Leaving Notion: what actually moves, and what does not

Notion exports your pages as Markdown and your databases as CSV files in a zip, and page text and uploaded files come out well. Relations turn into plain text, views and filters do not come across, and every file name ends in a long hash.

Stash is an AI document vault from Hive Asset Group, LLC that takes receipts, files, notes and forwarded emails, files them for you, and lets you find anything by asking in plain words.

People leave Notion for a few reasons. It got slow. They only ever used a tenth of it. They opened it one day and could not find the page they wrote last week. Or they realised they were spending more time arranging the workspace than using it.

Whatever the reason, the question is the same: what actually comes with you.

What the export gives you

Notion exports as Markdown and CSV, or as HTML, in a zip. Settings, then the workspace section, then Export all workspace content.

What you get back is reasonable and lossy in specific ways. Page text survives as Markdown. Databases come out as CSV files, one per database, with a folder of the pages alongside. Uploaded files come out as real files. Images embedded in pages come out too.

What does not survive: relations between databases become plain text, rollups and formulas become their last computed value, views and filters do not come across, and the page hierarchy becomes nested folders with long names ending in a hash. Comments and database views do not come across cleanly to most other apps.

That last one is the practical annoyance. Every file is called something like Meeting notes 3f2a9c1b4d5e6f708192a3b4c5d6e7f8.md, and the hash is not going anywhere.

Sort your content into three piles first

Before you move anything, it helps to be honest about what you have. In most workspaces it divides fairly cleanly.

• Things you wrote and might read again. Notes, drafts, meeting records, documentation.
• Things you collected. PDFs, screenshots, invoices, contracts, images. Files that happen to live in Notion but are not really Notion content.
• Things that only exist because Notion made them easy. Trackers, dashboards, tables of tasks you stopped updating in March.

The third pile is usually the biggest and almost none of it needs to move. Be ruthless with it. A tracker you have not updated in six months is not data, it is a record of an intention.

The second pile is the one that hurts

Collected files are the reason leaving Notion feels hard. They are scattered across pages, they come out of the export with hashed names, and putting them somewhere sensible is genuinely tedious work.

This is the part Stash was built for. You drop the whole export folder in at once, and every file gets read, named for what it contains, and put into a stash. A contract becomes the parties and the date rather than a hash. A scanned receipt becomes the shop and the month.

It also handles the fact that a Notion export is full of duplicates, because the same image often appears in several pages. Identical files are stacked together rather than filed four times.

The first pile depends on what you want

If your notes are genuinely notes, plain Markdown files in a folder, opened with any editor, are hard to beat and will still open in twenty years. Obsidian reads that folder directly if you want backlinks.

If what you liked about Notion was that everything was findable in one place, then the folder of Markdown files will disappoint you, because searching it means remembering roughly where things are.

Stash takes the other approach: you do not arrange anything, you ask for it. Ask reads your library and answers in plain words, with the things it used shown underneath so you can check it. That is closer to what most people wanted from a Notion search box.

A migration that actually finishes

1. Export everything from Notion. Do this even if you are not leaving yet. An export sitting on a drive costs nothing.
2. Unzip it and look at the folder names. Delete whole sections you know are dead.
3. Move the files pile somewhere that names and indexes it.
4. Move the notes pile into plain Markdown, or into whatever you have chosen next.
5. Keep the Notion workspace open for a month. Do not cancel immediately. You will remember something.

The honest version

Most people who leave Notion do not replace it with one thing. They end up with notes in one place and files in another, and they are happier, because the two were never really the same job.

Notion is very good at being a database you can style. It is mediocre at being the place your PDFs live, and that is what most workspaces slowly turn into.

Where to go next

If you are still choosing, the best Notion alternatives lists eight simpler picks with prices, and Stash vs Notion compares the two side by side. If you only want your notes, see Notion alternatives when you only wanted the notes part.

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