Markdown is good enough — and Notion isn't

I've watched three colleagues lose access to their writing this year. One had a Notion workspace migrate to a new owner and the export tool produced an unreadable HTML mess. One had a Google Doc that stopped loading on her iPad in the middle of a presentation. One paid Evernote for a decade and woke up to find his account flagged for inactivity, then deleted, then irretrievable. None of these stories are unusual. All of them are downstream of the same mistake.

The mistake is treating writing tools like writing tools. They are not. They are products built on subscription economics, and your document is the lock-in. Markdown — boring, ugly, plain-text Markdown — is the only writing format with a credible thirty-year lifespan, and that's worth more than any of the cute features you'd be giving up.

What Markdown actually is

A text file with a few conventions. # for headings. * or _ for emphasis. - for lists. Backticks for code. Square brackets and parentheses for links. That's most of it. The whole specification fits on a postcard. The point is not the syntax — the point is that the syntax is the file.

A Markdown document is a .md text file. You can open it in Notepad, in Vim, in VS Code, in TextEdit, in BBEdit, in your iPhone's Files app, in cat on a server you SSH into. Every machine that has ever existed since 1970 can open it. Every machine that will ever exist for the foreseeable future will be able to open it. The format is owned by nobody and depends on no service.

Compare to a Notion page. The page is a row in Notion's database, structured as a tree of typed blocks, accessible only through Notion's API. "Export to Markdown" produces a degraded version with the database links broken, the toggle blocks flattened, and the embedded files stripped. The export is not the document. The document is in Notion, and Notion is the only place it works.

Performance is not a small thing

I keep my notes in 2,000 Markdown files in a folder synced via iCloud. Searching across all of them is instant — ripgrep takes 30 milliseconds. Opening any one of them is instant. Editing any one of them never shows a loading spinner.

I also use Notion at work. Opening a Notion page takes 800-2000 ms. Search is fast for small workspaces and gets visibly slower past a couple thousand pages. The app reloads itself once a week to fix memory leaks. None of this is Notion specifically being bad — it's the structural cost of a database-backed editor with real-time collaboration. The features that make Notion appealing are also the features that make Notion slow.

If you write a lot, performance compounds. A 200ms latency on opening a note is unnoticeable for one note. It is unbearable across a hundred notes a day, every day. Plain text doesn't have this problem because there's no database, no sync engine, no rendering engine — there's a text file and an editor.

What you actually lose by switching to Markdown

It's worth being honest. There are real things Notion and Google Docs do that Markdown doesn't.

• Real-time collaboration. Two people editing the same Markdown file at the same time will produce a merge conflict. If your job is collaboratively editing a document with someone else live, Google Docs is the right tool.
• Embedded databases. Notion lets you make a table of tasks, filter it by status, link it from another page. Markdown can do tables but they're static. If your workflow is genuinely database-shaped, use a database.
• Comments and review threads. Possible in Markdown via Git PRs but heavyweight; native in Docs.
• Rich embeds. Notion shows YouTube previews inline; Markdown links are just links. Most of the time this is fine.

Notice that the things on this list are about collaboration and structured data. They are not about writing. The argument here is not that Markdown is better for everything — it's that Markdown is better for the writing itself, and the other tools should be reached for when you actually need their other features.

What you gain

• The file is forever. Twenty years from now you can still open it.
• Version control works. Put your notes in git and you have history, branching, and the same diff tools you use for code.
• Every editor has Markdown support. Pick the one you like — Obsidian, iA Writer, VS Code, Bear, or just plain TextEdit. Switch any time. The files don't change.
• Searching across your notes is grep. Not a full-text search service that can be slow or down. The kind of grep that returns in milliseconds.
• No subscription. You can stop paying for Notion and your notes don't disappear.
• Plain text plays well with every other tool you use — pipe it through pandoc to get a PDF, paste a section into Slack, copy a heading into a JIRA ticket. There's no "export" step because the content is already plain text.

Where Markdown writes itself

Personal notes and daily journals. README files. Product specs and design docs (the kind that travel through Slack, GitHub, and email). Blog posts. Documentation that lives in a Git repo. Meeting notes. Reading lists. Recipe collections. Anything you'd be sad to lose in five years.

Where Markdown is wrong: collaborative live editing of a single document, financial spreadsheets, anything with embedded interactive media as a core part of the document, structured project management with database queries.

How to leave Notion (or Docs) without losing everything

1. Export your existing workspace to Markdown via the platform's export tool. Notion has a built-in Markdown export; Google Docs round-trips through pandoc reasonably well.
2. Don't expect the export to be perfect. Toggle blocks, callouts, embedded databases, and inline formatting often degrade. Pick an editor (Obsidian is the most common destination, iA Writer if you want minimal, VS Code if you're already there) and clean up the worst breakages on the documents you actually still use.
3. Stop creating new content in the old tool. Even if migration is partial, the rate of new lock-in goes to zero immediately.
4. Put the new folder under version control. Git is overkill for some people; if so, just back the folder up to two places and call it done.
5. Use the old tool only for the things it's actually good at — collaborative editing, structured databases. Most of your writing isn't those.

The longer point

You don't have to optimise every workflow for the worst case. But if you write more than incidentally, your text accumulates value over time — your notes from three years ago start being useful in unexpected places, your journals become a record, your specs become institutional memory. Locking that accumulating asset behind a single vendor's product strategy is a bet. Markdown is the version of this bet where you can't lose.

The boring formats win in the long run. HTML beat Flash, plain SQL beat ORMs, JSON beat XML, and plain text Markdown is currently quietly beating the document-as-app generation. Pick boring on purpose.