Nex vs Notion: what we kept, and what we left out

Any honest comparison with Notion has to start by admitting how much of it is right. The block editor — where every paragraph, heading, image and toggle is a thing you can drag, comment on and turn into something else — is the interaction model that made the last decade of note-taking software make sense. Nesting pages inside pages, rather than filing them into folders, is the other one. Nex does both, deliberately and without apology.

What is worth writing about is the part underneath, because that is where the two diverge, and it is not a matter of taste.

A page is a document, not a row

Notion’s central idea is that a page is a row in a database. Pages carry typed properties, collections of them can be filtered, grouped and viewed as a board or a calendar. It is a genuinely powerful idea and it is why so many teams run their whole operation inside it.

It also has a cost, and the cost is paid by the person who just wanted to write something down. A database needs a schema. A schema needs decisions — which properties, which types, which options in the select — and those decisions arrive at the moment you are least interested in them, which is the moment you had a thought. The common complaint about Notion is not that it cannot do something; it is that a workspace which started as notes became a system that needs maintaining.

Nex takes the other branch. A page is a document. It has a title, an icon, a body, and a place in a tree. If you want properties on it, you insert a properties block — the dates it already knows, plus any fields you name yourself — and it lives in the document like everything else. Nothing is typed until you type it, and nothing is required.

What that costs us is real and worth stating plainly: those properties are not queryable. Nex cannot answer “show me every page whose Status is Blocked”, because answering it would mean reading every document in the account. That is the right trade while the alternative is asking everyone to define a schema before they can write a sentence. It becomes the wrong trade the day there is a database view to answer it, and at that point the rows move to a table and the block becomes its editor.

Comments stay next to what they are about

A comment is nearly always about one paragraph. Nex anchors it to that block and floats the thread in the margin beside it. There is a sidebar too, for the whole conversation at once and for remarks about the page rather than a line of it — and when you publish, you choose which a reader gets, or both.

The part that matters is not the sidebar, it is the anchor. Nex attaches a comment to a block id, never to a position in the text. Every edit above a paragraph moves its position, and a comment that has quietly slid onto whatever text moved underneath it is worse than one that admits it lost its anchor. Delete the block and the comment goes with it, on the same hook that updates the link index — because that is the one place a body changes.

Publishing is a button, not a pile of toggles

Putting a page on the web should be a decision you make once, having seen all of the settings, rather than a switch you flip and then discover four more switches under. In Nex you set the audience — anyone with the link, specific email addresses, or anyone at a domain — decide whether readers may comment and where, decide whether search engines are invited in, and then press publish.

The public address is /p/<title>-<10 random characters>, and the suffix is not decoration. “Anyone with the link” has to mean the link, not anyone who guesses /p/roadmap. It also removes the land-grab that a shared readable namespace creates, where the first person to publish “Getting started” owns that address and everyone after gets -2.

Where Notion is still the answer

If your workspace is a database — a CRM, a content calendar, a sprint board with relations and rollups — Notion is built for that and Nex is not. If you need several people typing in the same paragraph at the same moment, Notion does that and Nex deliberately does not (we wrote about why). If you depend on an ecosystem of integrations and community templates, that is a real advantage and it takes years to acquire.

Nex is for the other case, which we think is the more common one: you want somewhere to write things down that is fast, that nests, that lets you sketch on a whiteboard in the middle of a page, that keeps your comments where you left them, and that will hand you a clean markdown file the day you want to leave.