The Notion alternative for companies of twenty people and up.
Notion is wonderful for a team of five. At twenty it quickly gets unwieldy: the search stops finding what you are looking for, rights trickle down, the export loses the databases, and the AI only arrives with the Business plan. ThurWiki reads the Notion export.
What Notion users run into. And what ThurWiki changes about it.
Voices from public forums and reviews, some of them shortened. More reasons for switching stand on the migration page.
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With many pages, the search finds poorly.
«The search functionality is completely broken at scale …» – Hacker News, 2019
ThurWiki: Search by sound and by meaning, across titles, text and attachments. Hits in the title come first. Only what you are allowed to see is found.
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Rights trickle down.
«Permissions in Notion trickle down — if your company wiki is shared with your entire team, all employees can access all the pages.» – the boldtech.dev blog
ThurWiki: Nine rights across user, space and page, rules written onto groups, a rights matrix per space. What stands there applies.
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The export loses the databases.
«Databases export as CSV, not markdown, which is the single biggest complaint.» – raccoon.page, an analysis of the Notion export
ThurWiki: Pages come across through the Notion export with sub-pages, images, tasks and simple tables. What Notion does not export, we say beforehand. Out of ThurWiki, every page is available as Markdown.
How the move out of Notion works.
- Route
- From the Notion export (Markdown and CSV) as a file.
- Comes across
- Pages with sub-pages as a tree, text, images, task lists, simple tables.
- Check afterwards
- Databases come across as tables, not as databases; linked properties and views are lost. That is a limit of the Notion export.
Pages that quietly go stale no longer exist.
The most common ailment of a wiki is not the missing page but the wrong one: an instruction that has not been right for two years, and nobody notices. A review date turns that into an appointment.
- A name, a date, a rhythm. Per page a responsible person, a date and, if you want, a repetition: every 30 days, quarterly, half-yearly or yearly.
- The notice stands on the page, not only in a mailbox. Once the date is reached, everyone who opens the page sees it – including the engineer who needs the instruction right now. A reminder only one person gets does not help the reader.
- Confirming is one click. The responsible person is reminded and confirms right in the notice. With a repetition the next date counts from today – anyone confirming three months late is not immediately due again.
- Two overviews. “My reviews due” for the individual, and in the wiki administration all the reviews due across the wiki. The responsible person is an organisational note and not a right: they get no access they do not have anyway.
And back out again: as one PDF.
A wiki you cannot get out of is a trap – you know that, moving out of Notion right now. That is why the exit lies open.
- One document out of many pages. Tick across spaces, up to 300 pages per export; each begins in the PDF on a new sheet, in the order of the page tree. You choose how large it prints: 45 to 100 per cent, for type and content at once.
- Just as the page looks. What is printed is the real view, not a second rendering: macros, charts, draw.io drawings and tables stand in the PDF as they do in the browser.
- With your rights, not with everybody’s. A page you are not allowed to read stops the export rather than quietly going missing. An export that drops pages would be worse than one that never arrives.
- And by machine. Through the API every page as Markdown, with attachments – for an archive or for the move to the next system.
ThurWiki and Notion side by side.
| ThurWiki | Notion | |
|---|---|---|
| A page tree as deep as you like | yes, as deep as you like | yes |
| Search inside PDF, Word and Excel attachments, tolerant of typing mistakes | attachments yes, including scans and archives; typing mistakes yes, and by meaning | weak with many pages, according to user reports |
| An editor without markup | yes, a ribbon like Word’s | yes, blocks |
| Simultaneous editing | yes | yes |
| Four-eyes approvals | yes, without an add-on | no, only a verification tick |
| Invoices, tickets, issues and files from other systems on the page | yes, 41 connectors, from bexio, Odoo and Jira to Zabbix and Proxmox | through integrations |
| SSO (OIDC, SAML) without a price per user | yes, included | from Business upwards |
| An AI assistant | yes, with your rights, without credits | only from the Business plan upwards |
| Operation, backup and updates by the provider, data in Switzerland | yes, ThurData in Switzerland | cloud, provider in the USA |
| Run it yourself (open source) | no, run by ThurData | no |
| Export chosen pages and whole branches as PDF | yes, chosen pages and whole branches as one PDF; every page as Markdown through the API | Markdown and CSV, with losses |
| A review date per page with a reminder | yes, a responsible person, a date, a repetition, a notice on the page | yes, verification, in the higher plans |
| Price | per wiki, from CHF 4.90 a month | per user per month |
As of September 2026, based on the makers’ public statements and on user reports, without warranty. We also write down where we are not ahead.
Questions from Notion users
We use Notion databases. What happens to them?
They come across as tables, sortable and filterable, but without relations and views. Anyone who needs databases as the core should look at that with us beforehand; for knowledge, instructions, minutes and projects ThurWiki is well suited.
Does it stay as simple as Notion?
Writing, yes: a ribbon, macros with a search field, no syntax. On top of that comes what companies often miss in Notion: approvals, search into attachments, rights that do not trickle down by accident, operation in Switzerland.
Can we record meetings?
Yes, with the macro “Voice note or meeting”: record in the browser or upload, play it back on the page, optionally with a transcript through Whisper in your own house or through ChatGPT. Audio and transcript are attachments carrying the page’s rights; the search finds the transcript.
Where does the data sit?
In Switzerland, on ThurData’s own infrastructure. ThurData is a Swiss company with no US parent; the US CLOUD Act does not apply. Anyone using the AI through an outside provider sends the questions to that provider.
How do we stop pages going stale?
With a review date per page: a responsible person, a date and, if you want, a repetition (30 days up to yearly). Once the date is reached, a notice stands at the top of the page – visible to everyone who opens it, not only to the responsible person – and that person is notified. Confirming is one click in the notice; with a repetition the next date counts from today. Whoever administers the wiki sees all the reviews due in one place, and each person sees their own in the user menu.
How do we get back out of ThurWiki?
In the interface as PDF: you tick in the page tree what should come along – per row either the page alone or the page with all its sub-pages – across spaces, up to 300 pages in one document. What is printed is the view you see, so with macros, charts and drawings. Through the API, additionally every page as Markdown, with attachments. There is no bulk export of the whole wiki as an archive today; we would rather say so beforehand.
More alternatives pages: Confluence · MediaWiki · DokuWiki · XWiki · BookStack · Wiki.js · Docmost · Outline · SharePoint
ThurWiki is a Notion alternative for companies that want to keep their knowledge with rights per space, a search that still finds things at scale, and data in Switzerland. Notion migration through the export, with a preview.
Anyone wanting to replace Notion, retire Notion for a company or find a Notion alternative in Switzerland finds the route, the comparison and the trial import here.
Twenty of your Notion pages in ThurWiki, before you decide.
We set up a demo wiki and import a slice of your collection, with a preview. You see search, macros and the editor working on your own content.