Notion is So Sticky It’s Hard to Walk Away (Premium)

This has come up a lot lately, but I spend an inordinate amount of time trying to replace the personal technology hardware, software, and services that I rely on by testing alternatives. This has long been true, and you’ve surely heard the story of me downloading Slackware Linux disk images using the (then) high-speed connection at Scottsdale Community College in the mid-1990s and then painstakingly copying them onto physical media, one 3.5-inch floppy at a time.

But it’s also accelerated in the past year, and especially in the past 6 months, thanks to enshittification: I’m tired of being harassed by software whose makers have suddenly turned on long-time paying customers by ignoring their deliberate choices and configurations. And I feel that most acutely with Windows, the computing platform I rely on, and related Microsoft software like Office (Word) and OneDrive. So much so that I’ve stopped using both, for the most part.

That’s a big deal, but it’s not unprecedented.

Two years ago this week, I finally gave up on Microsoft OneNote and moved to Notion, one of many modern note-taking solutions that’s appeared in recent years. I was a fan of OneNote since the initial announcement in 2002 and I used it, somewhat religiously, from the first public beta. Microsoft created OneNote as a killer app for the Tablet PC, but its central innovation, impressive for that time, was that there were no documents to save or manage. I felt like OneNote had been created just for me, a sentiment I later learned was common among the journalists who covered Microsoft at the time.

Unfortunately, OneNote got caught up in the existential crisis of Windows 8 and the Windows Runtime mobile apps platform. After halfheartedly supporting WinRT with mobile app versions of the core Office apps that ran on both Windows 8 and Windows Phone, the Office team finally gave up and continued forward with the legacy Win32 desktop apps that we still use today. The one outlier was OneNote: The WinRT version of OneNote, initially called OneNote MX, offered a simpler and more modern user interface than the busy, complex desktop version, and in the shift to Windows 10, it briefly became the default OneNote experience for everyone. Until, of course, it wasn’t: A year later, the Office team reversed that decision, deprecated the WinRT app—by then called OneNote for Windows 10—and brought back the desktop app from the dead.

I loved OneNote MX/Windows 10, but more pragmatic concerns got in the way: I had used OneNote for the Windows Weekly show notes since at least 2011, when Mary Jo Foley joined the show, and we soldiered forward for over a decade, suffering through the weekly indignity of OneNote not being able to handle what by then was considered a basic collaboration feature for such a product: We could not edit the show notes concurrently because doing so introduced an endless series of sync errors. And by 2022, I had finally had enough and was looking around for a replacement.

In Windows Weekly episode 768 on March 16, 2022, I recommended Notion as my app of the week, noting that Mary Jo and I had quietly switched to that app to test it and were blown away by how well it worked. (A week earlier, I had selected Brave as my app pick, and that’s another example of a third-party app I use every day that’s replaced a Microsoft app.) Since then, I’ve never looked back. More to the point, I’ve expanded my use of Notion dramatically. And I now use it for all kinds of things, personal and work-related, across all my apps and mobile devices.

Today, I have Notions for work, Thurrott.com (business-related things), Eternal Spring, Hands-on Windows, and Windows Weekly. I track health- and fitness-related milestones in Notion, including the weight machines I use at the gym. I use it for to-do lists of all kinds, from the digital decluttering work I do on the site to the updates I need to make to the Windows 11 Field Guide. My wife and I are even using Notion to write a book about Mexico City now.

Notion is kind of a slam dunk. That I’ve never needed to pay for this service is both alarming and surprising, but the free version just keeps chugging along and has never once prompted me to pay for, well, anything. I share the Windows Weekly notes with multiple people, the Eternal Spring and Thurrott.com stuff with my wife, and … it just works. I so rarely get to say that about anything I use, whether it’s in personal technology or elsewhere in my life.

Notion isn’t perfect, of course.

As a simpler, more modern app than the traditional Office productivity apps we all know and love/hate, many things work a bit differently, and that can be a blocker for some.

Here’s a simple example. Where I might apply a Heading 1 style to a new or existing line of text in Word by typing Ctrl + Alt + 1, more modern apps like Typora use the simpler Ctrl + 1 (which is just an alias for the Markdown ## syntax). Even LibreOffice Writer—a legacy app by any definition—uses this more modern and simpler syntax. But not Notion. For some reason, you use a unique syntax in which you type /h1 and then it transforms into that style. And God help you if you want to change some text to that style after the fact: You need to click on the six-dot icon that appears to its right on hove and then select “Turn into” and “Heading 1.”

Notion, like OneNote, doesn’t force you to deal with files or the file system, and that’s both good and bad: Ideally, Notion would sync locally to my PCs, and perhaps give me the option to store it in OneDrive or Google Drive, but that’s not how it works. Instead, Notion is a modern app that runs in the cloud, and while it is highly customizable and can be used for all kinds of things, you can’t “host” your own Notion or, worse, effectively use it offline. In fact, there’s no real offline mode at all. And that can be a problem.

This, to me, is Notion’s only major downside, and depending on your needs, it could be its Achilles Heel. Notion’s “solution” to this problem, which is not so much a solution as it is a workaround, is that you can preload the pages you want to work on while offline by opening them while you are online. You can then edit them offline—say, on a plane—and when you are back online again, those changes will sync to the cloud and you will be made whole. I assume it’s obvious why this is a feeble answer to an obvious complaint.

This issue also explains why I’ve spent so much time researching and experimenting with Notion alternatives. And probably will continue to do so, though I am always struck by how well Notion works when I switch back to it. The best alternatives that I’ve found so far are Joplin and Obsidian, if you’re curious, and the latter is particularly good in that it’s user friendly and intuitive, especially if you’ve used Notion. But it’s also completely file system based: Each note you create in Obsidian is a Markdown file, so they’re future-proof, and human- and machine-readable, and always will be. Best of all, you can simply put your Obsidian folder in OneDrive or Google Drive and sync it to your own cloud storage, replicating it on all of your devices so that everything works even when you’re offline. Obsidian is free for personal use, and it supports a wide range of add-ons, too.

For the Microsoft fans out there, Microsoft Loop is a wildcard entry that may or may not turn into something special. Loop looks and works just like Notion, maybe a bit too much like Notion, but it integrates with OneDrive (both commercial and consumer versions) and it offers some small niceties for those familiar with Office, including the ability to use Office/Word-style keyboard shortcuts. So that Heading 1 example I noted above works the same in Loop as it does in Word, and that kind of thing could ease your transition or adoption.

The problem, sadly, is that Loop is curiously buggy and immature despite years of testing. (I first looked at Loop about two and a half years ago.) I had assumed for quite a while that I’d move from Notion to Loop at some point, but I’ve stopped even looking at it. Still, it could meet your needs.

The problem for Loop, Obsidian, Joplin, and the dozens (or maybe hundreds) of Notion alternatives, many of which are look-alikes and work-alikes) is that Notion is so good. And for those who use Notion heavily, have invested their time and effort to really learn the app and make it their own, the switching costs are high. They’re not real costs, of course, most people probably don’t even pay for Notion, though there are various paid tiers. It’s just not worth the effort.

This is the way software used to be. In that suddenly nostalgic pre-enshittification era, developers created software that met customer needs, and the most successful software was sticky, not because of lock-in, but because of quality. That age is long gone, it seems, but this uniqueness helps explain why Notion is so special and, perhaps, irreplaceable: I want to keep using Notion because I like it, not because I have to. There is no harassment at all. If anything, Notion is too permissive. My God, guys, give me a reason to pay. Please.

Ultimately, my testing of alternatives is all about finding the best solutions, and the best solutions are those that survive this testing. Notion, so far, has met and exceeded that bar in a way that few of the products I use do. Yes, I wish there was a real offline mode. And yes, I’d be happy to pay for that. But even with that one limitation, Notion stands alone, an island of quality in a sea of enshittification. And I love it for that.