Comment by untech
5 days ago
I’ve come to hate Notion with passion because of its abysmal performance, but I still pay for it for my small business. My non-technical employees use it as a database for clients, tasks, payments etc. I tried to research replacements several times, and still haven’t found anything good. Sometimes I wonder if I should build my own.
Anytype (https://anytype.io), Appflowy (https://appflowy.com)
Do you use Anytype productively?
I have it installed but I find it kind of daunting compared to Notion for organizing my notes, it seems to want to be a more abstract kind of 'knowledge management system'.
I just opened it again and it popped up a 'What's New' with phrases like 'Relations are now properties' and something about 'types', 'templates', 'sets' and 'queries', I really just want to take notes and organize them in a straightforward hierarchy.
These concepts have been copied directly from Notion.
I’ve found Anytype to be more streamlined. I’m highly familiar with Notion though, so adapted easily.
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Most intriguing thing in that vein I've seen: https://thymer.com (haven't used it, am not affiliated, just looked promising in a demo video esp. on performance grounds)
Hey thanks for mentioning us!
With Thymer we really care about performance, but Thymer is also end-to-end encrypted because we don't want to compromise on privacy. And it's real-time collaborative and offline first.
Thymer has optional self-hosting. Then you can upgrade (or not) at your own leisure, or intentionally stick to an older version you like better. Enshittification is a big problem in our industry. We've all been burned by it -- we certainly have -- and being able to opt out of a "new and improved!" version is a real feature.
Thymer will also be very extensible. Today we launched our plugin SDK: https://thymer.com/plugins and https://github.com/thymerapp/thymer-plugin-sdk/ with a bunch of examples. With Thymer you will be able to "vibe code" the very simple plugins and with VSCode/Cursor you can make more complex plugins with hot-reload.
Looks like org mode for the masses
I really like Notion’s information architecture (in particular the top index pages) and its multi-user capability.
I tried some other tools like Confluence and Obsidian but like you say, there seems to be no match from a UX perspective.
Do I love Notion? Definitely not. Would I change to another tool with the same feature set? Instantly.
If you like Obsidian and want it to be multiplayer you might be interested in Relay [0] (shameless plug).
There are also plugins like make.md [1] that are focused more on making the UX feel more like notion.
[0] https://relay.md
[1] https://github.com/make-md/makemd
Interesting product. What do you use for the backend sync? I see CRDT so I assume Y.js?
I’m building a Y.js sync server: https://github.com/nperez0111/teleportal
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I'm in the same boat. Since they decided to bundle in their AI features with their core product (at only a 30% price increase!), I've been looking for an exist route. But finding a single collaborative text editor + database designer replacement has been difficult.
> I wonder if I should build my own.
Please consider improving one of the existing open source solutions before doing this: XWiki, Nextcloud, wiki.js...
There's advanced stuff that already exists and we could use some cooperation to get better instead of another competitor in a crowded space.
(I work for XWiki SAS - you can also pay them to build what's missing for you)
NocoDB perhaps? It's not a document-focused system, but you said they use it more as a database.
https://github.com/nocodb/nocodb
There are many suggestions already let me through in one more: Affine : https://affine.pro/
You can self host too if you like. Not all features as Notion but comes very close. Seems more private too compared to Notion.
I am also looking for more private and secure Notion alternatives. My company doesn’t allow using Notion.
I like templates, tasks, scrum etc. which I use for personal use. But I am reluctant on saving any personal information in it.
Bummer performance is a problem for ya. We've worked on it a ton over the past year or two and generally performance should be much better across the board. Feel free to email me (username @ makenotion.com) if you have example pages that are slow you're willing to share. thanks!
I used a lot for organizing my personal projects, endup changing to Microsoft Loop for client stuff. And Obsidian for personal stuff.
The performance really is abysmal. I started using it years ago and the change from the early days has been drastic.
outline - https://getoutline.com is pretty good and you can import all your notion spaces too.