Notion Kinda Sucks

Notion feels in so many ways that it is an app designed for me. And no doubt many people feel that way when they first discover it. It promises so much: block-level editing like Wordpress, powerful database features rivaling Airtable, integrations with tons of your favorite tools because of its extensive and developer-friendly API, simplicity where you need it most, with powerful features just under the hood. Super polished UI. Collaboration and publishing to the web are a snap. And it has a somewhat generous free-tier. Manage your whole life in Notion! It sounds so great, and the app looks so good.

When I was first exploring Personal Knowledge Management, I naturally tended to using Notion. I created a task database to track my todos, and could tie my tasks and activities back to my goals. I created a notes database to track my notetaking. I set up daily reviews and connected my calendar to Notion. I created a dashboard of all the important bits in one spot. Creating systems in Notion is very satisfying in a sense - it scratches a creative itch that I think is very tempting to people like me who like to build things.

But I didn’t stay with Notion for long. Eventually I became fed up with it and now have even grown to dislike it altogether. Perhaps it’s partially due to the fact that I feel like I encounter Notion everywhere I go: in the Tech field it is often used as a replacement for older, less “cool” documentation tools, like Confluence and SharePoint, for example.

So why do I now think Notion sucks? Let’s dig into the issues.

Working on Notion, not on Notes

Maintaining a system in Notion requires significant overhead. I found that when I was working on my PKM I spent too much time trying to create formulas to define something in a database, or fiddling with my organizational structure, or trying to create reports that looked nice. All in all, a Notion user spends a great deal of time just designing and maintaining their PKM, which takes away from time that you should be spending on writing notes. This is evidenced by the fact that some people are willing to straight up buy Notion templates to have something preconfigured to their needs.

Data Sovereignty and Privacy Concerns

Your data with Notion lives on Notion servers. Although it’s unlikely that Notion employees are going snooping around people’s notes, it’s discomforting enough to me to know that they technically can. I certainly wouldn’t trust Notion with any confidential or sensitive information. In addition to that, there is the possibility of malicious actors gaining access to Notion and leaking your private data.

Consider this: with all your data on Notion’s servers, if you lose access for one reason or another, or they feel you have violated their TOS and they terminate your account, you lose access to all your notes. I’ve heard of this happening repeatedly to multiple different people. Notion will take action if they feel the content of your notes violates their nebulous TOS, and that’s not a chance I’m willing to risk.

Useless AI Features

Notion has been pushing AI as an upsell point from its basic service for quite a while now. My brief experimentation with Notion AI left me pretty unimpressed. It seemed incapable of finding even basic things that I knew were in my notes, so it sucks from a RAG perspective. Beyond that, it seems to hallucinate more than I’m used to. If AI implementation is important to you I would explore other options.

Lack of Future Proofing

Your data is stored in Notion’s databases in a proprietary format. There are limited options to export from Notion, making data portablity a concern. If Notion goes away or gets even more enshittified, it’s very difficult to move from Notion to another format and preserve the functionality of your knowledgebase.

Notion Gets Slooooooooow

This was the real kicker for me in the end. When dealing with a database with only hundreds of notes, Notion gets slow and buggy. Handling a database of 10,000 notes? Forget it. Navigating any large datasets gets very tiresome in Notion. It just plain doesn’t scale well.