You appended “reddit” to the search because listicles keep recommending whatever pays a referral. Fair. Here are eight real, individually verified threads from r/Notion and r/selfhosted where people explain why they’re leaving and what they moved to — grouped by the actual reasons: price, speed, and data ownership. The short version: Reddit’s most-recommended alternatives are Obsidian, Anytype, and Coda. We’re a vendor with a horse in this race (a $4/seat agent-native board), so every link below goes to the original thread — check our summaries against it.
The loudest cluster. When Notion raised Plus pricing in mid-2024 (to $10/user/month annual, $12 monthly), the reaction thread filled with people doing seat math and walking:
r/Notion · Jun 2024 · 30 points · 70 comments
u/newhunter18: “Cancelled everything today. I’ve been thinking we were paying for features we weren’t using... Now we’re on the free plan.” u/bioticspacewizard: “That price increase doesn’t seem like a lot at first glance, but spread across multiple users, it’s a pretty hefty additional cost.” u/nobuhok: “Welp. Back to Obsidian, I guess.”
r/Notion · Dec 2023 · 58 points · 81 comments
The bill-creep thread. OP: “I feel like notion has slowly been increasing my bill month to month I used to pay 16 dollars and this included notion AI but now my bill is 21 dollars all the span of a few months.” The top reply, at 43 points, is simply “$0” — u/astrognash: “Ain’t nobody but me using it and I don’t want that AI crap clogging up my workspace anyway.”
r/Notion · Oct 2023 · 45 points · 60 comments
OP u/xcelleration: “I’ve been noticing notion is very slow especially when a page has a lot of notes in it, I need to make a new page to store info in just so it doesn’t lag.” The top suggestion (u/alfredborden00, 37 points): “affine and anytype have similar functionality.”
r/Notion · Oct 2023 · 94 points · 84 comments
The fear, stated exactly (OP u/NewsmanTheMan): “My main concern is being able to have notes that won’t disappear if the company/org dies, so mainly offline functionality would be my main priority.” The answer Reddit converges on (u/Quetzal_2000): “Obsidian! ... the data is yours forever, locally.”
r/selfhosted · Jan 2019 · 76 points
The self-hosting crowd has wanted out for years — this thread predates most current alternatives. u/alex2003super: “it’s such a shame that a piece of software that good cannot be selfhosted.”
r/Notion · Aug 2021 · 106 points · 54 comments (original post since deleted; comments remain)
u/cecile_lebleu: “I took an entire week off in December to build the Notion ‘life operating system’... A couple months later I saw the system crumbling before my eyes like an abandoned building... Eventually it stopped sparkling joy.” u/therefore_joy: “after I finally find my set up and build the system, I can’t get myself to open the app.”
r/Notion · Jun 2026 · 35 points
The same fatigue, still fresh five years later. OP u/concernedcorgiowner: “Has any body else here had issues sticking to notion? I would love to use notion and these other ‘second brain’ productivity apps.” The stickiness problem hasn’t aged out.
r/Notion · Mar 2023 · 89 points · 98 comments
The broadest what-should-I-use thread in the set. Top-voted answers: Microsoft Loop, Coda, and Obsidian, with Airtable, Craft, Fibery, Tana, Mem, Capacities, and Anytype down-thread. u/Repulsive_Diamond373: “Obsidian is now my primary app... The only reason I switched is I need offline access.”
Tallied across the roundup, the recommendations rank: Obsidian (five threads), Anytype (four), Coda (three), then AppFlowy and Capacities. If your reason for leaving is offline access, local files, or the company-death fear, Reddit is giving you good advice: Obsidian and Anytype are local-first by design and genuinely excellent for personal knowledge bases. We won’t pretend otherwise.
Notice what the threads complain about: price per seat, lag, and owning your data. Notice what they don’t solve: none of the local-first picks is built for a team board where automations and AI agents do part of the work. That is the slot we occupy:
If your team runs content pipelines where agents pick up cards, draft, and move them — the workload behind our kanban-for-AI-agents page — that’s the case we built for, and the free tier (5 humans, 1 agent, unlimited boards) is a real trial, not a demo.
Try the team-board slot Reddit’s picks don’t fill — free tier, no card, agents included.
Create accountEvery thread linked on this page was individually loaded and verified, and quotes are short excerpts of text observed there, as of July 2026. Threads may change or be deleted after that; linked discussions and third-party pricing reflect their authors’ own views at the time of posting.