Notion 1.0 Web + Mac App - Docs, wikis, tasks – a minimal & unified workspace for teams

Notion co-founder here. We were accidentally hunted 10 months ago. Since then we have been rebuilding the product from scratch – it's now finally ready for you all. 🙂 To give you some background, our goal is to create the general purpose work tool for a post-file, post-MS Office world. My cofounder and I often joke that this was like the "hot startup topic" of the 90s. Unfortunately, tools for knowledge workers haven't advanced much since then. The state of art is either Google Docs/Quip/Dropbox Paper (multiplayer WordPerfect), or rigid SAAS apps (Visual Basic on the web by outsourced IT). To end users, all the knowledge and workflows are trapped in different "silos", the best people can do is to duct-tape everything together, previously with emails, nowadays with Slack. Notion wants to challenge this status quo of "software as silos". For the 1.0 release, we are bundling real-time documents, wiki-like organization, and lightweight tasks into a unified tool that can handle pretty much all your team's knowledge needs – and this is just the beginning. 😉 Thanks for the up-vote. Don't forget to download the Mac app (it's a beautiful and distraction-free writing tool on its own). Happy creating! ✌️

For an example of what can be done with the layout, this is an example of how I'm planning and keeping track of my days: https://www.notion.so/Tuesday-9-...

I have clocked 50+ hours on Notion, having written our startup’s internal knowledge base in it. I love this product. The editor may seem rough around the edges at first, but it reveals itself as a power tool with a slight learning curve. It produces great looking documents and has much more flexibility than Medium for example. This lets me stay away from static site builders and HTML and still produce complex layouts without losing maintainability. This actually gives you MORE tools than Markdown too, mainly because of the columnar layouts and (limited) style and colour options. The best part is structuring. Being able to nest pages, link across and control access domain/email/public is killer. The team reached out to me for feedback and have been integrating some of my suggestions which feels great. Being a power tool though I would say the only drawback is that you need to be a pretty advanced user to maintain and build documents. For my use case that’s fine. In theory this is easier to learn than Google Docs, but the Word UI is just so hard wired into people’s brains that anything else scares them away. I hope this style of editing becomes widespread.

Last couple of weeks have been busy in this space!! Quip, Amium, Dropbox Paper just to name a few (big players too!) How does Notion compare? What are the big differentiators here? And what is next on the roadmap? What's been the biggest takeaways/challenges since v0.5 was hunted last year to the 1.0 release with the Mac app?

I must echo the sentiment that so many people here share; Notion is a well-conceived and expertly executed tool for knowledge work. I have used, and considered the merits of so many solutions purporting to solve the problems involved in contemporary knowledge work, and to my mind, none understand the problem quite as well as the team behind Notion. This is evidenced by the unique approach the app takes. Treat the document as a canvas, and each block as a type of information brush. You can compose the blocks on the canvas towards whatever end you want with just enough structure, and just enough freedom. We do not conceive of the world of knowledge as a nested hierarchy of ideas, but as a network of ideas — a network of hierarchies. Notion gives you the ability to represent your knowledge in this way. Having used Notion for almost a year now, I can attest to the team's ability to consistently evolve the core ideas and add interesting new ones. I am excited to see the future of this app.

Notion is awesome. It's different from most (web) content editors because it's *not* entirely subservient to document flow. It actually gives a few well-picked layout tools, and that makes all the difference. For example, I've been using it to do translation work. My layout looks like this (Draft template in two columns):

This looks excellent. I'm a sucker for tools like this, but my first criteria is usually, "is this a tool that I would want to use as a single user without any team involvement?" It looks like Notion could well be such a tool.

The fuck. That's like really good.

First impressions: Phenomenal.

Beautiful ✅ Functional ✅ Fun to use ✅ One note though! Is it just me or the Mac app feels slower than in-browser?

The most creative solution to content creation and communication I have seen in awhile.

Notion is probably one of my top 3 most used products, both for personal and business stuff. It's incredibly flexible and powerful. I love it.

Is there a way to export an entire team/group of pages?

I love this product so much. I think you guys should release the source code and make a big contribution to humanity.

Overall, Notion is like a bunch of widgets and management apps combined into one awesome package. I've been using it for several months now, and it works really well. It's most useful for team projects, where you can make an entire directory of pages for the different types of tasks you need to handle, and keep all progress and information synced into one app.

Being able to move content blocks and pages around makes it very easy to organize, and the comment feature makes it easy to start a new thread to discuss a topic. Integration is also great, since I can embed code, videos, and even Google Drive documents. You can also customize the look and feel of pages (I love being able to set icons and header images for each page) to make them easily recognizable, and create complex layouts. There is a huge list of features that makes it possible to do almost anything you would want to do in a management/organization app.

It's still improving, and they have a list of new features coming soon (the one I'm excited for is being able to assign tasks to people). There's an iOS app beta (that doesn't work on my device currently). There are a few minor bugs that I come across, but it's nothing that distracts you from using it. It's a solid app that I'll continue to use for both group and individual projects.

Pros:

Content blocks/pages organize content easily

Shortcuts make it FAST

Collaboration is seamless with others

Customize pages for a unique look

Cons:

Live editing with collaborators isn't seamless

No iOS app available (yet)

Most of the features that are missing are coming soon anyways.

Absolutely fantastic. I've got dozens of hours of use down at this point and Notion just completely blows away apps like Google Docs and Paper. Those old bears feel silly now.

Just 10 minutes in trial mode and I'm sold. But really cautious to ditch Asana and Evernote. 1) Hope you have long-term plans and this service isn't closed or acquired in a short term. It's a free market I know, but it's also an exit-minded market. 2) Importing tasks and projects from Asana: anywhere on the roadmap? 2) Evernote import? and what's more important 3) Chrome extension or bookmarklet to add resources to Notion (instead to Evernote?) (love to see you've included custom domains on the roadmap).

This is *so* good.

This is awesome. A lot of interesting features and good UI decisions. Been looking for something like this for a while. Looking forward to see where this goes. Would like it to incorporate tools to make knowledge collection easier (import content from files, import from other wikis or tools, import information from the web (and keep the reference)...). Continue with the drag and drop interface, it's the way to go for non-technical business adoption.

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