OpenDocs vs Notion
We're not trying to replace Notion. Notion is a workspace for everything. OpenDocs is a publishing layer for the specific case where your source-of-truth is Markdown.
The honest position
Use Notion as your team's workspace. Tasks, meeting notes, full project management, knowledge base, wiki. Notion is excellent at all of it. If your team's already standardised on Notion, keep using it.
Use OpenDocs when your source-of-truth is Markdown. README files, ADRs, runbooks, AI agent outputs, technical specs that live in docs/ in your repo. The kind of doc that's already a .md file and would lose structure if you pasted it into Notion.
We do have lightweight projects (you can group docs into named projects from the CLI to keep workspaces tidy), but it's just organisation, not project management. No tasks, no databases, no kanban. If you need any of that, Notion is the right tool.
Using both at once is fine. Most of the teams we talk to use Notion for project tracking and OpenDocs for "this is the canonical version of the spec, here's the URL to reference."
Side by side
Notion
- Rich workspace: pages, databases, calendars, tasks
- Real-time collaborative editing
- Inline comments, mentions, threads
- Backlinks, embedded queries, relational databases
- Per-user pricing scales with team size
- Source-of-truth lives in Notion's database
- Editing is the primary mode
OpenDocs
- Publishing layer plus lightweight CLI projects (no tasks, no databases)
- Source files stay in your editor or repo
- One CLI command publishes a Markdown file to a URL
- Workspace-only or public visibility
- PDF and DOCX export with your branding
- Source-of-truth lives in your repo or filesystem
- Reading is the primary mode; editing happens in your editor
When OpenDocs is the right answer
Your team already writes everything in Markdown and isn't keen on rewriting it.
You're using AI agents (Claude Code, Cursor) that produce Markdown and you need them to publish it automatically.
You want PDFs and DOCX exports with your own branding instead of Notion's.
You want documents that read as documents, not as Notion pages.
When Notion is the right answer
You need real-time collaborative editing with multiple people in the same doc at once.
You want a wiki with linked pages, embedded databases, and project tracking in one place.
Your audience is non-technical and won't write or read Markdown comfortably.
Ship Markdown without leaving your editor.
Free plan publishes up to 10 docs. No credit card.
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