Side note: Why do people like Notion? I just can't get into it. It feels like every time I type, some autocomplete thing pops up and stops my typing. I just went back to the good old Notes app.
As someone who switched from Dropbox Paper to Notion...
There's no question that Paper is a better pure writing experience. If you're viewing Notion as just a note-taking app and nothing else, I think you're misunderstanding what it's for.
For starters, it's way easier to organize stuff in Notion than Paper. This is less a feature of Notion, and more of a terrible limitation of Paper. Paper was stuck with the "files within folders" model. Just the fact that Notion lets you control what shows up in the navigation sidebar was a huge time saver for me. And being able to create pages within pages within pages (which is very different from having sibling documents inside a folder) made it much more flexible for organizing everything.
But the real power of Notion is when you start to treat it as a database builder rather than a note-taking tool. Yes, it's useful for taking notes, but those notes are about something, and with tools like Paper, Obsidian, etc., the thing is always living somewhere else.
With Notion, I was able to make a database of projects and another database of tasks which linked to those projects. Each developer on my team has a custom dashboard showing just the tasks that are assigned to them and currently in-progress. I have a totally different view showing all the projects going on right now. And then each of those tasks have a pretty good (I admit it's not great) note-taking feature. The notes are living within the actual object you're taking notes about, which is totally different from Paper.
I even use Notion for personal stuff. I have a Notion form that my wife and I use to enter things we need to buy next time we're at the store. And there's a view showing the things we need to buy from each separate store with checkboxes next to each one so it's easy to remove them when we're done. There's a separate database listing the movies we want to watch, with a view for all the ones we previously watched, and when. I have a database of cocktail recipes along with ingredient lists (so I can easily filter by ingredient), formulas to calculate different volumes based on how many drinks you're making, a rating system, etc.
Basically, if you look at Notion as a bucket of unstructured notes with a markdown editor, I agree, it's nothing special. But that's not what it really is.
I have tried several times - real genuine multi-week efforts - but I'm with you. It never worked for me. I can see potential in there but it's just too much, for too little in return.
It's possible to lock pages in Notion (from the ... menu on the page), which prevents editing without unlocking. Most org-level pages in our workspace are locked. People also typically lock project pages after they ship, for example.
I'm with you. I've been working on making Obsidian great for work with real-time collaboration, SSO, and the ability to have fully private document collaboration [0].
Performance aside, it's crazy that in the age of Claude Code people don't insist on having their docs local, private, and in markdown.
