Notion 2.0 — The all-in-one workspace - notes, tasks, wikis, & databases
Notion is the all-in-one workspace. From notes, tasks, wikis, to database, Notion is all you need. Works great for teams and individuals. Available in the browser, iOS, Mac, and Windows.
I want to move from Evernote (I am a premium subscriber) to Notion, I really do but I don't think Notion wants me to. Whatever I am about to say, I say it with nothing but respect for Notion and in the hopes that it will continue to improve at the same pace.
First, the good - Notion has the best note editing interface I've ever used. A close second might be OneNote (it's a high bar, mind you) and Bear. It combines the simplicity of Evernote or Markdown with the power of OneNote although, it is missing the ability to use handwriting and doesn't support iPad with Pencil just yet. When it does, it will be perfect. I also like that I can save code snippets. Why is this so hard for Evernote?
Notion 2's tables, boards and other updates are huge. While I'm sure the in-built kanban board is not as feature complete as Trello, it should be more than enough for most projects. Same for tables. Airtable has a bunch of really cool advanced features but for most use cases, tables within Notion are just fine. Notion is on the right path and I am sure these features will only improve.
Now for what I don't like - The price is definitely my number one complaint. I will happily pay for Notion when it can do everything that other apps can. Until then, why not let me stay connected to the product with a cheaper paid plan or a better free tier? I pay for Evernote but if I were to consider switching, I can't do so purely because Notion doesn't do a bunch of things that Evernote can (even though it does a lot of things that Evernote doesn't) - Chrome extension to clip articles, emails, images etc., powerful mobile app with business card and document scanning, iPad support etc.
At $8 a month, it is more expensive than G Suite on a per-user basis. Why not give me 100 - 200 free blocks per month? Let me grow to love it. Let me build a workflow around it. Give me some incentive to tell my friends about it. When you have the features I want (I'm sure you're working on it), let me pay for it.
Price aside, I would also like to see how Notion fairs for quick note-taking, It's designed to be a wiki-style product and I get that but I'm sure a LOT of people are using it for personal notes. I use Evernote to save one-line notes - phone numbers, quotes, URLs etc. Notion's wiki-style UX is too heavy duty for that kind of use. It would be really cool if there was a "scratchpad" or "quick notes" feature that was not as heavy duty. For these simpler notes, I don't want to organize them into pages, I just want to save them and may be tag them. Which brings me to another feature I could really use - tags. Why limit users to only folders? Why not allow users to just tag notes?
I could go on but ultimately, I won't be switching to Notion right now, even though I really want to. Cost is too prohibitive but I'm sure I'll be on the hunt for future updates.
Pros:- BEST & most powerful editing interface hands down
- Brilliant, simple UX
- Lightweight Kanban and Airtable-like tables are huge
Cons:- COST: Highly prohibitive free tier
- No way to organize random snippets
- No browser extension, no handwriting support
- Mobile scanning
I signed up for Notion yesterday to collaborate with only 1 other person on our blog's content, and I was immediately blown away by how awesome it is. Notion just works. It does everything I expect it to do without trying to sell me stuff or to get me to use more features. I can just open it (so far only tested the web app) and start typing away my thoughts. The real-time collaboration works without any glitch which is a feat in and of itself.
Honestly very excited about this 2nd version, which comes as a total surprise: the v1 looked very much like a final product and the definite answer to all my issues collaborating efficiently at work.
Pros:- User friendly and simple to use
- One of the best typing experience I've had, if you feel great typing on Medium, you're in for a treat!
Cons:- I didn't feel the need to try the desktop app yet (macOS). Is that really a con though?
I worked at a company that made a B2C Zapier/IFTTT type of service, but with much more powerful visual scripting builder that was actually not terrible. 3rd parties or in-house contracted developers would build a "connector" for every possible API, abstracting them into these visual blocks / methods with some parameters or whatever they needed to make sure the API calls were valid. (or webhooks). It honestly was great software (the main part, anyway) with a lot of capability, and took things like Workflow and Stringify or MS Flow (not to mention Zapier and IFTTT) to the best possible extent. Non-devs could make automations in a way I would say is most similar to Alfred's workflow builder.
Notion has no public API, and no integrations, and this means that if you are at all interested in automating processes, integrating apps, etc, it's useless. It is essentially just a vault of all my stuff now. I cant send a text snippet on iOS from Drafts to it using a share/activity extension (the stuff in the menu with the box with an upwards pointing arrow), or other iOS automation tools like Stringify and Workflow and IFTTT, HomeKit itself (orSiriKit), Buffer, Pythonista/any code editor that allows automation, Launcher/Launch Center Pro, Airtable, Skyvia, or whatever alternative universe where I use Mulesoft, Azuqua, Integromat, Piesync, expensive bespoke ZWave software, and I can't use it in Alfred, Keyboard Maestro, Hazel, BetterTouchTool, IFTTT, Zapier, Automator, homecoded solutions, or any of the stuff off this list: https://www.producthunt.com/alte...
(also, tasker for android)
So now I finally perfectly organized my OCDish PTSDish generally racing with thoughts-brain, only to be locked in with out a single way to interact with other apps.
Bare minimum: can we at least get some quick updates to expose and document like, iOS URLs or SOMETHING? i.e. http://developer.fulcrumapp.com/...
Pros:The new features are well documented, and it has near feature parity with an entire productivity suite!
Cons:It is hermetically sealed; there is no way to integrate it with anything else (developer, enthusiast, or businessperson), extremely limiting
This is by far the best collaborative tool me or any one else in my team has used in a while. We've been using this tool for a while to collaborate and document our work. It's still in its infancy, and is growing fast. The customer support is just crazy good!
Pros:The best customer service! Oh, and... a fast, always live, minimal, clean, and native interface that's smooth�—such a pleasure to work on.
Cons:Needs a chat feature, a refresh button, and better columns/blocks.
HANDS DOWN 🙌🏼 THE BEST PRODUCTIVITY, ORGANISATION AND RESOURCE WORKSPACE myself or my team have ever touched 💯
We're huge advocates of Trello, power-users of Slack, data-hungry Google Sheet/Doc fanatics and unloyal downloaders of many productivity, Wiki, task management and organisation apps. With my CTO I often mused the idea of building an all-in-one workspace for internal use that sat as our Pandora's box of goodies ranging from development wiki's, onboarding information and branding resources all the way to task management, meeting notes and even time tracking - lo and behold I stumbled across this gem of an app.
We decided to run Notion for a week in tandem with Trello (for our highly-granular level project management) starting by spending an hour in the evening porting over info to populate a few spreadsheets, wikis etc. I also went ahead and threw personal pages up to trial it on an individual level. 📝Note: if you have a super high turnover of to-do's and an active team you won't find switching over from another app to be a lengthy process. After 6 years of managing a creative agency I reckon I have seen enough task management and organisation apps to last a lifetime, so take my thoughts here with that consideration.
-------
After a week we drew the following conclusions:
⏱ We worked faster with Notion than we did with Trello, Evernote or even a physical whiteboard.
📦 Today I solely used Notion for the entire workday. This time last week I would have used Trello, Slack (sending meeting notes and memos), Google Sheets, Google Docs, the native OSX notes app and GithubWiki just to get my day ORGANISED!
📚 Managing client editorials, project budgets, to-do lists and even basic memos and planning has been a breeze. It's great as a lightweight CRM too.
🛠 We were more organised than ever before. It's great to have a knowledge base for our products, plans and company sitting right amongst our task management tools.
-------
We have also been left wanting for nothing (👏🏼 Congrats, Notion team) but dreaming of a few things:
💵 Beefier finance organisation/support. Integrations with Quickbooks, Xero maybe? Make it easier to build budgets and organise our money plans!
🗣 Room to annotate and collaborate on images/PDF's etc.
🔐 Function to lock pages so you can't edit, and the little hover tooltip to edit doesn't show up.
🎨 Integration with design apps - Sketch, UXPin, etc. Many many many creatives will use this app and be left wanting in this area. Think: a creative agency collabs, annotates, refines, develops and more...keep them in Notion.
-------
The TLDR: Notion 2.0 kicks a** and we'll be using it for a long long time in place of a myriad of other productivity apps and tools. You should too.
Pros:- Clean, unobtrusive and customisable UX
- Lightweight and unrestrictive
- Perfect balance of tools
- Best productivity app I have ever used
Cons:- A document/page 'lock' so you aren't prompted to edit would be nice
- No usability, UX, functionality or other cons
Notion