# Notion 91 Hacker News commenters recommended Notion and 123 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 12 of 13 months; owners who said how long report a median of 7 years (4 owners). **Verdict:** Recommended for flexible live documents, wikis and collaboration despite bugs and slowness; the most common caveat is weak handling of security and privacy issues. ## Why people recommend it - Strong for collaborative editing and wikis (3 comments): "The biggest evidence for collaborative editing is the immense popularity of Google Docs, Notion and Figma." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47411400)) "not great for LLMs (network round trips, block-based editing), great for collaboration" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48682303)) "Notion is the least bad multiplayer wiki available at the moment." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49785356)) - Works well with AI and agents (3 comments): "really interesting to let the agents write a small "Dev Blog" post on a Notion page" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49784990)) "with their notion AI / MCP it's gotten super easy to get information in and out" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47875720)) "I think it's a great app that uses AI very well, and they continue improving." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47827446)) - Customizable and integrates with other tools (2 comments): "products like Notion that have an incredibly robust customizability and integration layer are going to thrive" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46528016)) "with their notion AI / MCP it's gotten super easy to get information in and out" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47875720)) - Attractive live documents and calendar views (2 comments): "Notion is good because of how they support a calendar view where you can put documents in a day's cell" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46831393)) "Where I think Notion really succeeds is letting people easily make attractive live documents." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46033781)) ## What people warn about - Weak security and privacy incident response (5 comments): "they have a terrible track record when it comes to dealing with and responding to security issues" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46538702)) "Their mistake was architecting things this way. From day 1 they should have cleanly separated public identifiers from privileged ones." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47829826)) "Never trust any consumer grade service without an explicit contract for any important data you don't want exfiltrated." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46540690)) - Slow, buggy, and poor keyboard input (3 comments): "Notion is extremely buggy and sometimes very slow, but in almost all cases I've seen, that ends up being worth the trade-off" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47258043)) "Civ 5 handled full-speed keyboard input, while notion doesn't let me input text at my roughly 100 wpm typing speed." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48986393)) "I tried using it, but I just can't because the keyboard shortcuts don't work with my non-US keyboard layout" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48494904)) - Pushes AI and extra features (3 comments): "This wave of business apps (Notion is another one) takes things one step further and hides even more things, even the simple stuff." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48439802)) "Am I the only one in the world who doesn't want to let ChatGPT run wild on our internal Notion without any hard limitations?" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47731081)) "Notion is blurring the line and trying to get people to build workflows and applications with notion as" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49513826)) ## Alternatives hackers recommend - [Obsidian](https://hackerapproved.com/p/obsidian.md): 447 recommend - [Org mode](https://hackerapproved.com/p/org-mode.md): 175 recommend - [Logseq](https://hackerapproved.com/p/logseq.md): 52 recommend - [Apple Notes](https://hackerapproved.com/p/apple-notes.md): 39 recommend - [Tolaria](https://hackerapproved.com/p/tolaria.md): 34 recommend ## Where to get it - [Visit the official site](https://www.notion.com/) ## Cite as Hacker Approved, "Notion", https://hackerapproved.com/p/notion/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).