.onlyoffice.com, their free hosted version for personal usage, and they load Google Analytics not just on the landing page, but when you open a document as well.
Not sure what's your use cases, but I have never encountered any of issues youve mentioned. Never got any delay, everything works smooth. I do use it a lot on desktop and mobile
I agree, to me Notion is not so much about taking notes as it is about presenting nice notes after the fact for showcasing to others (or for personal review). If I need to bang out something quickly, Notion is one of the worst options available.
Does the general typing latency not bother people? There's a noticeable delay between pressing a key and seeing a character appear. Other apps, Electron-based even, don't seem so slow. But then you type something like a/b and you realize why it's so slow. About half of the things a technical person might type while writing notes or documentation result in some "helpful" popup which must be canceled. I have a long laundry list of usability issues, but from all appearances their company has been growing and selling but not making good on the promises of addressing feedback.
My team and I use google docs to get the initial collaborative concepts down, and then one of us manually creates a Notion page with the more permanent result. I sincerely wish to find a collaborative writing/spreadsheet/drawing suite that was open source (paid service even) that could come close to the utility of gdocs.