I'm circling back to Anais early #100DaysOfKubernetes content, and getting ready to do some videos and put my own journey out there. One thing is that Anais does is using Notion for her documentation, and I have to choose a tool to help my own process. One possiblility is just using Notion, and I'm going to try it out; but I'd prefer an open-source tool that I have the option of hosting if I'd like. And that's another consideration -- do I want to host things myself, or might I prefer to go the SaaS route right now, with an eye to do this later? Maybe. So, with all this in mind, I've started to do some research. Along with Notion, I'm looking at Appflowy and Outline. All of these tools claim to have similar capabilities and nice presentations, so I'll give them all a run and see how they work. Claims are they do basic documentation, wiki-like organization, and project management aspects. I've used some tools for wikis and workflow management before, so I'll be interested to see how these all stack up. For the learning aspect, I'd be focused on ease of authoring and nice presentation, along with thinking about hosting, but I'll kick the tires on other features to be fair and complete. I create a Notion account, but first I figure out my current e-mail forward with a 3rd party is causing a bounce, but just from the notion stuff. So I use an alternate address, just a bit annoying. I then look at Outline and AppFlowy. AppFlowy doesn't even have a service, you have to self-host, and Outline's service is only a 30 day trial. Ugh. I'd have liked to try all 3 as services, to get a quick and fair comparison. I pencil in deploying an AppFlowy install, and focus on Notion. After logging in, it creates a bunch of stuff, to give you some feeling of how it works, which is kind of cool. But in the flow, there are a bunch of videos, which tells me that Notion has a bit more of a learning curve then people are saying. And that's not necesarily a bad thing, but more of expectations != actual experience. I watch the intro vid that is one minute, but there is a 4 minute video on "writing", plus 50!! more YouTube videos. Okay, so let's watch. Oh, the text is called Blocks. Umm, reminds me of.. Wordpress? The only new thing here is using @ to connect to a person. Okay, the "slash" command (/) has some real upside, which I like. I watch the templates and database videos too. Overall, I get a good understanding of what you can use Notion for. Now, I have to use it a bit to build some content, and see what I can do with that content (export or copy/paste) to keep a copy of it. I decide to give both the others a good try, which means doing some kind of local deployment. Appflowy has a Docker container (or at least they are working on it), and I'll have to dig on the Outline side. Fun! :) So, trying AppFlowy means installing a native client, which I did for Windows. It wasn't clear that this tool was native -- Notion is a web tool, so I assumed this would be too. Looking through there Github repo, that might be possible, but not sure on timing. I download and run it (no install needed) and it ... looks much like Notion. It's functional, and I'll do a bit more comparison as time goes on. After digging a bit on the outline side, it turns out I can't decipher how their auth works, so I'm going to come back on that. So I think my primary tool is going to be Notion to start, and I'll give AppFlowy a good try as an alternate.