Notion has the WORSE (IMO) interface in iPad-mini users. The keyboard doesn’t match with the floating bar and the Calendar is very disgusting to even download.
Dev with ADHD flavoured chaos here. Ideas live across Gpt, Claude, Notion, and Apple Notes. I gave Claude MCP access to my Notion so it can write ideas in for me automatically.
Honestly? It just made the mess look organised. Now I'll find a doc in Notion weeks later and not remember if I wrote it, Claude wrote it(the amount of emojis tell though who wrote it) from a chat, or I dumped it from Notes. Half my "plans" are sitting there abandoned because I never committed to them... they just got captured and forgotten.
Anyone else hit this? Or is it just me.
Notion is hiring 👀
If you’ve been thinking about applying, feel free to DM me. Happy to answer questions about the company/team and refer people I think would be a good fit.
I just wanted to share something I’ve been working on recently because I realized a lot of productivity systems started feeling more stressful than helpful for me. There were too many dashboards, too many tasks, and too many decisions to constantly keep up with, especially during busy or overwhelming days. I wanted something that felt calmer and easier to return to consistently, so I simplified everything into quick capture, visual organization, only a few priorities per day, and low-friction planning. It’s honestly made things feel a lot more manageable and less mentally draining to maintain day-to-day. Here’s part of the workflow:
Notion shipped their Developer Platform (v3.5) on May 13
Workers, Database Sync, Incoming Webhooks, External Agents API, and a CLI.
I spent 8 days going through every doc and the keynote and wrote
a guide that explains the whole thing in plain English. No jargon.
Real code. Step-by-step.
What's inside:
→ What actually changed (it's not just an API update - it's a category shift)
→ The 5 building blocks explained simply
→ A real 30-minute walkthrough to deploy your first Worker
→ 5 real use cases with working code
→ Opportunity map - what to build this week vs this month
Free Notion page. Duplicate it to your workspace. No email, no paywall.
👉 Notion Developer Starter Kit
Happy to answer any questions about the platform in the comments.
Hey all,
I’ve been trying a bunch of Notion alternatives lately and honestly I’m starting to think most people use Notion just because it’s what they started with, not necessarily because it’s the best fit for them.
For work I end up bouncing between different tools depending on the client/team setup, and over time I’ve noticed every app kinda has its own niche instead of being a true “Notion killer.”
Some quick thoughts from the stuff I’ve used:
Coda feels really powerful if you’re heavy into databases, automations, APIs, etc. probably the closest thing to a spreadsheet/database hybrid. but definitely more of a learning curve.
Taskade surprised me honestly. way more team-focused, built in AI stuff, fast collaboration, feels less bloated than Notion in some ways.
Monday is solid if your brain works better visually. good for tracking projects and timelines but gets expensive pretty fast.
Trello is still probably the easiest recommendation for people who just want simple Kanban boards without overthinking everything.
And then Obsidian is kinda its own category. i still use it whenever i want distraction free note taking without 500 dashboards and widgets everywhere.
Curious what everyone here actually stuck with long term and why. feels like every productivity app is either too simple or turns into a second job to maintain after a while lol
I really like the idea of using an app to organize my stuff because I'm very busy and I'm working on a lot of different projects all the time, so it would be really convenient to have a system in place to manage and keep track of everything
But every time I try to use Notion it just feels so mundane, I realize it probably has a lot of potential but why is the learning curve so steep? I don't want to spend hours on setting it up I want to save time
Lately it seems like anything that I do in Notion that requires an http request to get a result will take at least this long.
Operations that are still somewhat fast:
- typing text onto a page
- adding a page to a database view via the plus sign
- creating new blocks manually on a page
Options that take 3-5 seconds (or sometimes more)
- button automations. Even simple ones that only create a page in a database and open the page. Even if the database is simple and has under 10 fields. Even if none of the 10 fields are formula fields.
- navigating from one page to another page, especially if that contains a database view
I’ve tried clearing cache. Reinstalling the windows desktop app. Tried using browser web app. The same slowness occurs whether I’m at home, at work, during peak hours or in the evenings. If it requires an api call, it takes 3-5 seconds. It makes me think that this is an amount of time people find acceptable so I’m starting to be genuinely curious whether I have unrealistic standards for software performance.
lately i’ve been falling into the endless “notion alternative” rabbit hole and honestly i didn’t realize how many apps are trying to fill that space now.
every thread i read gives completely different answers too. some people want a better writing app, some want databases, some want offline notes, some want team collaboration, some just want something that doesn’t become a giant second brain maintenance project after 3 months.
i started keeping a list and it’s kinda wild how many names keep coming up. obsidian, anytype, capacities, appflowy, coda, logseq, craft, fibery, nuclino, affine, clickup, upnote, bear, joplin, standard notes, taskade and a bunch more i’m probably forgetting.
the funny thing is most of them seem really good at one specific thing but then weak somewhere else. like some apps are amazing for personal knowledge management but terrible for collaboration. some are super powerful but feel way too enterprise-y. some are clean/simple but missing features you randomly end up needing later.
and honestly the more i try stuff the more i feel like notion’s biggest advantage is just being “good enough” at a lot of things in one place.
curious what people here actually ended up sticking with long term. did you fully replace notion or did you end up using multiple apps together because nothing really covers everything well?
I think every Notion user eventually goes through the same cycle:
“i need a simple workspace”
then 3 hours later you somehow have:
The funniest part is the setup always starts with genuinely good intentions 😭
I rebuilt mine recently and forced myself to keep only pages I actually open weekly.
Turns out most of the “productivity” stuff was just making everything feel heavier.
My workspace is uglier now but I actually use it way more consistently.
Curious what people here prefer honestly:
minimal + functional
or full second-brain mode?
December 2024. Notion buys Campsite. They bring on the two founders, Brian Lovin and Ryan Nystrom, with a big warm welcome blog post about the future of collaboration.
If you never used Campsite, here’s what you missed. It was the calm, sane alternative to Slack. Posts instead of frantic chat. Real channels. A Home feed that actually told you what needed your attention. Built-in docs. People loved it. I mean loved it.
Then in February 2025 it shut down. Fine. That happens when you get acquired. You figure the good stuff shows up inside the mothership a few months later.
So I went looking for it.
Well folks: it’s not there.
Sixteen months in, there is no Campsite inside Notion. No posts surface. No channels. None of the stuff that made people fall for it. Notion’s team communication today is the same as it was before the deal. Comments. @-mentions. A discussion box. Slack and Teams integrations doing the heavy lifting.
Now here’s where it gets interesting.
The founders didn’t disappear. They’re shipping like crazy. But all of it is AI. Nystrom runs AI engineering now. They built Notion 3.0, the AI agents, the Custom Agents launch. Big, visible, important work. Just nothing, and I mean nothing, that looks like the product they got famous for.
And the market noticed the hole. There are already new tools popping up openly going after ex-Campsite users. You don’t get to do that if the thing already lives inside Notion.
So here’s my theory, and tell me if I’m wrong.
This was an acquihire wearing a product-acquisition costume. Notion was going all-in on AI at the exact moment they bought two killer builders. So what do you do? You point them at AI. Building a real Campsite inside Notion would’ve meant going to war with Slack and Teams, the same tools Notion’s own integrations depend on. Easier to swallow the team and the philosophy and quietly let the app die.
Their own welcome post even called Campsite “a Lego block that was missing from our construction set.” Read that again. That’s not “we’re going to ship your product.” That’s “we’re taking your block and your people.”
So I want to hear from you:
Was this always an acquihire and we all just wanted to believe otherwise?
Is the Campsite vision dead, or is it hiding inside the AI work somehow?
Does a Campsite-style feature ever actually ship in Notion, or is it gone for good?
And if you used Campsite back in the day, has anything come close to replacing it?
Tell me what I’m missing. Because the more I look at this, the more it smells like a really polite funeral.
I’m looking for a way to interact with ChatGPT in voice mode so I can discuss ideas naturally. The core contents of the conversation should then be summarized by ChatGPT and automatically saved into Notion. Do you have any ideas for a good workflow or process for this?
I want to warn other Notion users, especially teams using AI-assisted workflows in production workspaces.
I asked Notion AI to move content between pages.
Instead:
This was inside a live Enterprise workspace.
The hardest part was recovery.
Different restore attempts surfaced different states of the workspace, and support repeatedly stated restoration was “complete” even when major structures were still missing.
I documented the entire process with screenshots and logs because the workspace contained critical long-term research and incident documentation.
Please:
I’m still trying to determine whether this was:
Curious what everyone has found to be the best method for task templates. I.e., my projects have the same list of tasks and I want to be able to drop them into a new project without the tasks being related to other projects, which is the issue I keep having. I’ve done some research and it suggests buttons are probably the best but haven’t got it to work the way I need yet.
I’ve used Notion, Trello, ClickUp, Jira, etc. and they’re powerful, but after a while everything starts feeling emotionally flat. You organize work perfectly… then still procrastinate opening the app.
So I started experimenting with a different idea:
What if a workspace felt more like a game world than a dashboard?
Not in a cringe “add XP points everywhere” way, but using actual game design ideas:
Right now I’m building an early prototype where tasks feel more like quests/missions and the environment feels alive instead of corporate.
Curious what Notion users think:
What’s the biggest thing current productivity tools are missing emotionally?
I think the reason students keep rebuilding their planners is because most of them slowly become guilt dashboards 😭
You open the app and immediately see:
At some point the “productivity system” starts feeling more stressful than the actual coursework.
That’s what happened to me with Notion eventually.
I loved how customizable it was…
but my study setup slowly evolved into this giant machine that needed maintenance before I could even start working.
So recently I started keeping my actual planner way simpler.
Mostly just:
No giant life wiki.
No second brain.
No 9 interconnected databases deciding whether I deserve peace.
Ironically I’ve been more consistent ever since.
I still love aesthetic/productive setups btw.
I just think students underestimate how calming a simple planner feels when your brain is already overloaded from classes.
Curious how many people here downsized their systems over time instead of making them bigger.
Since yesterday, when I open the Notion Calendar app in MacOS it redirects me to the website, and for some reason to the https://www.notion.so/unsupported-browser.html, even though I'm using the latest Chrome version.
Two things I tried without success:
- Making sure I'm properly logged in in the website
- Uninstalling and installing it again
Any ideas?
This isn’t really a sub anymore. It’s just bots or businesses faking posts to try to sell something. It’s depressing. Should make a change or just retire the sub.
What is the absolute best Notion template ever created?