Discourse vs. Notion

The Notion software was mentioned to a colleague recently and I was wondering, since I have no experience with it, whether someone in the Discourse community could share their experience and compare with Discourse, when Discourse is used to organize collective action.

About Notion

Notion is a project management and note-taking software. Notion is a software designed to help members of a company or organization coordinate deadlines, objectives, and assignments for the sake of efficiency and productivity.

Previous discussions

None yet.

Importer status

There’s no importer yet, but @pfaffman could write one (see #4 below), based on Notion backup documentation mentioned by @Decorbuz in #3.

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There is not. If there were, it would be in scripts/import_scripts. It’s not clear from the Notion site whether it is possible to download your data, so it might be impossible to write an importer (unless, perhaps you were to contrive to scrape the data).

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I believe you can in fact export your Notion data.

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I stand corrected. So then you’d just need to write an importer if you planned to build a new community in Notion and then migrate it to Discourse. I typically do that fro $1500-$3000, depending on how hard it is and how many things you need to get imported across (just user, category, topic, post, or also groups, permissions, and so on).

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All this is great. But I don’t use non-free software, I’m curious about people’s experience with Notion. I’ve been using Discourse for years to organize collectives, and I wonder what kind of features Notion has that Discourse misses, or what kind of things people like in Notion that they miss in Discourse, or the other way around: where Discourse shines in comparison.

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For a while, I used Walling after ditching Notion in 2018. In 2020, I started using alternatives like Craft and Taskade instead.

More recently, I tried out Microsoft Loop and ended up sticking with it. It’s very good! :+1:


Circling back to Discourse though, I don’t think it’s trying to replace Notion or any of the alternatives I’ve mentioned above. Notion might work well in tandem with Discourse, but it certainly isn’t a replacement of any kind.

I’d be interested to know if anybody uses Discourse alongside Notion. How has it benefited you? Do you feel more productive?

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