Notion

What hackers pick instead

• ObsidianA note app built on a local folder of plain Markdown files, with backlinks and a rich plugin ecosystem that works well with AI agents; critics flag risky community plugins and weak collaboration.447recommend
• Org modeA plain-text Emacs system for notes, TODOs, agendas, tables and literate programming that people find more capable than Markdown, though it's tightly bound to Emacs and poorly supported elsewhere.175recommend
• LogseqRecommended as a free, open-source, local outliner with block structure and powerful queries. Critics say development is slow and sync is paid and closed source.52recommend
• Apple NotesRecommended for quick startup and reliable sync across Apple devices. Common caveat: it slows with very long notes and is weak on Windows, Linux and the web.39recommend
• TolariaOpen-source Markdown notes app with a clean interface and built-in git, liked as an Obsidian alternative. Critics cite sorting bugs and that it is a web wrapper.34recommend

Every quote

The 40 most detailed of 229 comments. Each links to the original.

1. Notion is extremely buggy and sometimes very slow, but in almost all cases I've seen, that ends up being worth the trade-off

   Mixed · Mar 2026 · in “Show HN: We want to displace Notion with collaborative Markdown files”

2. products like Notion that have an incredibly robust customizability and integration layer are going to thrive

   Recommends · Jan 2026 · in “The creator of Claude Code's Claude setup”

3. The biggest evidence for collaborative editing is the immense popularity of Google Docs, Notion and Figma.

   Recommends · Mar 2026 · in “Lies I was told about collaborative editing, Part 2: Why we don't use Yjs”

4. Notion is good because of how they support a calendar view where you can put documents in a day's cell

   Recommends · Jan 2026 · in “Ask HN: Do you also "hoard" notes/links but struggle to turn them into actions?”

5. they have a terrible track record when it comes to dealing with and responding to security issues

   Mixed · Jan 2026 · in “Notion AI: Unpatched Data Exfiltration”

6. Where I think Notion really succeeds is letting people easily make attractive live documents.

   Mixed · Nov 2025 · in “I built a faster Notion in Rust”

7. not great for LLMs (network round trips, block-based editing), great for collaboration

   Mixed · Jun 2026 · in “Show HN: OpenKnowledge – open-source alternative to Obsidian/Notion”

8. really interesting to let the agents write a small "Dev Blog" post on a Notion page

   Recommends · Sep 2026 · in “Trying the software factory pattern”

9. with their notion AI / MCP it's gotten super easy to get information in and out

   Mixed · Apr 2026 · in “Workspace Agents in ChatGPT”

10. I think it's a great app that uses AI very well, and they continue improving.

    Recommends · Apr 2026 · in “Notion leaks email addresses of all editors of any public page”

11. Notion is the least bad multiplayer wiki available at the moment.

    Recommends · Sep 2026 · in “Trying the software factory pattern”

12. Their mistake was architecting things this way. From day 1 they should have cleanly separated public identifiers from privileged ones.

    Criticizes · Apr 2026 · in “Notion leaks email addresses of all editors of any public page”

13. This wave of business apps (Notion is another one) takes things one step further and hides even more things, even the simple stuff.

    Criticizes · Jun 2026 · in “How's Linear so fast? A technical breakdown”

14. 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?

    Criticizes · Apr 2026 · in “I Still Prefer MCP over Skills”

15. Never trust any consumer grade service without an explicit contract for any important data you don't want exfiltrated.

    Criticizes · Jan 2026 · in “Notion AI: Unpatched Data Exfiltration”

16. Civ 5 handled full-speed keyboard input, while notion doesn't let me input text at my roughly 100 wpm typing speed.

    Criticizes · Jul 2026 · in “Jelly UI: Soft-body physics for native HTML form controls”

17. What are you doing to address the process/structural issues that allowed such a privacy issue to get to production?

    Criticizes · Apr 2026 · in “Notion leaks email addresses of all editors of any public page”

18. I tried using it, but I just can't because the keyboard shortcuts don't work with my non-US keyboard layout

    Criticizes · Jun 2026 · in “Ask HN: What software feels exceptionally polished?”

19. Notion is blurring the line and trying to get people to build workflows and applications with notion as

    Criticizes · Aug 2026 · in “Markdown Database Pattern”

20. Which is what they should do immediately if there is no faster fix for a privacy leak like that.

    Criticizes · Apr 2026 · in “Notion leaks email addresses of all editors of any public page”

21. All of our other documentation lives in notion, so I can easily reference and link business requirements.

    Recommends · Mar 2026 · in “"How I write software with LLMs"”

22. Notion is a great product for corporations, and I get why companies are jumping on this bandwagon so fast

    Mixed · Nov 2025 · in “I built a faster Notion in Rust”

23. ChatGPT/Claude in Notion seems to produce inferior results than using them directly which is frustrating

    Mixed · Aug 2026 · in “How I use LLMs to learn complex topics”

24. it can replace both for you if you can adapt to it's sense of static tabbed and tiling window management

    Recommends · May 2026 · in “Ask HN: Struggling with managing i3/tmux/vim. Need to simplify.”

25. Quizlet, Khan Academy, Notion, and Gizmo are all great, but each only handles one piece of the puzzle

    Mixed · Jul 2026 · in “We're 15-year-olds tired of switching study apps, so we built our own”

26. They're simple, easy to quickly parse, don't take over your browser's decade old predictable patterns

    Recommends · Sep 2026 · in “Details.so”

27. Notion is an amazing tool, but not focused on the same type of documents that Revise is focused on.

    Recommends · Mar 2026 · in “Revise – An AI Editor for Documents”

28. I had 1,000+ bookmarks in Chrome and Notion but could never find the specific article I needed

    Mixed · Feb 2026 · in “Show HN: Local-first AI assistant that helps you recall saved articles”

29. tending the Notion garden became someone's job despite there being no incremental value there

    Mixed · Jul 2026 · in “The Productivity Mirage”

30. I never really experience any problems running Notion, Figma, VScode and Linear side by side

    Recommends · Feb 2026 · in “When Code is Free, Why is Claude is an Electron app?”

31. the commenting and discussion on a file has so much more friction that Google Docs or Notion

    Recommends · Mar 2026 · in “Ask HN: Leaving Notion, Codebase as a Wiki?”

32. The way they’ve handled splits in text using a “text slice” and block mapping is truly novel

    Mixed · Sep 2026 · in “How Notion handles concurrent editing with CRDTs”

33. it's starting to lean heavier and heavier into an AI-first workflow and I don't like it

    Mixed · Sep 2026 · in “LibreOffice breaks download records after declaring it has no AI features”

34. Notion really does seem to be a compelling product if it weren't for the jackassery

    Mixed · Apr 2026 · in “Notion leaks email addresses of all editors of any public page”

35. good enough for Figma, Slack, Notion, leading apps in their respective categories.

    Recommends · Jul 2026 · in “Anthropic's Method to Losing Goodwill in a Few Easy Steps”

36. It is just perfect. Was very happy to pay for personal plan which is now removed.

    Mixed · May 2026 · in “The Future of Obsidian Plugins”

37. This is simple, I add just the most basic information needed to keep me going.

    Recommends · Dec 2025 · in “Ask HN: What do you use to manage your coding projects?”

38. I use Notion Enterprise specifically for its Zero Data Retention (ZDR) access.

    Recommends · Aug 2026 · in “GPT-5.6 Sol Pricing Cut by 50%”

39. not because it's good, just because it's what i've been using since the start

    Mixed · Jan 2026 · in “JobOps: DevOps thinking applied to job hunting (self-hosted, local-first)”

40. forcing more and more things on their users without any ways to disable them

    Mixed · Apr 2026 · in “Notion leaks email addresses of all editors of any public page”