Show HN: Nuclino – A unified real-time workspace for teams

https://www.nuclino.com/

by bjoernm • 9 years ago

133 84 9 years ago

bjoernm25• 9 years ago

Hi all! We're building Nuclino, a unified workspace for teams. Here's why you should check it out:

* You can replace several collaboration tools with Nuclino as it combines the best ideas from many! (e.g. the board from Trello, real-time editing from Google Docs, internal links from wikis)

* Real-time collaborative editor with markdown commands

* Visualize your data with different views such as lists, boards, and graphs

You can use it to plan and track sprints, collaborate on requirements, share ideas, goals and more.

It's been working out great for ourselves and our first users, but we'd love to get feedback from a wider audience. If you don't mind a couple rough edges and missing features, it would be awesome if you could check it out and tell us what you think!

Ralfp• 9 years ago

Looking good, but working in advertisement I've got small nitpick:

https://d33wubrfki0l68.cloudfront.net/e59309758061057655df10...

I would check with your legal if its all right to use competitors branding in your advertising. Depending on way this branding is presented (or not) it's either trademark violation, violation of laws forbidding direct comparisons with other brands (hence "better than leading product" in ads) or grounds for libel damages.

bjoernm25• 9 years ago

Thanks a lot for this hint, we’ll review it!

notheguyouthink• 9 years ago

I'm likely in the minority and mean nothing negative, but for our team $9/m per user is a bit spendy. We'd love to pay (and need private workspaces), but while this product does have a lot of features it does not replace any of our existing tools entirely. Eg, we could replace our use of Github Issues with it, but we aren't saving money by dropping Github Issues - we're only spending more - $9 per team member.

So I love the product, but since it's yet another additional tool in our pipeline, it doesn't replace anything outright. Possible solutions for us:

1. A small plan which just includes the free tier features, plus private workspaces at a lower price. Not sure what price seems fair, but $4-$5 seems reasonable. $3 would be a no brainer price. 2. A tier priced according to total members. Eg, $30/m for 5 members, or something. Though, seeing as we'd need ~20, it would still rack up in price I imagine.. perhaps this is no different than just reducing the price. /shrug

So yea, not trying to say those prices make sense or are needed, just trying to provide constructive feedback on why we are not choosing to use it, despite liking it. $2,000 -> $3,000 a year is just a bit steep for what we "almost" have right now, in our existing tools.

Keep up the good work!

bjoernm25• 9 years ago

Thanks a lot for the constructive feedback! We just released the pricing several weeks ago and are open to experimentation. Would you be up for a quick chat about this? If yes, just send me an email (it's in my profile).

dlss• 9 years ago

I actually really like this idea, and almost clicked away before understanding it. Maybe try describing it as "What if every Trello card had its own Google Doc?"

(I'm sure you have other features, that was just the one that excited me personally)

bjoernm25• 9 years ago

Thanks for the feedback! It actually sounds great the way you describe it, we’re definitely gonna test it.

danr4• 9 years ago

Your pricing page is tucked away at the bottom. It's one of the first pages I go to, and hiding it like that makes me think you're trying to trick me.

bjoernm25• 9 years ago

Thanks for the feedback! Definitely not planning to trick anybody, we’re just trying to keep the top navigation simple. We’re actually also considering moving the blog and support links to the footer. But we’ll keep an eye on it!

codegeek• 9 years ago

Please listen to the GP. Pricing needs to be in the top menu and not hidden away in footer. You will lose tons of prospects because they will think pricing is not transparent. I thought the same until I scrolled down to the bottom.

masonicb00m• 9 years ago

Counter-feedback: didn't bother me that pricing was at the bottom.

ricardobeat2• 9 years ago

I thought there was no pricing available until I came back and saw this comment, would not sign up for "freemium".

bjoernm25• 9 years ago

I'm sorry to hear that :( Do you prefer free trials, paid-only, or some other model?

dyeje• 9 years ago

I was tasked with finding an internal knowledge base solution for our small development team last year. I stumbled across Nuclino and we've been very happy users since last December.

I think what makes it so great is just the pure simplicity. I absolutely hate dealing with all the cruft of Wikis and similar solutions. With Nuclino we just go and write the information down without all the hassle.

Couldn't recommend it more, keep up the good work.

bjoernm25• 9 years ago

Thanks for the kind words! The complexity of traditional wikis inspired us to build Nuclino. We definitely plan to keep the experience as smooth and simple as possible :)

type0• 9 years ago

Let's say a team signs up with your service and after a couple of years requirements change and they want to migrate. What are the formats that one could export the data?

samat• 9 years ago

Tried it some months ago and preferred Notion. Is there a comparison with pros and cons?

bjoernm25• 9 years ago

Thanks for giving us a try! It would be awesome to hear more about your experience. If you're up for a quick chat, just send me an email.

Obviously I'm highly biased regarding a direct comparison, but here are some thoughts:

Overall we're trying to provide a simpler and faster experience. For example, our editor is just a single stream of content blocks, providing consistency and a fast editing experience. In Notion the editor has more complexity with adjustable multi-column layouts, page header images, etc. If you don't require those formatting options, I'd argue Nuclino is a better fit.

By providing different views on the same information, we also enable you to use Nuclino for different use cases. For example, the list view allows you to prioritize lots of items, the board view to track a workflow, and a graph view to explore information.

Oras• 9 years ago

Having a features page to list features with screenshots will be helpful.

Out of interest, when did you start? I'm confused about "Join over 2000 teams".

bjoernm25• 9 years ago

Have you seen our product page (https://www.nuclino.com/product)? There are screenshots and a video tour :)

We started about one and a half years ago, but just recently released a major update introducing the board view and other essential features: https://blog.nuclino.com/the-new-nuclino

Gys• 9 years ago

Looks interesting. The demo on the frontpage could use a bit more contrast.

The pricing model mentions 'Private workspaces'. Does that mean the free option is visible to all visitors ?! If so then it should clearly mention that...

bjoernm25• 9 years ago

Thanks for the feedback! The free option is not visible to all visitors, only to your team. Private workspaces are meant for information which should not be accessible by the entire team. You have to be invited to a private workspace in order to view and edit the content. We'll try to explain this better on the pricing page!

sAbakumoff• 9 years ago

Why is your product better than the atlassian stack - jira, bitbucket, confluence?

bjoernm25• 9 years ago

Our main differentiators are simplicity, speed, and the fact that you only need a single tool (not counting Bitbucket here).

We've seen that many teams don't need all the features the Atlassian stack provides and happily trade it for a simpler, faster, and more unified experience.

Feel free to try it out and see if it works for you and your team :)

jamesmcintyre2• 9 years ago

@bjoernm Nuclino is beautiful, reminds me of this (at the end): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u4AXaFlIFQA

I love how you've enabled users to take down ideas in a very quick way without forcing them to make decisions about what "category" or purpose the information has at that moment and then they can freeform build on that information to take it from something amorphous to something with utility. This compliments the way humans actually tackle complex work.

Can't wait to see where Nuclino goes from here!

aleo• 9 years ago

Lovely design and ui, feels somewhat scandinavian. Lots of attention to detail, very smooth experience. I wish it had more contrast though because it makes me squint a little, if I had to use it every day I'd go crazy.

Can't edit item titles in place, I have to click item and then edit title in editing area.

First cluster (uncategorized items) is not editable, not draggable, not deletable - is this intentional? I guess it makes sense for uncategorized stuff, but what if I don't need it? Bit annoying.

Graph view would make more sense if I could create nested clusters/items, but since data is always one level deep I don't see why I would use it.

I like how search works very much.

Collaboration works very cool - I can see who edits which item at the moment. The only thing I want here is to have a log of who edited what exactly in each item.

Very positive impression overall.

That said, it doesn't make me want to switch from trello and I kinda hate trello. I'll think about this and let you know if i come up with any specific reason.

(this is my first review ever - was it helpful?)

bjoernm25• 9 years ago

Thanks a lot for your thoughtful review! Here's some feedback:

* Great to hear you like the design and UI! Contrast is not easy to get right with all the different screens and layouts, but we'll improve this.

* Editing the item title in place is planned.

* The current behavior of the uncategorized items is intentional, but as you noted it's not ideal and we're currently working on ways to improve it.

* We're already experimenting with different approaches to the graph visualization like visualizing the links between items. Stay tuned :)

* We're planning to add versioning, which will allow you to retrace how the content evolved.

It would be very interesting to us if you come up with a specific reason. Don't hesitate to contact me directly :)

JasonSage• 9 years ago

I very much agree about the contrast issue. On my Mac it's great but if I plug in a less-than-perfect monitor it's too hard to look at.

Your product has a great look and feel, looks very polished overall!

luxbock• 9 years ago

Does it provide 2FA? I'm looking for a tool like this, but my company handles a lot of sensitive material and so having 2FA is a hard requirement.

bjoernm25• 9 years ago

We're planning to add Google SSO which supports 2FA. Would that work for you?

desireco42• 9 years ago

I like it. I like idea about it, there is definite need and I like what I've seen so far.

bjoernm25• 9 years ago

Thanks! That's great to hear.

dham• 9 years ago

Noticed you are using Mobx. Awesome choice! Anyway looks nice so far. The contrast of the site needs some help though.

sandGorgon• 9 years ago

That's interesting. Normally we hear rhetoric that mobx is unsuitable for complex webapps. What has been your experience vs redux ?

kiejo8• 9 years ago

At Nuclino we're very happy with MobX and I would say that it is definitely suitable for complex projects and that it mostly depends on the overall architecture that you choose. MobX is rather unopinionated and there are many ways to work with it. You can even use it in a Redux style architecture if you want! In the end it all depends on your requirements and preferences. For us, choosing MobX was key to building Nuclino the way it is today as there are a few key features which would have been much harder to build with Redux.

mxuribe• 9 years ago

The graph view on this is really awesome! Kudos guys on a neat product!

I would definitely recommend this for the workplace...however, for private use, I've always been an advocate of self-hosted. Does anyone know of a similar platform for single-person, self-hosted use-case?

Dryken• 9 years ago

Really smooth user experience and fair pricing. Still I find one negative point that really makes it unusable for me : Content are only one level deep.

Unless I missed a feature allowing to nest content on multiple level ?

bjoernm25• 9 years ago

Thanks Dryken! Inside a workspace there is currently only one level of nesting by using clusters. However, you can use internal links like in a wiki to create index pages that build the structure you need with arbitrarily deep nesting.

Generally, we're trying to keep the organisation flat as we've seen lots of teams struggle with deeply nested information, e.g. in the context of huge shared network drives. However, there are some cases where more nesting might be useful and we're already trying out some ways to address that.

iRobbery2• 9 years ago

Consider hosting all web resources and dependencies on your own domain(s). I don't need google, cloudfront etc etc to know i'm using a certain web application. Certainly not if i was paying for it.

kiejo8• 9 years ago

Thanks for the feedback! This is the first time that we hear about this concern, but we will look into it. Serving these kinds of resources (fonts, icons) ourselves has a disadvantage in terms of caching, so we'll have to decide if it's worth the trade-off.

iRobbery2• 9 years ago

I'm surprised to hear a webapp dev say it is the first time he hears about leaking traffic to third parties. Kind of worrying.

artur_makly• 9 years ago

What was the tech-stack you used to build this?

kiejo8• 9 years ago

To give you a rough idea:

For the frontend we use React, MobX, ProseMirror, and Webpack.

The backend uses Node.js, Express, µWS, and Postgres.

Keats2• 9 years ago

Can I ask a bit more about ProseMirror? I am currently using a custom text editor but was looking into potentially replacing it with editors like ProseMirror, Slate.js

How easy is it to write custom plugins/behaviour? For example our tables are much more complex than the ones from the default plugin, we have e-signature etc.

I will have a look myself over the next weeks or so but wanted to get some opinion on that!

crsv2• 9 years ago

Sorry for the existential question - but how do you guys not get disenchanted in this space by the idea that if you actually manage to meaningfully differentiate that you're surrounded by nimble giants that can easily mimic your success and crush you?

davidjgraph2• 9 years ago

"nimble" "giants" are not two words I'd associate with (m)any companies... :)

crsv2• 9 years ago

Do you think a Trello/Asana/Slack/MS/Google wouldn't be "nimble" enough to riff on a successful feature? See: Facebook/Instagram -> Snap.

bjoernm25• 9 years ago

We believe in what we do and so far we've not been able to find another product with the same focus that builds upon the same principles and ideas. Wanting Nuclino to exist and our passion to create it, is what drives us most. As for competition from established players, I wholeheartedly agree with the comment from davidjgraph. Every new startup faces this challenge, but history shows that it can be difficult for large companies to mimic the success of new products.

ttty• 9 years ago

Anything more concrete?

JoshTriplett2• 9 years ago

https://nuclino.com/ gives an expired SSL certificate error. (Got there because I wound up on the blog, and wanted to get back, so I edited the URL.)

kiejo8• 9 years ago

Thanks for reporting this! We're aware of the issue and will fix it as soon as possible.

JoshTriplett2• 9 years ago

This does look a lot like a much better Trello.

Does this support import from Trello?

bjoernm25• 9 years ago

Glad you like it! Unfortunately we don't support importing from Trello yet. We offer a generic import for HTML and Markdown, so if you can get the data out of Trello that way you might be able to import it.

dopeboy• 9 years ago

Wild. If the founders are reading, I met one of your friends (significant others?) in Bali in April.

Awesome work and hello from the States.

bjoernm25• 9 years ago

That is crazy! That must have been my girlfriend, can't wait to tell her. Greetings back from Germany :)

ruleabidinguser• 9 years ago

"Omg honey someone on the internet met you!"

SubiculumCode2• 9 years ago

Trying out right now. Looking for a chat feature? Or is that right on the board?

I'm trying to resize a large picture on the board. Is possible?

bjoernm25• 9 years ago

There's no chat feature in Nuclino at the moment as most teams use it together with a chat tool like Slack. But we're planning to add some lightweight commenting soon.

Resizing a picture is not possible, but we're planning to add different size options like full-width vs. normal-width for each image. Would that solve what you're trying to achieve?

SubiculumCode2• 9 years ago

I was not sure if the board was more like a blank "powerpoint-like" space, or if it was more linear, thus my question about resizing.

kensai• 9 years ago

Been using it for some months now. Awesome!

peternicky• 9 years ago

Really nice work. Are you familiar with Notion? I would love to hear your pitch why I might want to use Nuclino instead of something like Notion.

sethlesky• 9 years ago

As a happy Notion user I'd like to hear this as well!

kiejo8• 9 years ago

Thanks! There was a similar question with an answer a little further down the comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14866580

Hope this helps :)

rjvs• 9 years ago

Like many here, I appreciate the design and feel of the product.

It looks like you're experimenting with a desktop app (although you don't mention which platforms) is there any work on mobile apps? I couldn't find any mention of them on your website.

Although the bulk of our Trello usage is on desktops, being able to access and respond to notifications when away from the desk/office/laptop are deal breakers for our team.

kiejo8• 9 years ago

Great to hear you like the design and feel of the product :) We're currently beta testing a desktop app for Windows, MacOS, and Linux, but haven't started work on a mobile app yet. Of course we see the value in mobile and we'll get there eventually!

boyd• 9 years ago

Product looks really fantastic, and it was nice to see returns and tabs behaving as expected (feels snappy like a desktop app!).

It's also nice how escape gets you back to the search bar – I don't have enough data to know how search prioritization scales, but feels really snappy and nice so far.

One comment (admit this is a pet peeve) – it'd be really nice if Google and/or Github SSO was available on any of the paid plans. As a buyer, I really don't like having to choose between good security practice (and a bunch of features that aren't needed for my small team) vs. a lower price. Put differently, it's a bummer that across a number of SaaS services the choice to use SSO - but few or no other "enterprise" features - ends up costing tens of dollars per person per month. :/

Edit: Also thank you, thank you, thank you for a nice table editor where I don't have to do things by hand in markdown!

bjoernm25• 9 years ago

Hi boyd, that's a good point. We're considering to add certain SSO providers like Google Suite to the basic plan and others like Active Directory to premium. Glad you like the table editor!

thirdsun• 9 years ago

It looks promising. I really like the way you set your pricing tiers without limiting the number of items / rows / entries available to the user.

However are there any plans for mobile apps? That's an important feature.

bjoernm25• 9 years ago

Even though we'd love to, we don't offer mobile apps yet. You can use Nuclino in a mobile browser, but it's not something we've been focusing on. As far as priorities go, we're currently focused on web and desktop first, but we'll release mobile apps eventually.

david_p• 9 years ago

Great UI, great product. I'd use your product to replace prodpad.com anytime :)

We're already experimenting with different approaches to the graph visualization like visualizing the links between items.

Yes please! Being able to visualize links between items that I created would be amazing.

Coloring items by cluster would be great too: I'd like to have different types of items (some would represent customers, others features-requests, and I'd like to be able to differentiate customers and feature-requests in the graph visually while visualizing links among them).

CodeWriter23• 9 years ago

Honest feedback here, the choice to use the fade in effect on every single element on the home page resulted in me leaking out of the funnel at the very top. I just couldn't stand reading it, it was frustrating to swipe up a screenful and have to pause to read. Please know I present this constructively. Best of luck.

bjoernm25• 9 years ago

Thanks for the comment! We did not receive this feedback before, but we'll test it with more users and check if it makes sense to adjust or remove the animations.

BLP4YC• 9 years ago

Does anybody know a tool to just build the graphs as in the tool?

Show HN: Nuclino – A unified real-time workspace for teams

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