How I Searched for a Notion Replacement

For 2.5 years now, Russia has been losing services one after another, some are leaving because of sanctions, some are being helped by the well-known bond agency, and we have gotten used to all of this, but on August 27, news came that Notion is leaving, which also claims that user accounts from Russia will also be deleted.

And I was not prepared for this at all, especially after I dug into the settings and realized that the region was not specified anywhere and changing the region by re-tapping would not work. Well, using a VPN to surf the Internet is already a habit, but you will have to look for alternatives to at least not lose data, so we will talk about their search and alternatives.

It is worth mentioning that the article does not consider the issue of finding the ideal solution that will solve all problems, but rather a compromise solution with minimal crutching for the time of a deeper analysis and search for a more successful alternative and preparation of stronger crutches. The first priority is to transfer the data in a readable form.

What are we even looking for?

In general, I periodically looked at various alternatives, at least because Notion sometimes takes a very long time to figure things out for me (I suspect that the problem is that I run it on antediluvian calculators, but this does not change the essence), but with the news about the departure of articles with supposed alternatives, they poured out of all the cracks, and so many alternatives suddenly appeared that at first I did not understand where they were before, and then kaa …

First, we need to define what Notion is in order to understand what we are looking for, or more precisely, what we discard immediately from what we find:

• Saving, structuring and storing notes is essentially the basic functionality of any adequate note-taker and probably does not need any explanation.

• Organizing a knowledge base is one thing to store a stack of notes that you can quickly navigate, but it's a completely different thing to store huge amounts of complexly structured data. In fact, this is why I stopped using Google Keep, which stores everything in one pile (and therefore looks funnier article from citylink where they offer Keep as a replacement, albeit an incomplete one)

• Databases – although it is more like a DB due to its reduced functionality, it is still a very convenient tool that I personally use mainly for structuring reference materials, maintaining a backlog and various task management

• Embed elements – of course, storing the necessary links is quite convenient, but in many ways, in many ways there is absolutely no need to go to another tab for this – if I need to leave a 30-second video on YouTube inside a note – I don’t want to open it separately later. However, the same story applies to many other services

• Schemes – I often have to attach very simple sketches to my notes (otherwise I will get confused in my own writing) for which I successfully used the “built-in” Mermaid

• Import from Notion and ideally export back – on the one hand, its absence is a reason to finally delete everything unnecessary during the transfer process and not store garbage (the hard drive with physical backups from 10 years ago shed a stingy tear), but in conditions of limited time, cleaning up notes is far from the best idea, and as it turns out in the process, we are talking about thousands of pages, which just looking through everything will take a lot of time

And now, armed with this set of criteria, you can go and look at all the options in a row, starting with those that are definitely not suitable, in order to get rid of them very quickly.

This is about something completely different!

These are the exact words that can be used to describe almost all the articles from various media outlets that have come out in the first couple of days while the topic is hot. Of course, one can understand their haste, but not their approach of throwing everything that can be written into one pile, thank you for that notepad.exe they didn’t mention it, although I didn’t look at all the articles.

Simple note takers

In addition to the above mentioned Keep V article citylink mentions Evernote which is not much different from the Google service, the same can be said about the Melkomyagkie service OneNote. all three are about the same thing and look like a set of notes on a table, glued to a monitor, etc. All of this is absolutely the same and does not bring any order, so we will not dwell here for long and will move on to the less obvious.

Markdown editors

Joplin And Obsidian contrary to opinion sectarians fans (especially the latter) are not replacements for Notion, but rather very cool Markdown editors and nothing more. And here obsidian lovers may be outraged that they have kilotons of plugins there, and that you can mold any Frankenstein monster. Firstly, I did not find a single plugin for nothnovyh “DB” right away, the author of the article “Is it possible to replace Notion databases with Obsidian?” unlike me, he searched much more carefully, but, strangely enough, he also did not find anything. Secondly, to everyone who talks about how plugins can be used to make at least something else from obsidian, I would like to answer with one famous picture:

And to clearly show how different this is, I will simply show one of my pages in Noion and how it is displayed in Obsidian and Joplin:

Yes, in Joplin just a random subpage is open, and in Obsidian the “universe model” is simply because the page in them simply does not open because they are not suitable for this task – these are very cool Markdown editors, but not a replacement for Notion

Those who think Notion and Confluence are the same thing

Here I would like to quickly deal with one huge group of “not that” – Replacements for Confluence which left a year ago and this is a great way to reuse the material, besides, various analogues quickly began to fuss and attach import from Notion to their Confluences. Probably, this is relevant for everyone who used Notion instead of Confluence and nothing more, but nevertheless, it is enough to touch a couple of them and with all the rest everything quickly becomes clear. Well, actually, here they are from left to right Strive, HiHub, EvaWiki, Megaplan, Minerva Knowledge, WEEK, Yandex Wiki, ClickUp , Teamly It wasn't me who came up with the idea of ​​pulling this owl onto Notion, some of them are actively pulling themselves up on the wave of relocations (You can follow the links, some lead to these statements on official websites), I found someone in articles RBC, CitylinkSkillfactory on their blog on Habr, etc.

Other “not that”

The list of absolutely not what these or those articles offer can be continued endlessly, but among them there are really interesting options that did not receive enough attention from my side for various reasons, I will write about them briefly now:

• Airtable – a cool thing for tables. I would say it is especially convenient for my style of keeping records, but in addition to tables I have a lot of voluminous notes that do not look convenient here, and the “Wholesale” import does not work

• Capacities – something similar but completely different, I'll look at it when I have time, but right now I have absolutely no time for that, especially since there is no wholesale import either

• Mail.ru Notes – only today (at the time of writing) they announced import from Notion, but I don’t want to use their services for my own reasons, and I don’t have time to consider them as an option either

• Baserow And NocoDB – they ended up here thanks to another one article about Notion replacementsbut these are Airtable alternatives, but they sound like an interesting addition

They are worth keeping an eye on.

The closest options besides the selected ones seemed to be those that, surprisingly, were unable to import data, so they were completely unsuitable now, but they are definitely worth keeping an eye on.

Yonote

Yonote – This is an Orthodox replacement for Notion that has been actively catching up with it since 2022 (correct me if I'm wrong, I'm focusing on registry entry) and there are really a lot of similarities, it is quite inexpensive now (it is impossible to use it on a non-free plan – 50 MB limit is not enough even to check the functionality), but the guys are now having problems with server bandwidth and even 40-50 KB of data are flying for days. It is clear from the chats that the problem is being actively solved, but after the transfer you need to put the data in order, and this is not one day, and wait for the import, and check – now it is too late to consider it as the main option for moving, but it is definitely worth following the project.

AppFlowy – Open Source is also a fairly fresh (2021) analogue of Notion, which has not yet attached import from Notion, perhaps it can be attached with a bit of dancing with a tambourine, I haven’t danced.

Microsoft Loop – also an analogue of Notion, also announced in 2021 (but then there was only a web in beta), only it is part of the Microsoft 365 subscription. There is a free version for personal use, quite convenient, but there is no import. I have been following it periodically since the first announcement, but I am not ready to transfer everything to it manually yet.

The Little Engine That Could

And so, having made our way through the thorns of various software that vaguely resembles Notion, does not resemble Notion and tries to present itself as resembling it, we got to them – those same two options that were able to digest the import and not break everything to hell along the way (they broke everything, of course, but not everything). And these are the guys who, in any case, will be able to save data that can be used at the same time, and not just stored on the hard drive until better times. I will compare them further and in more detail, but superficially you can already now. So, Coda And Anytypewhat is it, how are they different and how are they useful.

Coda is also SaaS like Notion, so it is not clear when they might suddenly leave and you will need to look for a replacement again, however, data import into it occurs with minimal losses, but more on that later. Import works through an export archive, which still needs to be unloaded, and this is not fast (it took me almost a day for the entire half-gigabyte space). There will be no instructions on how to unload/download here, there are enough of them on the Internet.

Anytype is open source and the freshest (of those for which I even looked at the release/announcement date) it recently turned a year old from the first beta. The account is linked using a code mnemonic phrase instead of a login and password. Import works via an API token, I won't talk about it either, everything is in the documentation.

The links and references are lost, but experienced people say that they are also lost when importing into Notion itself. The views in the tabs are lost, running ahead, the situation is the same with Anytype, the thing is that Notion does not know in what form to issue them when exporting and… simply does not issue them

Despite the fact that Anytype imports data via API token, the situation is the same in it, I suspect that Notion itself cannot export data about tabs.

The next sudden difference was the diagrams. The thing is that I had them all drawn in mermaid, which turned out to be a paid add-on in Coda for $10/m, and all that was left of the diagrams was the source code.

However, this is not the most insoluble problem, because among the free Code add-ons there is Kroki, which in theory can also work with diagrams. It is probably worth noting that Anytype also has support for Kroki, which is much more intuitive than in Coda.

Another funny thing was that Coda pulled up a lot more media files among icons and covers, while Anytype simply didn't catch the sources for most of them.

But in most cases, of course, these are not the most critical problems; the table names turned out to be much more critical:

Here, as it seems to me, the issue is in the data representation, while Anytype comes with the closest representation by API key, Coda accepts data from files that have a file name, but no table name, since for Notion the table name is the name of the page (file) on which it is defined. Well, for Coda it is a question of assigning names to tables.

One of the interesting features of Notion was the embedded elements. It's one thing to attach a video from YouTube, which everyone has been able to do for a long time, and quite another to throw in your own widgets, and both can't handle this. Below is my own widget from Notion and an attempt to insert it into Coda, Anytype doesn't even try here

On the other hand, it is worth looking at what the new tools offer from themselves. While Coda offers a fairly familiar arrangement of elements, Anytype can offer its own widget panel that looks very interesting.

On the other hand, although the buttons from Notion were not picked up, Coda has all the same functionality, unlike Anytype.

We can compare the two alternatives for a long time, but the general idea remains the same – neither of them can completely replace Notion, but both offer interesting alternatives.

Results and conclusions

As a result of the transfer, there were only two options that you can really move to now, but both are not a replacement, but an alternative. Some of the options are too long for such an emergency move and luckily Notion warned in advance. So what does it mean, should we keep everything on Orthodox solutions or raise Self-hosted for personal needs so that this does not happen? In the conditions of constant sudden sanctions and actions of our beloved (no) department, it seems to me the most reasonable decision to remain in constant search of alternatives to all the services used, so as not to look for them with a burning ass when you are already pressed. I was partly helped by the fact that I already knew and looked at some of the services before, but even so I remained in a quandary.

The second obvious conclusion, which does not seem so obvious at first glance, is not to look for a complete replacement for the usual service, because it will definitely not exist, but at the same time always have several options in reserve for an emergency move of at least the most necessary. At a minimum, this will allow you not to end up with anything, at most, find a more convenient service.

The third obvious conclusion is that no SaaS in today's environment provides guarantees for tomorrow.

As a result of this excursion into the world of alternatives, I found a lot of interesting software for myself that is not suitable for current purposes, but is interesting in general, and for current purposes there are two options that I will study closely in the near future and will definitely share the results.

P.S. While I was writing this article, it became known that Coda is also leaving

PPS in parallel with this information has surfaced about that Buildin temporarily removes the maximum file size limit for Russians when importing from Notion as part of the “Guardian of Russian Data” program