Motivation

Notion is being experimented with by #optics as a potential replacement to the team Confluence. Notion has three things that concern the #it team, and are currently hard reasons against migration to Notion. These are:

  1. Notion is not open-source.
  2. Notion is not self-hosted.
  3. Software as a service (SaaS) model means there’s no guarantee we can keep our free Notion plan forever.

@Reid Sox-Harris ‘s research can be found here:

Confluence Migration

The intent of this research is to investigate Notion-like alternatives that closely meet the featureset provided by Notion, and also meet the requirements put forth by #it. Featureset requirements are as follows:

  1. Database + wiki paradigm: Notion allows for the creation of two types of artifacts: pages and databases. Pages allow for the construction of a traditional wiki. There's no real edge over Confluence there. The “killer-feature” provided by Notion is databases. Databases supercharge pages by enabling spreadsheet-like functionality within pages. See the #optics Roadmap for reference. Databases can be configured to display info in tabular, Kanban, and timeline views. Migrating to Notion would allow the team to consolidate task tracking and timelining to one place (instead of having it split between the Google Sheets Task Tracker and Instagantt.
  2. API integrations: Notion allows for the integration of external services through integrations. #optics is exploring the possibility of using an integration to sync GitHub issues from the Payload Designer onto Notion. Again, further supports consolidation of everything under one platform for ease of access and visibility.
  3. Free model: unlimited members, unlimited pages, free. That's the plan this Notion workspace is currently running under. There’s a small loophole that we needed to exploit to make this work, but any Notion alternative would have to be free to beat this setup in this regard.

Notion has the potential to provide the team with the functionality of Confluence, Asana, and Instagantt FOR FREE. Migrating to the platform offers incredible productivity benefits, which is why I'm a strong proponent of making the switch. However, #it’s concerns are valid, which is why I'm open to continue searching for alternatives. Regardless of what the final verdict is on our platform of choice, #optics will continue to use Notion for project management, unless our platform of choice also allows for the creation of databases with multiple views and custom properties. A compromise solution might be to store our wiki separate from our project management-related artifacts on Notion.

Notes

2022-06-15

Outline vs. Notion.so or what do you miss in Outline that Notion has?

Takeaways: