I liked Notion for a while, and it certainly has done well, but it has pivoted to the Enterprise market and away from individual consumers, and more importantly, it is just too slow.
I’m currently on Notion and have went through many off these different things.
I’m always worried about getting too invested and then the company going under. However, the open source things are always a little too rough around the edges for my taste.
This is the factor that persuaded me to try Obsidian in the first place. It’s maintained by a company, so perhaps more polish than some FOSS projects, but the notes are all stored purely as simple markdown files on your hard disk, so if the company goes under the worst that happens is there are no more updates and I just keep using whatever the last version was
To address that concern, I think it is important that a service has good data export. One thing that is good about Notion is that the data you are creating is fairly generic: markdown and tables, so now that they are popular and have a public API we are seeing lots of services for moving and sync’ing their data with other services.
I’ve thought about trying Roam, but it is expensive and I worry that, if I use it for a while but then decide it is no longer worth the cost, how will I move that data elsewhere?
I’m currently using Notion and agree on the “slow” part.
However, what Notion does give you, which other, mostly markdown / flat-file based systems do not, is a form of “data-base”, or more truthfully spreadsheet-like applications with light formulas, sorting, filtering etc. Also, the free version also includes sharing / “publication” and sync.
I do not use it heavily, but those are the reasons I’m sticking with it for now.
Thanks for pointing me to it, if I make the jump in the future, that might come in handy. Although it does slightly take away from the appeal of pure markdown files.
Yes, and having that database like functionality, as well as the usual note taking, is really a great addition. And sync is critical IMO. If they would just make the web front-end faster I would stop looking for alternatives.
This is an important but tricky category.
I liked Notion for a while, and it certainly has done well, but it has pivoted to the Enterprise market and away from individual consumers, and more importantly, it is just too slow.
I’m currently on Notion and have went through many off these different things.
I’m always worried about getting too invested and then the company going under. However, the open source things are always a little too rough around the edges for my taste.
This is the factor that persuaded me to try Obsidian in the first place. It’s maintained by a company, so perhaps more polish than some FOSS projects, but the notes are all stored purely as simple markdown files on your hard disk, so if the company goes under the worst that happens is there are no more updates and I just keep using whatever the last version was
To address that concern, I think it is important that a service has good data export. One thing that is good about Notion is that the data you are creating is fairly generic: markdown and tables, so now that they are popular and have a public API we are seeing lots of services for moving and sync’ing their data with other services.
I’ve thought about trying Roam, but it is expensive and I worry that, if I use it for a while but then decide it is no longer worth the cost, how will I move that data elsewhere?
I’m currently using Notion and agree on the “slow” part.
However, what Notion does give you, which other, mostly markdown / flat-file based systems do not, is a form of “data-base”, or more truthfully spreadsheet-like applications with light formulas, sorting, filtering etc. Also, the free version also includes sharing / “publication” and sync.
I do not use it heavily, but those are the reasons I’m sticking with it for now.
Obsidian’s dataview plugin might have all the database features you’re looking for.
Strongly agree with sync and publish though. The free solutions I out together for each are ugly.
Thanks for pointing me to it, if I make the jump in the future, that might come in handy. Although it does slightly take away from the appeal of pure markdown files.
Yes, and having that database like functionality, as well as the usual note taking, is really a great addition. And sync is critical IMO. If they would just make the web front-end faster I would stop looking for alternatives.