If this garbage was simply a feature you had to enable I would be quietly annoyed on principle but otherwise ignore it and just go about my business, but instead it shows up at THE TOP OF THE LIST EVERY TIME YOU TRY TO EMBED LITERALLY ANYTHING. This one incredibly stupid bit of trend-chasing is now the first thing you see no matter what you're trying to do. Fuck this, man!!! I'm sure they'll get rid of this all in like six months when free GPT queries are no longer being subsidized, but the fact that this is their attitude at all to trend-chasing makes me want out.

Anyway, if anyone has any suggestions for things that have Notion's collaboration features I would LOVE to hear them. I am staring at lists of features and feeling like I'm losing my mind. Unfortunately the thing that I primarily use it for is sharing documents with others (and having running comment threads on issues), as well as providing general knowledge bases for team members to reference. I've gotten Obsidian and Joplin as suggestions but their collaboration features seem kinda hacky and it's not really the markdown editing part that I care about.

I have spent the entire work day researching Notion alternatives! I know a bunch of people were looking at the replies to my posts for suggestions, so I'll summarize my findings thus far.

ClickUp: Let me just cut to the chase, this is what we're probably going to go with. It has all the rich text documentation features, embeddable databases (lists, kanban, tables, etc.), commenting, public pages with a shareable link, and isn't too expensive. It's even got a Miro clone! I wasn't even asking for that! (Update: this feature is shit.) The downside seems to be that it's insanely baroque and has a billion features that I don't need, but if that's the only problem I can live with it, probably. I'll see how it goes!

Obsidian: This was the most popular suggestion I got from everyone else and it seems fine at what it does. It has a huge plugin ecosystem that provides a lot of functionality, if you're technically-minded. It also has a built-in whiteboard feature! And if you want it to output to a publicly accessible website, there's a lot of options for this. But its collaboration tools are EXTREMELY hacky (just piggybacks on filesystem syncronization), don't really seem to be designed with multiple users using it at once, doesn't support comments, and all the plugins that provide database support are either janky or are technically complex to set up, so I think it's bad for collaboration in general, and especially bad if you're collaborating with people who aren't the sort of people who use Linux. (I mean, I do use Linux, but I couldn't ask a whole team of collaborators to put up with this.)

Joplin: Their officially supported cloud sync/publishing feature is a bit cheaper than Obsidian's. Otherwise this is all of the problems of Obsidian but without the large plugin ecosystem.

Logseq: A lot of people recommended this too! Seems like it's designed to manage stray notes very well, which is interesting, and it might be good at what it does. But it can't do any kind of collaboration!

AppFlowy: Very deliberately designed to feel just like Notion, including the database features! However, there is absolutely zero support for collaboration or sharing.

Affine: Another extremely tight Notion clone... that is way too early in development to be used. If they do everything on their roadmap it'll probably do everything you want out of a Notion clone! However, right now, basically none of the functionality you need is in there.

Confluence: God, just shoot me now. The collaboration features are there, but it doesn't have any of the database stuff you'd want—probably because they want you to use a barely-function JIRA integration or some bullshit instead—and public sharing is currently disabled for new users for some reason?

Nuclino: Another Notion-like, this one actually does have all the collaboration features you'd want! And the marketing text makes it looks like it has database features, but actually this is a lie, it just has a list/board view that encompasses every single entry in your space. Oh well!

Monday: Another incredibly baroque business-oriented offering that provides a thousand more things than you'd need. This is like... 80% of the way there in terms of my own use case? It's got all the document editing, databases, and commenting features I'd want, but you can't share documents publicly. Also the per-seat cost is really high and the granularity on how many seats you purchase at a time is bafflingly bad.

Just using Google Drive with documents and spreadsheets: Technically doable! We worked this way for years, shockingly.

Mostly what I have learned is that I am still insanely mad at Notion for taking a thing that worked extremely well for our purposes and proving that they have no idea what people who actually have to use their product for work actually want out of it, to the point where I no longer feel confident using it even though they're inevitably gonna pull this feature in six months when they run out of subsidized OpenAI requests or whatever. What a huge waste of my time!!! Also, I hate reading marketing copy for software, especially when it's business-oriented, but that was not a new lesson.