As soon as Notion announced that it was blocking accounting from Russia, everyone ran to write articles about analogues and where to go. But, unfortunately, most of the authors of the articles either did not open Notion, or proposed analogues. I have tried everything in recent days and why can I choose only a paid VPN and an account without a “Russian trace”. We will analyze why all candidates from the selections are not suitable: Obsidian, Teamly, Yonote, Affine, Strive, Connoted, Siyuan.

Teamly — looks close, but the focus of the program is not exactly on notes and creating your own database, but on collaboration and social interactions, I would call it a “Knowledge Management System” for a corporation, that is, a competitor to SharePoint.

The main disadvantage is that there is no program for IOS, and if you need to have access to texts and the knowledge base everywhere, and not only from a laptop and you have an iPhone, then that’s it.

Connoted – An interesting idea of ​​the application is that you can share your notes with the whole world, they are recommended by tags. But the functionality of Notion is super far away, only text notes without hierarchy are implemented.

Yonote – No applications at all. You can only use the web version, and the support for those offers installation via PWA. But from my own experience, this means problems with offline mode, authorization. It will often require you to log in, and yes, I installed the programs and in the absence of the Internet, the interface did not load.

Obsidian — there is no synchronization between devices (there is in the paid version, but the program is foreign, which means risks, what will happen), there are no normal tables, there is no built hierarchy, you cannot share pages by link. To be honest, this is a really cool program, but it’s not even close to Notion. This is the local version of Wikipedia.

Strive is a task management service and focused on it. There is documentation. But I saw how one woman used autocad instead of a calculator, and there is a comparison of 3dMAX and Excel (spoiler: Excel wins because it is faster to make a 3D model).

Affine is the closest analogue, a very similar system and even has imports from Notion. They lost the idea of ​​content, you can’t put a page there, you can only create a folder or a tag, but I think you can get used to it. The only limitation is that they are also a foreign service that will wave a pen in September. But they are OpenSource, so if you have the strength to protect the server part yourself, it will be a good solution.

Siyuan – Chinese Opensource. It works very cool on the computer and the phone, but the synchronization does not work. You need to register for it, but Russian numbers are not supported there. Maybe will work for selfhosted.

It is better to try all solutions yourself and in advance, but it is difficult to find an analogue. Therefore, the best way is to transfer everything to a new account in which there were no payments from Russia (they will not be banned). Sign up for a paid VPN and continue using it. And for a guarantee, export all data on September 8. And give analogues another year for development.

And by tradition, it is the author’s Telegram channel. There is not a single word about services and task management, but maybe you like startups?