I am using Notion-type applications to organize my writing projects (research, characters, locations, manuscript, etc). After using Notion for a month, I decided to look for alternatives as I needed full offline capabilities.
After looking at forums, I found that Anytype is the closest alternative function-wise even with different architectures.
There are a few changes from notion that I liked even before six hours of usage:
- One of the changes that caught me off guard is that the templates are tied to object types. I had trouble with this at first, but eventually I got used to it. Getting used to it helped a lot as having different types of objects makes the template creation much easier than in Notion (in that site, you have to copy-and-paste quite a lot).
- Another nice change is that the presence of relations makes the “recursive” items (ie. making a location that is a part of an existing location). Making things better is that the Sets feature allows me to keep track with changes easier.
There are several weak points, however:
- Importing directly from Notion couldn’t produce any result yet. Importing from the Notion’s exported markdown zip resulted in a blank page although the original page was quite long.
- Exporting produces a markdown and zip which doesn’t contain the relations and object types which would otherwise help in backing up and restoring the projects.
- The Navigation is quite janky when it comes to linked pages. In the sidebar, when a link is added, the list should acknowledge the change by displaying the article linked to them as their “child”. And if a link is removed from the page, the page of the removed link should not be displayed as their “child”.
- The trash bin’s selection mode should not force me to click only the checkmark. The selection area should be expanded to span the selected object’s card.
- In addition, I would like to have a “toggle” option for the title, heading, and subheading which is available in Notion.
- I’d like the addition of non-page templates i.e templates that cover multiple objects.
I hope this impression helps. I will keep using this to organize my projects as this app is promising despite their flaws.
Edit(s):
- In sidebar, the current page should be highlighted instead of the last visited page.
- And there should be a section which lists all pages in the sidebar, not just favorites.
