Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Notion API – public beta

developers.notion.so

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 262 posts

Re: Notion API – public beta

#21

Post by orliesaurus »

Full Disclosure - I have been lucky enough to have closed BETA access to the Notion API and here are some things I have noticed. BTW I do not work for Notion, im totally indie :P

- The team building the API has been super responsive and respectful, very good collaboration on their Dev slack and I had a great time testing things

- The documentation has been updated with the feedback from the community who had access, it's in a MUCH better status now than when it started

- The API speed has increased, it was really slow, now its a bit faster :)

Looking forward to see how other companies are using the Notion API, whether natively or through other integrations, I've seen a lot of activity from the folks at Integromat and Typeform :) (which are awesome tools btw!)

Re: Notion API – public beta

#22

Post by harrisonjackson »

And the Zapier integration is launched, too! https://zapier.com/apps/notion/integrations

It has the same basic trigger (new item), actions (create/update item), and search (find item) as every other CRM integration. It is missing a trigger for item getting updated - still excited to see how folks are using it though.

Re: Notion API – public beta

#23

Post by Karunamon »

andreilys wrote: post #7
arnon wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Move on to what and why?

So many other applications out there that don’t hold your data hostage like Notion. I learned after spending an hour to transfer notes that they have a “limit” on the number of “blocks” (aka notes) that I can have. Absolutely terrible user experience and turned me off from ever using Notion. I ended up going open source with vimwiki (and obsidian as a visualization layer, although as comments pointed out it’s not ope…

The limitation only applies on free accounts, paid accounts for personal usage are extremely cheap, and it has full exportability into markdown and csv. Not sure what you're talking about unless this was a long time ago.

Re: Notion API – public beta

#24

Post by bachmeier »

andreilys wrote: post #7
arnon wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Move on to what and why?

So many other applications out there that don’t hold your data hostage like Notion. I learned after spending an hour to transfer notes that they have a “limit” on the number of “blocks” (aka notes) that I can have. Absolutely terrible user experience and turned me off from ever using Notion. I ended up going open source with vimwiki (and obsidian as a visualization layer, although as comments pointed out it’s not ope…

> I ended up going open source via Obsidian

Obsidian is not open source. I'm hesitant to dump my stuff into Obsidian because their markdown has plenty of nonstandard features. You can't run a directory of Obsidian notes through Pandoc and copy the output to your website. I think someone did write a partial converter at some point. This is kind of an issue with all the recent notes apps like Dendron, Logseq, and Athens.

Re: Notion API – public beta

#25

Post by jitl »

spullara wrote: post #15

Who makes a database API with no way to change records in the database?

You can update the properties of a page in a database using a PATCH request to v1/pages, details here: https://developers.notion.com/reference/patch-page

(I work at Notion, but not on the API team)

Re: Notion API – public beta

#26

Post by ra7 »

andreilys wrote: post #7
arnon wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Move on to what and why?

So many other applications out there that don’t hold your data hostage like Notion. I learned after spending an hour to transfer notes that they have a “limit” on the number of “blocks” (aka notes) that I can have. Absolutely terrible user experience and turned me off from ever using Notion. I ended up going open source with vimwiki (and obsidian as a visualization layer, although as comments pointed out it’s not ope…

I tried Notion. It was cool in the beginning, but I got overwhelmed by the UI and all the templates they have.

Went with vimwiki. I just store my notes in a private Github repository. It's simple and effective. So far I've been happy with this setup.

Re: Notion API – public beta

#27

Post by mattwad »

I have to give a shoutout to the dev who wrote Nishan, a wrapper around Notion's internal API used by their webapp. I've been using it for a while and it will be a long time before the public API catches up. Getting users to find the api token from cookies has been a pain though, so I'll be looking into migrating asap. https://github.com/Devorein/Nishan

Re: Notion API – public beta

#28

Post by villasv »

bnt wrote: post #17
owlbynight wrote: post #12

When I initially signed up for Notion, I did so thinking the API was already usable. It was used as a selling point for their premium service even though it wasn't implemented. This was a year and a half ago or so. I felt pretty burned by it and killed my subscription. Hopefully this turns out well for the people who've been waiting for it, but that experience left a terrible taste in my mouth.

Isn't that the whole point of Agile MVP development? Sell something that doesn't exist and hope someone buys it? Personally, I don't expect much from it, after working with Airtable's API and hating every second of it.

You nailed the opposite of an MVP, which is to deliver it immediately and improve it later.

Re: Notion API – public beta

#29

Post by caslon »

andreilys wrote: post #7
arnon wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Move on to what and why?

So many other applications out there that don’t hold your data hostage like Notion. I learned after spending an hour to transfer notes that they have a “limit” on the number of “blocks” (aka notes) that I can have. Absolutely terrible user experience and turned me off from ever using Notion. I ended up going open source with vimwiki (and obsidian as a visualization layer, although as comments pointed out it’s not ope…

Obsidian isn't as bad as Notion, but it's also proprietary. Unfortunately, there is no good company in this space.

Re: Notion API – public beta

#30

Post by arcticfox »

bnt wrote: post #17
owlbynight wrote: post #12

When I initially signed up for Notion, I did so thinking the API was already usable. It was used as a selling point for their premium service even though it wasn't implemented. This was a year and a half ago or so. I felt pretty burned by it and killed my subscription. Hopefully this turns out well for the people who've been waiting for it, but that experience left a terrible taste in my mouth.

Isn't that the whole point of Agile MVP development? Sell something that doesn't exist and hope someone buys it? Personally, I don't expect much from it, after working with Airtable's API and hating every second of it.

Well you've either got to make it clear that it doesn't exist yet, or not actually charge them until you build it. Otherwise that sounds like fraud.
Post reply on HN