Are we making the best notion open source alternative?

by entherhe • 3 years ago

28 15 3 years ago

Debated if to click the link after reading the clickbait headline, but after playing around with it for a few mins seems actually quite decent!

Obviously missing some features compared to Notion, but surprisingly not that many, especially compared to the other Notion alternatives. And style wise seems quite polished.

georgespencer2• 3 years ago

Excited to try this!

A few years ago someone gave me the excellent advice that I should stop saying “no” to fractional roles I was unenthusiastic about, and instead price them accordingly.

The first thing I did was to stipulate a $500 daily surcharge for any gigs expecting me to use Notion.

I won’t recapitulate the miserable design of Notion’s janky non-native desktop app for macOS, but just this week, my calendar (cron) asked me to “refresh to update the app”.

After that it asked me to restart the app.

After that it had disappeared from my dock, and apparently my entire Mac.

Turns out Notion acquired it, and thought the best way to tell me was to use the update to silently update the app, install a new binary (???) and delete the old one.

Except it crashed half way through, so I had no idea.

Everything those people touch—from “the concept of an enumerated list” to “a popular indie calendar”—seems to be rushed in execution and badly designed from the start.

j45• 3 years ago

Offline-first is a must have.

paulddraper• 3 years ago

Lol imagine thinking confluence is any better

georgespencer2• 3 years ago

Not sure I follow… does someone (me? Another poster?) say that Confluence is better?

abdullahkhalids• 3 years ago

I write all my notion docs locally in markdown. Then import them into notion. Fortunately, I don't have to write docs collaboratively with others at work.

This way I don't have to deal with notion's horrible interface to write. Only reading, which is fine.

_lvbh• 3 years ago

Sync server appears to be open source as well! Much better than Logseq/Obsidian when it comes to that. Thank you!

ccakes• 3 years ago

Also has a self-hosted version however it’s a bit out of date with their SaaS product

https://github.com/toeverything/AFFiNE#self-host

zamalek• 3 years ago

Anytype doesn't _require_ cloud storage or a subscription - each device I have is an E2E encrypted replicated backup. Cloud storage is merely extra peace of mind (your free tier is more generous). While I understand that you're trying an open source business model, Anytype is extremely hard to beat; especially from a data sovereignty perspective.

P2P sync is a must.

junipertea• 3 years ago

Last time I tried anytype it automatically synced my notes somewhere with no option of opting out. The only option was to modify the source code and rebuild it.

Less data sovereignty than notepad.

rubymamis• 3 years ago

I'm creating a Notion alternative based on Qt C++ and QML called Plume. In my benchmarks, it is the fastest block editor there is. It's based upon my previous open source note-taking app. But I will most likely make Plume either close source or open-core (not entirely sure about it). I made a short video showing the new Kanban feature I've been working on https://www.loom.com/share/b40009316f6b420b9ece15a1f99e987c

Some people recently said I'm over promoting my app, but I can't see how this will be considered spam if it's exactly the ballpark of my app. Therefore, I'm reluctant to share any more links here. So based on the comments, I'll update this post.

pedalpete• 3 years ago

I'm curious about your pricing. Is that $8 (does anybody actually do the x.99 crap anymore?) per user? If so, you need to make that clearer. What happens when I have more than 10 users?

Also, why have an exact copy of the notion design? Is it possible there is a missed opportunity to do something better?

kelsolaar• 3 years ago

Obsidian all the way, markdown means it can be edited anywhere by any text editor, even online, e.g. Github.

SN76477• 2 years ago

My dream is to have Obsidian inside of a database.

darkmuck• 3 years ago

unfortunately there's no mobile support at all yet

Are we making the best notion open source alternative?

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