Notion.io is my new favorite

Posted by Chris Thompson
May 3, 2019 at 04:36 PM

The main value in Notion IMHO over a traditional wiki is that it’s really built on a database model, rather than a traditional wiki model. There’s a whole layer of it that you can treat as a hierarchical wiki, without encountering the database stuff at all, but everything (even pages that don’t look like database pages) are database items. So for people who find building inter-linked networks of web pages too much effort/cognitive overload, you can just create pages, let them exist in little siloed mini-databases (again, these are part of the big database), and find, filter, and manipulate them as database items rather than cross-linked wiki pages. And several of the database views are more useful than traditional database views, like kanban boards.

The other big innovation in Notion is how it treats relationships between pages. Everything, including database items (everything is a database item) can have a hierarchy of sub-items. In some respects this is a little reminiscent of Ecco.

Recent versions of Notion also allow grouping heterogenous file types in database attributes rather than in the main content of an item, which is pretty handy too.

It’s one of those tools that you can be creative with pretty easily.