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

Notion releases offline mode

notion.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 189 posts

Re: Notion releases offline mode

#81

Post by dimal »

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.

Personally, I use Obsidian. But I can’t imagine using it with a team. There’s too much friction sorting out what extensions to use, making sure everyone knows how to use said extensions. I don’t see how Obsidian is feasible for teams. If anyone has experience making it work well for their team, I’d love to hear about it.

Re: Notion releases offline mode

#83

Post by bayindirh »

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 and doesn't replace each other. I'd certainly won't run my digital garden over Notion, or store the databases I keep in Notion in Obsidian. Obsidian's Bases fill a different need, for now.

Also, Notion slightly pivoted recently. They altered their “single person” oriented Pro plan and made Business their “Entry level, full fledged” plan. They do not cater to individuals anymore. Where obsidian is more geared towards individuals.

Re: Notion releases offline mode

#84

Post by dzuc »

EGreg wrote: post #38
paxys wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What feature set exactly? Describe what makes it so amazing. Basically collaboration? Notes has that too.

Ever try to use the collaboration feature in Apple Notes? I find it remarkable how unreliable is.

Re: Notion releases offline mode

#85

Post by rafram »

joeriddles wrote: post #48
ale wrote: post #28

Although I’m sure implementing this into a big codebase is a technical headache I hope this encourages other big Electron apps like Figma (or even Tana, a direct competitor) to support an offline mode of sorts.

I'm surprised Figma doesn't support offline mode given this blog post about how they built it. https://www.figma.com/blog/how-figmas-multiplayer-technology...

> Figma lets you go offline for an arbitrary amount of time and continue editing.

This sounds like they’re trying to support cases where you temporarily lose connection while editing a document. Very different from being able to start up your computer without an internet connection, open a document you’d previously downloaded, edit it, and sync sometime later once you come back online (which is what Notion now supports).

Re: Notion releases offline mode

#86

Post by bayindirh »

meel-hd wrote: post #82

https://notesnook.com is better than Notion and Obsidian. The cross-platform apps are fast and smooth, and it have sync, which Obsidian requires a subscription for.

I was a notesnook subscriber. It was a good app riddled with some unpleasant bugs in their publish workflow, so I canceled after three months or so, sadly.

OTOH, you don't need to pay for Obsidian sync. You can sync it via any cloud provider or syncthing if you prefer.

I have a business related vault under Obsidian. It syncs via office's Nextcloud instance. I also added "Edit history" plugin, so I have unlimited diff and undo on that vault, too.

Re: Notion releases offline mode

#87

Post by numbers »

layman51 wrote: post #42
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).

I think you're correct. But I remember back around 2020 when Notion became very popular, it was definitely marketed toward individuals like students, or professionals who wanted to do a lot of planning or organization related to their working/personal lives.

yeah, when I downloaded the beta back in 2017/2018, I was using it as a replacement for Evernote. It was amazing. As the feature bloat made it slower and as the push towards companies made it less individual-focused, I started to use it more for group projects and now for teams.

Obsidian is just better for writing especially longer notes etc. Notion is great for sharing data intensive stuff, nicely formatted docs, and for collaborating.

Re: Notion releases offline mode

#88

Post by superfrank »

maz1b wrote: post #76

Offline mode is one of those features that sounds simple enough, but in reality gets pretty complex pretty fast, particularly if you want to do more meaningful capabilities or operations esp at scale.

I'm on a team building offline mode into an enterprise product at work and you are soooooo correct about this. Offline mode is a deceptively hard problem to begin with and it becomes 10x harder if you're trying to add it to a product that wasn't designed with offline mode in mind.

Re: Notion releases offline mode

#89

Post by cholantesh »

layman51 wrote: post #42
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).

I think you're correct. But I remember back around 2020 when Notion became very popular, it was definitely marketed toward individuals like students, or professionals who wanted to do a lot of planning or organization related to their working/personal lives.

I actively used Notion with a lot of my fellow students at the time. I've subsequently gravitated towards Joplin for 'richer' content and Obsidian for general text.

Re: Notion releases offline mode

#90

Post by 0xCMP »

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.

Once iOS 26 drops Apple Notes will be much-much more useful with the combination of supported linking between notes and supporting Markdown.

Before it rapidly became untenable as a place to actually store my notes. I use it more as a "temporary note" that will be moved to the proper place later.

Post reply on HN