From Notion to plain files: what changes, what doesn't
Every few weeks someone asks whether they should move their whole Notion workspace into Plainva. I never give a clean yes — it isn’t a clean trade, and I’d rather be honest about that than pretend local-first is a strict upgrade.
What you actually give up
Notion is built for teams: live cursors, comments, someone editing the page while you watch it change. Plainva is local-first and single-user — it syncs between your own devices, not with other people in real time. You also lose the web app you can open anywhere with just a login, and some of the deeper database machinery Notion has spent years building, like rollups and formulas reaching across a dozen linked tables. I built .base to be genuinely useful, not to out-feature Notion.
What you get in return is the part that actually convinced me to make the switch myself. Your notes become plain Markdown files, on storage you own, readable in any editor for as long as text files exist — which is the whole reason I started this project. There’s no export dance if you ever want to leave, because you’re already out. It’s fast, since nothing round-trips to a server on every keystroke, and it’s private, since nothing you write becomes someone else’s training data.
The part people don’t expect
What surprises people most is that databases aren’t part of the trade at all. Boards, tables, relations, a graph — .base gives you the Notion-database feel, except the rows are your Markdown notes, not entries in someone’s cloud.
If “mine, fast, future-proof” matters more to you than “hosted and collaborative,” it’s worth an afternoon’s trial. Nothing stops you going back.
- See the databases: databases guide
- Try it: plainva.com
— Marco