Notion and Coda are attractive, but I'm wondering if the learning curve is too steep. Not sure if my team would use them without me setting everything up.
I use Notion for personal projects and love it. Very easy to learn. I used it to plan and execute my NaNoWriMo challenge last month and really have nothing bad to say about it. Works well on all my devices.
But it's unstructured. I think in a work environment it's most useful as a wiki/project planner/lightweight tracker, but still can't replace the MS/Google office suite, and can't replace Jira/Asana for in depth ticketing.
I’d agree: Notion is great for individuals, a household, maybe even a small business? But it’d be a tough ask to scale to 100 people in an engineering org. But who knows, maybe it will find a niche like Basecamp did?
It is a wonderful replacement for Evernote though, and it makes you wonder what Evernote has been doing all these years? The formatting, drag/drop, multiple views on the same docs are great.
Evernote started the trend but Microsoft destroyed them in the same way they killed Netscape; OneNote is free beer and it's deeply integrated with the Office suite.
I can scan a whiteboard using MS Lens on my phone and it's instantly available on my laptop in OneNote. Oh and I don't have to convince the SOE nazis to allow install.
I can do the same thing with Apple Notes. And I don’t have to pay Microsoft anything. And it’s all available to iWork. Notes even has document scanning.
With Continuity Camera in Mojave, I can take a photo from my iPhone and instantly place it within a Pages document.
For power Excel users, Numbers isn’t yet a replacement, but for everything else, the stuff that is built in to MacOS works great and is free while working seamlessly across all Apple devices. I don’t work with massive spreadsheets nor use pivot tables so for me, iWork + Notes solves office productivity pretty darned well, plus Keynote puts PowerPoint to shame.
Regardless of what other tools I try, I always end up coming back to Apple Notes for the ease of writing, drag & drop images, easy sharing as PDF, and being able to work on them on the go with iPhone and iPad. Apple's integration got me addicted. The search feature that can search even my sketches - bonus sweetness!
I do wish Apple Notes had some way of making a Kanban board.
Interesting, haven't heard of this one. From a quick perusal of the site it looks kind of like a more feature-ful Workflowy, is that a fair impression?
I'm not very familiar with Workflowy. They are similar though. I would say that Workflowy is what you'd get if you restricted Notion to only allow list items at the top level.
In Notion every paragraph is a "node", and a node can be text, media, list item, database (excellent feature, though, really more of a table where each item is a page), reference to other object, etc. Anything can have a parent of anything else, and the UI/UX is smooth.
For my NaNoWriMo project I've got databases of characters, places, maps, etc, and then pages for chapters with all the text, comments, to do lists, etc.
For the benefit of anyone else wondering the same: I checked it out and no, it's really nothing like Workflowy. The key feature of Workflowy is that you can 'zoom in' to any list item, essentially meaning any data item can also be a document which makes it actually viable to do everything at the top level. It doesn't seem Notion supports this workflow. Definitely jealous of some of the advanced data-type features in Notion but it feels much too fiddly for my mental model. Thanks for the explanation, though.
We've tried to focus Notejoy on being as intuitive as possible to support any kind of team. Because of this, we've seen a variety of teams beyond just startups adopt Notejoy, including coffee shops, law firms, freelancers, agencies, coaches, and more.
