[pcx]

I love using Notion, but I think the general discussion about it does not talk enough about how it's flexibility is also a problem many times.

1. Flexibility of blocks is a cognitive overhead for most folks in my team. They would rather prefer more constrained and opinionated approaches like Trello

2. Notion is currently a jack of all trades and master of none. We have tried to use it as a wiki, project tracker, issue tracker, CRM & spreadsheet. Though it's good to have one tool that can do many things, we quickly reach limits of what is possible automatically and have to spend a lot of time to manually maintain it

3. Convention over configuration creates problems for other team members to follow because conventions are not documented properly.

But I see a lot of potential of it becoming a platform. If they can incentivize 3rd parties to build over their platform and build trust, I think it's gonna be the next big thing. "One platform for all my data" with specialized tools to deal with different kinds of data. I can imagine tools like Tello, Jira, Hubspot, Google spreadsheets & draw.io running over it.

[PragmaticPulp]

I've tried to use Notion, but my experience mirrors yours:

There's just enough flexibility to slow you down, but not enough flexibility to make it down exactly what I need without jumping through a lot of hoops.

My favorite productivity tools blend into the background. I can get down to doing the work without mental overhead of managing the tool. Notion, on the other hand, feels like I'm spending half of my energy fighting with Notion, and only half of my energy doing the work I'm trying to accomplish.

[slightwinder]

> There's just enough flexibility to slow you down, but not enough flexibility to make it down exactly what I need without jumping through a lot of hoops.

This reads as if you except Notion to give you meaningful work to do, a workflow you can follow? Or do you just don't know how to implement the workflows you envision yourself?

[jdhornby]

I’ve had a similar experience with Notion. “Jack of all trades and master of none” resonates strongly with me.

This lead me to my latest startup https://froosthq.com/ which is Notion inspired and aimed solely at software teams.

[omnimus]

Funnily enough originaly the saying was "A jack of all trades is a master of none, but oftentimes better than a master of one." Seems like it got pretty skewed over time.

[discreteevent]

Specialization is for insects.

https://wiki.c2.com/?SpecializationIsForInsects

[michaelcampbell]

And also what allowed civilisation to exist.

[the_monocle]

I really like the jetbrains solution to this problem. https://www.jetbrains.com/space/

[jakaroo]

Does this product "exist" yet or is it vaporware we're putting our email addresses in for? Page seems very light on info or even pricing.

[yuchi]

The product exists indeed and it’s very stable. Been out there for years.

[ralmeida]

Froost or Notion? Froost's homepage says "subscribe for early access".

[jakaroo]

Yeah. I googled Froost out of curiosity and I was spot on, the project barely has anything but a landing page and a post on Indie Hackers about said landing page launching a few days ago.

[codegeek]

I would rephrase "all in one tool" to more specific like "project management tool". All in one for software teams makes me think that you also offer things like version control etc. All-in-one is a very loaded phrase. Just my 2 cents.

[martijn9612]

Hey, just noticed a small mistake, or it was just unclear from my side. Looks like the "pricing" link links to "learn" in the url, while there being nothing about pricing in the page itself.

[empath75]

Imo github is eventually going to subsume all of this activity. People don’t want to go to more than one place.

[falcor84]

If Microsoft could have subsumed "all of this activity", it would have by now. This all goes in cycles and there's always room for disruption.

[enahs-sf]

I think Microsoft is taking leaps and bounds to make up for the errors of yore. I wouldn't underestimate them at this point.

[drcongo]

That looks pretty nice. I've put my email in your signup as this is something that I've built half of about 5 times now.

[1cvmask]

What are the five apps called?

[mkl]

Not OP, but if they were only half built (and presumably therefore not released), what use is knowing the working titles?

[maxcan]

Love the landing page. Can I ask what tools/frameworks you used or just straight up tailwind and desgin skills?

[jdhornby]

Straight up Tailwind

[maxcan]

thanks.. the SVG squares are a nice touch

[antigirl]

Tailwindui! Did you use it for the app aswell? Would love to see what the app UI looks like for this

[jdhornby]

Yes sir. Everything is Tailwind.

[ultrasandwich]

wanted to add my email but the console reports "mailchimp ajax submit error: error"

[jdhornby]

Thanks for letting me know, will take a look now. If you want to drop me an email “josh@ the website above” then I’ll add you to the list.

[pcx]

Looks great, signed up!

[lukestevens]

Notion recently published "How Notion Uses Notion" [0] which I found insightful in terms of how Notion's flexibility is put to work internally.

It's interesting seeing where teams hit the limits of the tool & wish for (or move to) something else though. I wonder if "The Notion Way" will emerge at some point, which would be useful for quickly qualifying yourself in or out.

[0] https://www.notion.so/How-Notion-Uses-Notion-616f41d2f5124f3...

[halfimmortal]

This is great, thanks for sharing

[michaelbuckbee]

I've found Notion really worthwhile, but the fact it's so flexible means you need to go in with a plan so that you can really take advantage of it.

I really like how Marie Poulin's sets up her Notion process, here's a good example of how to make contextual dashboards - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YX2AJD4kx80 but there's a bunch more, just massive productivity boosts from not having to jump between so many different apps/services.

[fermienrico]

Also, the whole Emoji's thing is distracting to me. I just want to see plain text in simple san-serif fonts, with borders (which are apparently outdated in favor of massive emptiness of negative space).

Visual cognitive load is ok as far as the brain can process blocks of information. Such as a table with borders. When you have emojis, colors, effects, etc without clarity of separation, you get something that becomes tiring after a little while to look at.

[karmakaze]

That's funny. One time while converting a prototype to less of a prototype, I created like 40 PRs in 40 working days. There were so many in-flight at one time that I couldn't really use normal issue trackers. Instead I created one GitHub issue with a table of items. Each item had an emoji in the first column that indicated its current status. The gear was 'in-progress', 'eyes' review, 'ship' deploying, and green check for done. I didn't know how many lines there would be, I started out with about 6 and it worked exceedingly well. If anyone ever asked me what I was working on or where I was with it, I just sent them the one issue link and they had the whole history and the near future listed.

I called it Emoji-Driven-Development.

[fermienrico]

lmao this sounds insane. I fully admit and recognize - I like reading tax forms :-|. The more old school, the better. Give me docs set in Times New Roman, all this frivolous stuff is giving me a headache. Now...where is my walnut cane and financial times set in orange paper?

Please link me the github issue so I can make use of a bottle of kerosene I've got left from 1940's gas lamp.

[kixiQu]

That's funny, because to me, the emoji seem like a nice visual differentiator and borders seem hideous.

[fermienrico]

Borders are timeless, they've been around before the internet and to be around forever. Literally a line in the whitespace that allows your eye balls to know that hey! that's block A and that's block B and there is a fricking line in the middle!

[drannex]

+1 on that, I have an unreal disinterest in emojis in all forms.

[slightwinder]

> how it's flexibility is also a problem many times.

Flexibility is always a challenge, but in case of Notion IMHO the bigger challange is getting over it's aweful userexperience and interface. And flexibility is not always a problem. Excel proofs that flexibel solution can succeed with the laymen.

> 1. Flexibility of blocks is a cognitive overhead for most folks in my team. They would rather prefer more constrained and opinionated approaches like Trello

Is this not solved with their Template-Library? Those deliver a guided opinionated experience. Though it's not as constrained and powerful as a specialized app like Trello.

> 2. Notion is currently a jack of all trades and master of none.

It's a canvas-tool. You get a set of brushs and pencils and it's up on you to paint what you need. This has naturally advantage for some and disadvantages for some others.

> 3. Convention over configuration creates problems for other team members to follow because conventions are not documented properly

Is Notion a team-tool? Do they advertise it as such?

> But I see a lot of potential of it becoming a platform. If they can incentivize 3rd parties to build over their platform and build trust, I think it's gonna be the next big thing. "One platform for all my data" with specialized tools to deal with different kinds of data.

There are far better soltions around for this. I doubt this is a sane endgoal for notion.

[tablet]

Good points. It seems you might enjoy Fibery[1], it addresses most of these problems (and has internal whiteboard as draw.io replacement as well). But I’m biased as a Fibery founder.

[1] https://fibery.io

[ijustwannatosay]

This is amazing. I really am sold on your self-depreciating humor.

https://fibery.io/anxiety

[riquito]

It's customary to mention any involvement when suggesting a product

[tablet]

Thanks for advice, I’ll improve!

[pier25]

That button "I don't get it..." at the bottom right is genius.

[aloer]

your site looks amazing and the I don't get it button is really great.

But... even after looking at all the four separate landing pages I have no idea what exactly fibery could do for me

[tablet]

We'll re-do the product page with the Fibery 2.0 release somewhere in July. Thanks for the feedback!

[omniscient_oce]

Same. I wish everything wasn't so zoomed in so I didn't have to read heaps of large headers and scroll for ages to figure out what exactly it does.

[tablet]

BTW, Here is the detailed review Fibery vs. Notion (longread) [1].

[1] https://medium.com/fibery/fibery-vs-notion-66019dd91846

[mingabunga]

This looks amazing. Just reading over the docs before I dive in.

[munchbunny]

Yup, Notion and OneNote occupy similar scenarios for me. It's where I can gather my compiled thoughts and notes, but I've had trouble implementing any team processes on it due to it not being constrained enough in its UI.

I don't think there's any easy answer here. I respect the Notion team a lot for making a tool that is so flexible, but it's also a curse in some key scenarios.

[mywacaday]

Onenote is so close as a perfect system for me but what it leaves out really hurts. -No task Hierarchy -No alerts for due dates (Yes you can add outlook tasks but its flakey) -No automatic reporting

[0x49d1]

No page sharing Not standard markup of the notes (not possible to export)

[pcx]

Yeah. I see that it works great for some scenarios, like when I and my co-founder are collaborating. But if I try to teach it to a sales guy, I can see he just hates it :(

[nso95]

Perhaps a wiki or internal QA site would be a good solution.

[pagade]

I am really surprised no one has mentioned https://zenkit.com/. Kanban - Wiki - Calendar - List - Mindmap - Hierarchy etc. It does those things very well.

[slightwinder]

Probably because it seems to be less known than Notion. IIRC it's a bit more expensive and more constrainend than notion, more targeted at teams than single users.

[sirusdas]

I really liked it first impression UI lets see how it goes. Thanks for the share.

[biosed]

Is data removable, do you use?

[pagade]

I use it for personal purpose. By data removable, I guess you mean right to be forgotten. Their https://zenkit.com/en/gdpr/ page provides the details.

[bradgessler]

I feel like Dropbox Paper strikes a great balance. If you drop certain links in a Paper doc, like a Figma or Google Docs Spreadsheet, it will show either an iframe or screenshot read-only representation of the current content with a link to it.

My only beef with Dropbox Paper is their iOS apps are buggy as hell and have been for a few years. I really wish they’d invest more in their native apps.

[b0tch7]

+1 for Dropbox Paper. I am weirdly addicted to it for all my internal documentation and writeups. When you get used to (and expect) the guardrails, it's so fast to quick create a doc with multi-media.

My only pain point is the damn file system

[aheckler]

Agreed. It seems especially weird that, after moving files into a folder, they still appear in the main list.

That, and the fact that new files are world-readable by default. (With unguessable URLs, but still...)

[raiyu]

Ran into the same issue. Loved the design and the demos I saw so I signed up.

What I really wanted was just a simple flexible to-do list, something that I missed from Basecamp v1 and was willing to try somewhere else.

But the flexibility made it a nightmare. Because what I wanted was very simple, the friction that I encountered, though probably not huge, felt much larger, because I felt, why can't this be easier? I just want a simple to do list, and I was messing with headings and all of this non-essential stuff that I didn't need.

I'm sure in a business setting it could be different, especially if someone goes through the trouble of setting things up so you have some sort of system of consistency that you work inside of, but as a first time user the flexibility was a bit of hinderance.

[Mela1998]

I can totally relate to this. I often feel that with all these "simplistic" products coming out they actually oversimplify it to the point where it actually takes longer to do. It is great to have the flexibility and all, but where do we draw the line from being too flexible or too simplified? Like you, I ran into the same issues with Notion, so I switched to Trello, but it has some lack of features that I really wanted. I've been searching the web to find team chats that particularly don't require too much integration, and is simple. Especially with task management. I've been seeing a lot of mentions about AirSend on twitter, and I checked out their website. They have a really simple to-do list that is built-in. My team and I just started using it last week, and so far I don't have too many complaints. Not sure if you are looking for a switch, but you might like them. I hope this helps! Their website is, AirSend.io

[jerrygoyal]

long time notion user here. I was using notion for my personal life and it was serving the purpose but when I started using it as a project management tool for my dev team I realised how crippled it is (no dependent tasks, gantt view etc). maybe I'm wrong and notion is not built for this but then again why would i use it just for wiki? recently started looking for task management+wiki tool.. reviewed more than 10+ tools and finally picked an extremely powerful but a less known tool clickup.com

[Aeolun]

I’m starting to be quite sad about all these nice things that I’ll never get to use in my huge enterprise :/

[presspot]

ClickUp is totally badass, and their feature velocity is breathtaking.

[amineazariz]

Can't agree more. I was using Notion from the very beta start and loved it. Then couples of months in I strated noticing that the more Notion added features the more I was spending more time "perfecting" my workspace than doing actual work.

Stopped using it and went back to old good Google Sheets, Apple Notes. Very constrained and just the right amount of "flexibility" to make it work for you workflow. No emojis encouragements.

[treebornfrog]

Regarding your first point, totally agree 100%.

I want to use notion, it's such a nice UI/UX. Problem is, it's just too complicated.

Trello is basic, but gets the job done.

[omniscient_oce]

Same here. I was so overwhelmed with the million ways I could accomplish my relatively simple needs that I just gave up on it. Also everything basically bringing up a modal for a new page annoyed me. Maybe it's just my personality type but I like there just being a canonical way of doing something and then doing it, rather than spending a fair chunk of time customising and configuring the tool to do what I want.

[manigandham]

This was exactly our issue. Not good at any one thing and the interface is very touch. A single mis-click and you can mess things up which reminds me Asana.

What all these platforms really need is solid APIs and interoperability so we can use the right tool while keeping everything in one place (ideally email or slack).

[kmfrk]

I really need a better index of all my notes, right now it's just too overwhelming without a better way of organizing everything, especially since it automatically collapses all my workspace trees when I close the app. Really gets in the way of using it beyond a handful of pages.

[qrt]

“One platform for all my data with specialized tools to deal with different kinds of data. I can imagine tools like Tello, Jira, Hubspot, Google spreadsheets & draw.io running over it.”

-> https://qatalog.com

[gemmtree]

that is really neat! but what apps can I connect to it? It says 9 providers but can’t see what they are

[brainzap]

I miss Trello: add task, edit, save.

[zestyping]

Can anyone explain to me why Trello is so popular? I'm serious; I honestly don't get it.

If I want to track tasks, I just make a Google Spreadsheet with a row for each task. This scales up easily to a hundred tasks or so, and it's straightforward to filter on a column to focus on particular categories or statuses. In Trello, I can see maybe 30 cards max before my screen space is all used up, and I spend so much time hunting around for cards. If a card has moved, I have to just read linearly through all the cards to find the one I'm looking for. I could use the search box, but that only pops up the detail window for the card; it doesn't show me where the card is in context.

Trello is like a task spreadsheet where you can only see a small amount of information at once, it's really hard to find tasks, you can't add custom columns, you can't colour-code things the way you want, you can't add tabs, you can't add formulas to do simple things like addition, you can't see previous versions, and on and on.

So why would you use Trello when you could use a Google Spreadsheet and get things done twice as fast? Does the whole product exist only because people like the cute little animation of picking up the tilty little cards and dragging them to other columns?

[slightwinder]

> Can anyone explain to me why Trello is so popular? I'm serious; I honestly don't get it.

It's sleek, powerful, constrained and optimized for it's single purpose, while still remain flexibel enough to give space. Also scales up nice for multiple users, from 2+, teams, 2+ departments and even whole companies or even more. And it also works on most platforms effortless.

> If I want to track tasks, I just make a Google Spreadsheet with a row for each task.

That reads horrible. How do you manage richtext with Spreadsheet? Links? Pictures? How do you collaborate with others? How does this get automated and integrate with other systems? How do you get a sane overview of the state of your tasks and projects? Sure, more or less all possible, but not on the level of quality you get from a specialized and over a long time optimized solution. And you need to invest the time to build this all first.

> So why would you use Trello when you could use a Google Spreadsheet and get things done twice as fast?

More like ten times slower.

[zestyping]

How do you find cards? That's what really gets in the way for me.

How do you manage hundreds of cards? Dragging each card one at a time takes forever. If you want to make a change to a bunch of cards, do you open each card, edit it, close it, open the next card, etc. -- doesn't that take ages? Isn't it frustrating not being able to just drag 20 rows of a spreadsheet at once, or paste/format 20 cells at once?

> How do you get a sane overview of the state of your tasks and projects?

How do you get an overview when you can't see anything? In Trello I feel like I'm blind -- all the cards are scrolling off the bottom of the screen and the columns are off to the right. Instead of a single line of text maybe 20 pixels high, every card is a stack of labels, dates, a few lines of text, little icons and profile avatars. The minimal card is 100 or more pixels high, which means that only about 5 to 8 cards will fit vertically with all the other detritus packed into the UI.

How about an objective metric: in a given column of your Trello board, what fraction of the column can you see at once? Like what percentage of the vertical scrollbar track is the draggable part? For me it's about 5 to 10%.

[wh-uws]

I like Trello A LOT have like 30 different boards with probably thousands of cards.

Why Trello over Sheets?

I use Trello as basically a really extensible digital kanban board.

It also makes easier to associate tasks with each other add extra context (for instance if I'm keeping track of some long form context associated with a task where would you put that in sheets? A note? Can you search those? Once it gets really long a Google doc? I guess).

Also can add custom fields. I used this to allow me to add weights to cards so they automatically rearrange in priority order.

I even have boards that serve as a personal knowledge base.

I feel like Trello gives you really great free reign to discover a process for things and have it evolve over time.

Could you accomplish that with sheets? Probably but not as elegantly and definitely not with a UI

[gurkendoktor]

You are right that a spreadsheet gets more information on the screen, but Trello's kanban layout really highlights which task is "where" (in what state).

I've often used it with clients to let them know which high-level features are in progress, which are done, etc. It has also worked really well for collaborative trip planning. Both of these workflows benefit from cards with cover images too.

It's not a replacement for a company-wide knowledge base or an issue tracker for hundreds of tickets.

[ulisesrmzroche]

All the stuff you mentioned is not important when you’re collaborating on a project with others. Addition? Version control? Lol. Whatever.

Just because you don’t understand why people use Trello does not mean everyone’s a frivolous idiot.

What do you guys do for a living? Not a joke question.

[srmatto]

GitHub more or less offers this in the Projects board feature:

https://help.github.com/en/github/managing-your-work-on-gith...

[rattray]

Folks who have used both Trello and gh Projects, how does Projects compare?

[xet7]

gh Projects

Pro:

- Integrated with GitHub issues

Con:

- Can not move card to other board

- No import/export

- No themes

- No change background image

- Only basic automation of moving cards to Done list etc

Trello

Pro:

- Can move card/list to other boards

- Export to JSON

- GitHub Power-Up for GitHub integration

- Butler for automating, in English

- Themes

- Change background image

- API

Con:

- Only SaaS, can not self-host, not Open Source

- No Swimlanes

- Export to CSV needs paid account

- No Import from JSON/CSV on free version web UI

Wekan https://wekan.github.io

Pro:

- Open Source, can self-host on x64, RasPi3/4 etc

- Import from Trello JSON cards/lists/checlists/attachments/labels/votes

- Import CSV, currently importing custom fields in progress of being added

- Import from Wekan JSON including attachments

- Export CSV, currently exporting custom fields in progress of being added

- Export Wekan JSON including attachments

- IFTTT Rules wizard has translations, but less rules than similar Trello Butler

- Swimlanes

- Themes

- Gogs integration https://github.com/wekan/wekan-gogs

- API, Outgoing Webhooks per board, Global Webhooks at admin panel of (nearly) all board actions

Con:

- Not integrated with GitHub yet

- No move list to other board yet

- No change background image yet

[etiennebch]

Less clunky in my opinion if you use it for software development because you can link it to issues / PRs and automate based on that

[tommoor]

Trello… still exists?

[arkitaip]

Only on HN can people question the existence of an app which has 50M users. Trello might not be this month's flavor but I'll be damned if it's not one of the most useful planning tools out there.

[mynegation]

I think tommoor is aware that Trello still exists, I read it as them questioning parent comment's phrasing "miss Trello"

[asaddhamani]

I don't know how Trello has 50M users, and how so many people and companies can use it for project management. For anything more than a single board, I find it terribly lacking in functionality. Can't even see all your cards across boards without scrolling 50 times.

[OOPMan]

Using Trello well requires you to ruthlessly process cards. Once they start to "overflow" it becomes a nightmare

[jtth]

Lots of folks would argue that's a feature that exposes a problem in the conceptualization and modeling of a domain.

[ulisesrmzroche]

Well then they’re something wrong with you and your understanding of what people want in software. Can you link an app that you’ve made that people actually use?

[buzzerbetrayed]

> Only on HN can people question the existence of an app which has 50M users

1. GP isn't doing this. You misunderstood. 2. Even if they were(they weren't), how would this be something exclusive to HN?

[jay_kyburz]

It will soon be dead as Atlassian have started to kill it. For example, it now quite often now does browser page refresh when I open a card to add a comment. WTF ATLASSIAN!

[Scarbutt]

Sounds like the curse of Emacs.

[brlewis]

The curse of emacs is "Jack of all trades and master of ones that don't attract new users"

[pcx]

I am a 10yr+ Emacs user, this hit too close to home than I would like! I am seeing a lot of momentum in Emacs ecosystem for last couple of years and Spacemacs rocks! So hopefully it's gonna get better :)

[slightwinder]

Spacemacs is still alive? I tried it some years ago and it had several problem at the time. Does not seems have solved them yet.

[komali2]

Certainly is, though slowly but surely you zero in on the "best configuration" for yourself. Whereas when I was using vscode, onenote, google keep, and a bunch of other shit to manage everything, I had "topped out" at productivity.

I'm trash at vim (I use evil-mode), org mode, and org-agenda, but I'm still lightyears ahead of where I was 2 years ago before I used these tools.

[slightwinder]

> I had "topped out" at productivity.

Did you topped out the tool or your personal ability?

> but I'm still lightyears ahead of where I was 2 years ago before I used these tools.

But is this because of the tools, the gain of new experiences or the 2 years difference?

And how do you know whether you are really moved forward, and not just run in circles appearing busy without being more productive? Do you have some objective metric for this?

[komali2]

> Did you topped out the tool or your personal ability

Both, I'd say.

> Do you have some objective metric for this?

Well my happiness, for one. My sense of accomplishment. How much more I can fit in a day. But no, I don't KPI myself.

[prennert]

I just started using orgmode to compliment notion. So far it feels to me as Notion is a bit like emacs / orgmode without API, and orgmode is a bit like notion without collaboration.

[xet7]

There is orgmode for web:

https://org-web.org

https://github.com/DanielDe/org-web

[pickdenis]

> orgmode is a bit like notion without collaboration

Emacs has a number of collaborative editing solutions: https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/CollaborativeEditing

The nice thing about org-mode is that it automatically gets all the cool stuff that emacs has. (Although, I have never tried any of the solutions listed in that wiki page and I suspect even the "working" ones have issues).

[j45]

A meaningful and working integration with Airtable will help both products leap forward. Each is good at what they do.