I’ve come to hate Notion with passion because of its abysmal performance, but I still pay for it for my small business. My non-technical employees use it as a database for clients, tasks, payments etc. I tried to research replacements several times, and still haven’t found anything good. Sometimes I wonder if I should build my own.

Anytype (https://anytype.io), Appflowy (https://appflowy.com)

Most intriguing thing in that vein I've seen: https://thymer.com (haven't used it, am not affiliated, just looked promising in a demo video esp. on performance grounds)

I'm in the same boat. Since they decided to bundle in their AI features with their core product (at only a 30% price increase!), I've been looking for an exist route. But finding a single collaborative text editor + database designer replacement has been difficult.

I really like Notion’s information architecture (in particular the top index pages) and its multi-user capability.

I tried some other tools like Confluence and Obsidian but like you say, there seems to be no match from a UX perspective.

Do I love Notion? Definitely not. Would I change to another tool with the same feature set? Instantly.

> I wonder if I should build my own.

Please consider improving one of the existing open source solutions before doing this: XWiki, Nextcloud, wiki.js...

There's advanced stuff that already exists and we could use some cooperation to get better instead of another competitor in a crowded space.

(I work for XWiki SAS - you can also pay them to build what's missing for you)

Bummer performance is a problem for ya. We've worked on it a ton over the past year or two and generally performance should be much better across the board. Feel free to email me (username @ makenotion.com) if you have example pages that are slow you're willing to share. thanks!

There are many suggestions already let me through in one more: Affine : https://affine.pro/

You can self host too if you like. Not all features as Notion but comes very close. Seems more private too compared to Notion.

I am also looking for more private and secure Notion alternatives. My company doesn’t allow using Notion.

I like templates, tasks, scrum etc. which I use for personal use. But I am reluctant on saving any personal information in it.

NocoDB perhaps? It's not a document-focused system, but you said they use it more as a database.

https://github.com/nocodb/nocodb

I used a lot for organizing my personal projects, endup changing to Microsoft Loop for client stuff. And Obsidian for personal stuff.

The performance really is abysmal. I started using it years ago and the change from the early days has been drastic.

outline - https://getoutline.com is pretty good and you can import all your notion spaces too.