Ask HN: Do you like Notion? Isn't it overrated?

Have a look at FSNotes, I use it on Mac and iOS and it works well for me, I previously used notational velocity and loved it, have also a liking for Joplin but it doesn’t synch as easily as I would like, FSNotes does all really well! I tried Notion, it was not for me in so many ways!

Did notion add Find and Replace?

Last time I used it, about a year ago, it did not have this feature and notion had been out for years at that point.

I stopped using it because it lacked this basic feature.

I started using it just as a markdown dumping ground and over time refined my use. It came naturally to me. If your team is using some complicated system that nobody explained to you, then I can't blame you. Notion can definitely be as complicated or as simple as you want it.

You’re not entirely wrong, although I don’t personally know of anyone who would use Notion for any kind of serious document authoring. Notion isn’t terribly original, it’s quite opinionated, and it’s hardly a panacea of productivity—but it manages to find an acceptable middle ground in several key software categories in a way that its competitors never have that, when combined effectively, add up to something more than the sum of its parts. For a lot of people who have been longing for such a product, it can feel special even if there’s not anything particularly special about any one thing it does.

I think the thing that Notion managed to do that truly sets it apart from Office, as well as a lot of its note-taking/productivity app peers, is to make a very simple and intuitive method for anyone at any skill level to create and utilize a “relational database” (I realize there are oceans of meaningful distinctions between Notion’s databases and proper ones). For me, Notion became something of a phenomenon because after years of getting excited about things like Evernote and Asana (or anything in Google Docs) only to be sorely disappointed to find that all of them could do a lot of general things fairly well, not one of them could adapt to my specific workflow in a way that made them essential. Notion’s paradigm of combining Airtable’s customizable database-lite functionality with Evernote’s note-taking/knowledge gathering wasn’t the most original recipe, but they executed it pretty well, and maintain a good pace of improvement, and it’s become the only note/task/productivity app that I have ever used consistently enough to experience value from it.

I started using it during their initial public beta, and my workspace currently has over half a million blocks of information inside, with some of my early original databases for things like contacts serving continuously to this day. As a freelance IT consultant, Notion’s functionality along with years of my data makes it easily the most useful and powerful application I use today. I’m sure that probably sounds horrifying to many of HN’s users, and I 100% understand and share the concerns. I have tried dozens of alternatives, from Access to more direct OSS clones like Focalboard, and even a few attempts to roll-my-own using traditional relational databases and a variety of frontends, but none of these have come close to meeting my needs with the ease and efficacy that Notion does, and does well.

All that said, there does seem to be an over-abundance of hype surrounding it in the last year or two, and it’s certainly got plenty of problem areas that are ripe for legitimate criticism (cross-compatibility/vendor lock-in, lack of data backups, questionable data security, performance issues, bloat, monumental feature creep, etc., etc.).

It at least exports to Markdown and CSV. It requires quite a bit of tweaking to migrate the exported data to anything resembling a 1:1 representation of its “databases”, but I imagine there will be something akin to an ORM eventually (if there’s not already) to better facilitate such tasks.

That said, I absolutely understand your concerns, and I really don’t think its export ability is a meaningful answer for them. It’s enough for me and my needs, but I wouldn’t presume to suggest it would be the same for anyone else. I would absolutely say that anyone considering Notion for their business should aware of these potential issues.