Tabularia compared with Notion

A workspace you build into a writing tool

Notion is a set of parts — pages and databases, boards, relations between them — and a great many writers have assembled those parts into a planning system, typically with a database for the characters and a page per chapter. It suits a writer who enjoys designing the system as much as using it.

What comes with that is maintenance. To Notion a chapter is just a page, and the character in your database has no idea which scenes she appears in; the relationships hold because you keep them holding. And when the draft grows, the writing often migrates somewhere else, leaving the plan behind to drift out of step with the manuscript it describes.

Tabularia arrives as the system. A project is already one continuous typeset manuscript with books, acts, chapters, and scenes in it, and outline, sheets and threads are waiting in it rather than assembled from parts. So the work you put in goes into the story — the threads worth following, the anchors worth placing — instead of into the machinery that holds them. And none of it can fall out of step with the draft, because it is attached to the draft.

Reading the whole of it

Writers who do draft in Notion generally end up with a page per chapter, which means the project exists as a list of pages rather than as a thing you can read through. There is no count across all of them, and nothing shows where in the book you are.

In Tabularia the whole project is one composition. Scrolling goes from chapter 1 to chapter 30 without opening anything, search reaches all of it, and the minimap holds your position — which is also what makes a word count across the whole manuscript, or a thread traced through it, mean something. Working on one part does not mean opening one page: the Working Scope narrows the canvas, search and the counts to the book, chapter or scene you are reading. You get the quiet of a single page without the project being stored as a list of them.

Why to switch

Notion is a system you shape yourself, and the writing is one part of a workspace that runs everything else too. It will model anything you can describe, and two people can be in the same page at the same moment — Tabularia models one thing deeply instead, holds writing projects and nothing else, and collaborates in turns. A collaborator you invite gets a draft to work in, and their pass arrives as a set of proposals you take or leave rather than as edits already in your book.

Switch when you want to stop maintaining the scaffolding and write. The jumps you built links for are already there: the Outline goes to any scene, and an anchor to the exact paragraph you marked. A character's sheet opens beside the page instead of replacing it. Planning has a home that does not drift, since a story shape puts its beats into the prose as anchors. Your other books are their own projects, a click apart, and a manuscript does not slow down as it grows. Your Notion export comes across in one step, so the planning you have already done is not wasted.

Staying with Notion for now

• Why does Notion lag when I write a long chapter?
• How do I turn Notion pages into one manuscript?
• Why does Notion's PDF export look so bad?