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Notion releases offline mode

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Re: Notion releases offline mode

#101

Post by dtkav »

mxschll wrote: post #11
photon_garden wrote: post #10

I was a big Notion fan for years and am now solidly in the Obsidian camp. Speed and local-first was originally the main differentiator, but over time Steph Ango's "file over app" philosophy has become my favorite feature. Yesterday I used Claude Code to automate some Obsidian cleanup and it was trivial because everything's just a file.

Local-first becomes even better in combination with local LLMs.

yes! So many people are missing out on using claude-code directly on their knowledge base locally. Once you have it all local it seems completely crazy to push all of that context into a locked-in saas platform with mediocre AI tools.

Re: Notion releases offline mode

#102

Post by yeahboi »

paxys wrote: post #36
tequila_shot wrote: post #2

I guess for a lot of users like myself using Notion ship has sailed. Most of them have moved to Obsidian, with the new database feature of Obsidian, and it being free, I do not see why users would choose Notion over Obsidian.

Obsidian is great for solo use, but then so is Apple Notes and a dozen similar options. Where Notion shines is team based sharing and collaboration. There's really nothing else like it with the same feature set.

[dead]

Re: Notion releases offline mode

#103

Post by mgmobrien »

tshaddox wrote: post #79
raincole wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tech-savvy people indeed do have some very interesting (while out of touch) perspectives.

I don't think Obsidian is even a major player in tech-savvy circles. I'd point to Apple Notes instead.

It's a major player for personal notes. Eg

> Love letter to @obsdmd to which I very happily switched to for my personal notes. My primary interest in Obsidian is not even for note taking specifically, it is that Obsidian is around the state of the art of a philosophy of software and what it could be. — https://x.com/karpathy/status/1761467904737067456

And there's a lot of interest from tech-savvy folks wanting to use it at work. (Said as a cofounder of a co making business multiplayer tools)

Re: Notion releases offline mode

#104

Post by freehorse »

trentnix wrote: post #15

I'm a Notion fan but the lack of a native Linux app has me shopping for a replacement. Obsidian seems, from what I've seen, focused on the ability to graph notes, which I don't really care about. I want note-taking, list-making, and markdown friendly. I do want to keep Notion's ability to work in a browser and to maintain a single, accessible store of my notes. What are my options?

> Obsidian seems, from what I've seen, focused on the ability to graph notes, which I don't really care about. I want note-taking, list-making, and markdown friendly.

FWIW I use obsidian for "note-taking, list-making, and markdown friendly" and have not bothered with note graphs etc and it none of such features have gone on my way ever.

The good thing imo about obsidian is that it is perfectly possible to keep it all dead simple if that is what you want. The only "advanced" feature I use is rendering a slides-based presentation out of a markdown file (and setting up a css file for this). For any other notetaking or knowledge management tool I have spent more time configuring/learning to use it than actually taking notes.

For my uses, notion is unnecessarily complicated.

Re: Notion releases offline mode

#105

Post by rchaud »

jjfoooo4 wrote: post #24
wahnfrieden wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are not their current market, at all (individual vs team use) and your solution is unsuitable for theirs

People using their free offering for personal use is a critical part of Notion's sales pipeline. It's a hell of a lot easier to sell a piece of software to a company when all it's internal users have already trained themselves how to use it in their personal time. Those users are probably the ones generating the enterprise sales lead in the first place See also: Google Docs

Google Docs as a paid enterprise offering wouldn't fly without having Gmail lock-in and having that underpin Google SSO.

That's what Microsoft has that market sewn up with Office 365, despite being several years late to collaborative document editing -- Outlook anchors the whole thing together.

Re: Notion releases offline mode

#106

Post by mgmobrien »

bayindirh wrote: post #83
tequila_shot wrote: post #2

I guess for a lot of users like myself using Notion ship has sailed. Most of them have moved to Obsidian, with the new database feature of Obsidian, and it being free, I do not see why users would choose Notion over Obsidian.

I use both. Obsidian is very powerful for quick entry and working on Markdown knowledge bases, and it's great. I use it to manage my digital garden among other things. On the other hand, Notion is great for processing data. I use their databases extensively incl. their charts and whatnot. I also host a couple of read-only public pages for friends or family as documentation. I think they cater to different use cases a…

For some kinds of data processing having your files in a local folder is a prereq. Every day I have my Obsidian vault open in Zed, and I interact with files via the tool-calling agent panel and via terminal.

I haven't tried Notion AI, maybe it's great. But I can't imagine going back to a world where all my knowledge lives in Notion's house. Notion CEO Ivan Zhao recently said: "If you think about applications, each application is kind of like a mini-prison of computing". (https://www.theverge.com/decoder-podcast-with-nilay-patel/75...) I think he's right. I don't want to be in Notion's prison even if it's big and nice.

Re: Notion releases offline mode

#107

Post by pavel_lishin »

Illniyar wrote: post #7
tequila_shot wrote: post #2

I guess for a lot of users like myself using Notion ship has sailed. Most of them have moved to Obsidian, with the new database feature of Obsidian, and it being free, I do not see why users would choose Notion over Obsidian.

I've never heard of companies using Obsidian. Notion isn't really marketed or suitable for individuals (even if their free plan says otherwise).

Notion works great for me as a store of WYSIWYG documents that I can drag around in a hierarchical set of pages. This means that I can easily use it on my phone, on the go.

But I don't use any of its Database functionality, or any of the other 90% of its features.

Re: Notion releases offline mode

#108

Post by echelon »

pavel_lishin wrote: post #107
Illniyar wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've never heard of companies using Obsidian. Notion isn't really marketed or suitable for individuals (even if their free plan says otherwise).

Notion works great for me as a store of WYSIWYG documents that I can drag around in a hierarchical set of pages. This means that I can easily use it on my phone, on the go. But I don't use any of its Database functionality, or any of the other 90% of its features.

Notion needs to fear all of the people using (and loving) Obsidian at home that want to use it for work.

Notion is going to have a very hard time turning corporate Notion users into at-home/personal Notion users. Obsidian has already won this use case with one of the most rock-solid products ever.

Now Obsidian gets to fight the battle for corporate on their terms. And their tool is already developer friendly.

There are a million Obsidian champions, and there's probably a dozen of them in your org. I think Notion should be shaking in their boots right about now.

If Obsidian can get their organization management and syncing/backup strategy right, and if they make their product interface well with distributed git automations, Obsidian is going to take over so many new workflows. Not just knowledge bases, but mdbook -> webpage workflows, documentation, customer-facing pages, everything.

Notion makes product managers smile. Obsidian makes developers and product managers smile.

Re: Notion releases offline mode

#109

Post by Slow_Hand »

tequila_shot wrote: post #2

I guess for a lot of users like myself using Notion ship has sailed. Most of them have moved to Obsidian, with the new database feature of Obsidian, and it being free, I do not see why users would choose Notion over Obsidian.

I dunno. I love Obsidian, but it has a huge learning curve and is not currently the type of tool that I see companies adopting when they need to have their employees adopt it’s use. Obsidian is way too overwhelming for the average user, whereas Notion is far more user-friendly and intuitive for people who just need to interact with the system to do their job.

Edit: Not to mention that (last I checked) Obsidian lacks a lot of granularity when it comes to permissions for editing pages. It would be very easy for a beginner user to disrupt the markdown files or the organizational system. Even doing things like applying labels or tags in the YAML is less intuitive and requires a lot of consistency guidelines for users to make it worthwhile. Notion facilitates this kind of thing a lot better.

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