What is Dropbox Paper and what are its top alternatives?
Dropbox Paper is a collaborative document-editing tool that allows users to create and share documents, spreadsheets, and presentations in real-time. It features a clean and simple interface, inline commenting, task assignments, and integration with other Dropbox services. However, it lacks advanced formatting options, version history tracking, and offline editing capabilities.
- Notion: Notion is an all-in-one workspace for notes, tasks, wikis, and databases with powerful collaboration features and extensive customization options. It offers a wide variety of templates and integrations, but the learning curve can be steep for first-time users.
- Quip: Quip is a collaborative productivity software that combines documents, spreadsheets, chat, and task lists in one seamless platform. It provides real-time editing, chat threads, and shared folders, but the free version has limited storage and features.
- Coda: Coda is a flexible document editor that combines tables, text, and apps to create interactive documents that can be used as databases or project trackers. It offers a wide range of pre-built templates, but the complexity of creating custom formulas and functions may be overwhelming for some users.
- Notability: Notability is a powerful note-taking app with features like handwriting recognition, audio recording, and PDF annotation. It is ideal for students and professionals who prefer handwritten notes, but it lacks advanced collaboration tools.
- Zoho Writer: Zoho Writer is a cloud-based word processor with collaboration tools for teams to create, edit, and share documents in real-time. It offers seamless integration with other Zoho apps, but the free version has limited storage capacity.
- Slite: Slite is a lightweight note-taking and knowledge sharing platform designed for teams to organize and collaborate on documents easily. It focuses on simplicity and organization, but some users may find it lacking advanced formatting options.
- Airtable: Airtable is a flexible spreadsheet-database hybrid that allows users to organize information in a customizable grid format. It offers powerful filtering and sorting capabilities, but the complexity of setting up custom views and functions can be daunting for new users.
- Google Docs: Google Docs is a popular cloud-based word processor with real-time collaboration features, seamless integration with other Google services, and extensive revision history tracking. However, it lacks advanced workflow automation and customization options compared to other tools.
- Slack Notes: Slack Notes is an integrated note-taking feature within the Slack messaging platform that allows users to create, share, and edit notes directly in Slack channels. It streamlines communication and collaboration, but it may not be suitable for users who require more advanced document editing features.
- Microsoft OneNote: Microsoft OneNote is a digital notebook app that allows users to capture, organize, and share notes in various formats, including text, images, and audio recordings. It offers seamless integration with Microsoft Office apps, but the interface and features may be overwhelming for some users.
Top Alternatives to Dropbox Paper
- Evernote
Take notes to a new level with Evernote, the productivity app that keeps your projects, ideas, and inspiration handy across all your digital devices. It helps you capture and prioritize ideas, projects, and to-do lists, so nothing falls through the cracks. ...
- Google Docs
It is a word processor included as part of a free, web-based software office suite offered by Google. It brings your documents to life with smart editing and styling tools to help you easily format text and paragraphs. ...
- OneNote
Get organized in notebooks you can divide into sections and pages. With easy navigation and search, you’ll always find your notes right where you left them. It gathers users' notes, drawings, screen clippings and audio commentaries. Notes can be shared with other OneNote users over the Internet or a network. ...
- Slack
Imagine all your team communication in one place, instantly searchable, available wherever you go. That’s Slack. All your messages. All your files. And everything from Twitter, Dropbox, Google Docs, Asana, Trello, GitHub and dozens of other services. All together. ...
- Confluence
Capture the knowledge that's too often lost in email inboxes and shared network drives in Confluence instead – where it's easy to find, use, and update. ...
- Basecamp
Basecamp is a project management and group collaboration tool. The tool includes features for schedules, tasks, files, and messages. ...
- Quip
Edit and discuss in one place. Quip combines documents with messages so you can work faster, on the web or on the go. ...
- Google Keep
It is a note-taking service developed by Google. It is available on the web, and has mobile apps for the Android and iOS mobile operating systems. Keep offers a variety of tools for taking notes, including text, lists, images, and audio. ...
Dropbox Paper alternatives & related posts
- Search text in images (OCR)5
- Checklist5
- Dark mode3
- Great mobile app3
- Syncs quickly3
- Encrypt Text2
- On life support3
- No document structure2
related Evernote posts
- It's simple, but expansive3
- Free2
- Fast and simple1
related Google Docs posts
If you're a developer using Google Docs or Google Sheets... just stop. There are much better alternatives these days that provide a better user and developer experience.
At FeaturePeek, we use slite for our internal documents and knowledge tracking. Slite's look and feel is similar to Slack's, so if you use Slack, you'll feel right at home. Slite is great for keeping tabs on meeting notes, internal documentation, drafting marketing content, writing pitches... any long-form text writing that we do as a company happens in Slite. I'm able to be up-to-date with everyone on my team by viewing our team activity. I feel more organized using Slite as opposed to GDocs or GDrive.
Airtable is also absolutely killer – you'll never want to use Google Sheets again. Have you noticed that with most spreadsheet apps, if you have a tall or wide cell, your screen jumps all over the place when you scroll? With Airtable, you can scroll by screen pixels instead of by spreadsheet cells – this makes a huge difference! It's one of those things that you don't really notice at first, but once you do, you can't go back. This is just one example of the UX improvements that Airtable has to the previous generation of spreadsheet apps – there are plenty more.
Also, their API is a breeze to use. If you're logged in, the docs fill in values from your tables and account, so it feels personalized to you.
We are trying to find a good tool for internal technical documentation. E.g. playbooks for site operations, or how-to docs on how to use a particular library. The documentation will contain a lot of code/command snippets.
We currently use Google Docs because of its very good WYSIWYG capabilities, and most importantly, its commenting system that allows us to discuss a particular issue and keep record of that discussion. However, Google docs is not made for code documentation so it's a bit clunky sometimes (e.g. it will capitalize the first letters of sentences etc...).
We briefly tried the GitHub wiki, but it severely lacked on collaboration/commenting and ease of editing.
What tools do people recommend for editing internal documentation?
- Works great with OneDrive1
- Syncs quickly1
- Dark mode1
- Search text in images (OCR)1
related OneNote posts
- Easy to integrate with1.2K
- Excellent interface on multiple platforms876
- Free849
- Mobile friendly694
- People really enjoy using it690
- Great integrations331
- Flexible notification preferences315
- Unlimited users198
- Strong search and data archiving184
- Multi domain switching support155
- Easy to use82
- Beautiful40
- Hubot support27
- Unread/read control22
- Slackbot21
- Permalink for each messages19
- Text snippet with highlighting17
- Quote message easily15
- Per-room notification14
- Awesome integration support13
- IRC gateway12
- Star for each message / attached files12
- Good communication within a team11
- Dropbox Integration11
- Jira Integration10
- Slick, search is great10
- New Relic Integration9
- Great communication tool8
- Asana Integration8
- Combine All Services Quickly8
- Awesomeness7
- This tool understands developers7
- Google Drive Integration7
- XMPP gateway7
- Replaces email6
- Twitter Integration6
- Google Docs Integration6
- BitBucket integration6
- GREAT Customer Support / Quick Response to Feedback5
- Jenkins Integration5
- Guest and Restricted user control5
- Gathers all my communications in one place4
- Clean UI4
- GitHub integration4
- Excellent multi platform internal communication tool4
- Mention list view4
- Perfect implementation of chat + integrations3
- Android app3
- Visual Studio Integration3
- Easy to start working with3
- Easy3
- Easy to add a reaction3
- Timely while non intrusive3
- Great on-boarding3
- Threaded chat3
- Eases collaboration for geographically dispersed teams2
- Message Actions2
- Simplicity2
- So much better than email2
- It's basically an improved (although closed) IRC2
- Great Channel Customization2
- Great interface2
- Intuitive, easy to use, great integrations2
- Markdown2
- API1
- Easy remote communication1
- Get less busy1
- Targetprocess integration1
- Better User Experience1
- Multi work-space support1
- Travis CI integration1
- It's the coolest IM ever1
- Dev communication Made Easy1
- Community1
- Integrates with just about everything1
- Great API1
- Very customizable1
- Great Support Team1
- Flexible and Accessible1
- Finally with terrible "threading"—I miss Flowdock1
- Archive Importing1
- Complete with plenty of Electron BLOAT1
- Watch1
- I was 666 star :D1
- Easy to useL0
- Platforms0
- Can be distracting depending on how you use it13
- Requires some management for large teams6
- Limit messages history6
- Too expensive5
- You don't really own your messages5
- Too many notifications by default4
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We're using GitHub for version control as it's an industry standard for version control and our team has plenty of experience using it. We also found many features such as issues and project help us organize. We also really liked the fact that it has the Actions CI platform built in because it allows us to keep more of our development in one place. We chose Slack as our main communication platform because it allows us to organize our communication streams into various channels for specific topics. Additionally, we really liked the integrations as they allow us to keep a lot of our in formation in one place rather than spread around many different apps.
Sentry has been essential to our development approach. Nobody likes errors or apps that crash. We use Sentry heavily during Node.js and React development. Our developers are able to see error reports, crashes, user's browsers, and more, all in one place. Sentry also seamlessly integrates with Asana, Slack, and GitHub.
- Wiki search power94
- WYSIWYG editor62
- Full featured, works well with embedded docs43
- Expensive licenses3
- Expensive license3
related Confluence posts
We knew how we wanted to build our Design System, now it was time to choose the tools to get us there. The essence of Scrum is a small team of people. The team is highly flexible and adaptive. Perfect, so we'll work in 2 week sprints where each sprint can be a mix of new R&D stories, a presentation of decisions made, and showcasing key development milestones.
We are also able to run content stories in parallel, focusing development efforts around key areas of the site that our authors need first. Our stories would exist in a Jira backlog, documentation would be hosted in Confluence , and GitHub would host our codebase. If developers identify technical improvements during the sprint, they can be added as GitHub issues and transferred to Jira if we decide to represent them as stories for the Backlog. For Sprint Retrospectives, @groupmap proved to be a great way to include our remote members of the dev team.
This worked well for our team and allowed us to be flexible in what we wanted to build and how we wanted to build it. As we further defined our Backlog and estimated each story, we could accurately measure the team's capacity (velocity) and confidently estimate a launch date.
As a new company we could early adopt and bet on #RemoteTeam setup without cultural baggage derailing us. Our building blocks for developing remote working culture are:
- Hiring people who are self sufficient, self-disciplined and excel at video and written communication to work remotely
- Set up periodic ceremonies ( #DailyStandup, #Grooming, Release calls and chats etc) to keep the company rhythm / heartbeat going across remote cells
- Regularly train your leaders to take into account remote working aspects of organizing f2f calls, events, meetups, parties etc. when communicating and organizing workflows
- And last, but not least - select the right tools to support effective communication and collaboration:
- All feeds and conversations come together in Slack
- #Agile workflows in Jira
- InProductCommunication and #CustomerSupportChat in Intercom
- #Notes, #Documentation and #Requirements in Confluence
- #SourceCode and ContinuousDelivery in Bitbucket
- Persistent video streams between locations, demos, meetings run on appear.in
- #Logging and Alerts in Papertrail
- Team collaboration (non-tech)71
- It's simple and intuitive39
- Great UI24
- Plain, simple20
- Very fast15
- Clear pricing12
- Super fast task creation9
- Integration with external services7
- iPhone app4
- Frequent + awesome updates4
- Remote management1
- As close to an all-in-one tool that is client friendly1
- Team collaboration1
- Team and client collaboration1
- Plays nice with Google Apps1
- Basic3
related Basecamp posts
As a small startup we are very conscious about picking up the tools we use to run the project. After suffering with a mess of using at the same time Trello , Slack , Telegram and what not, we arrived at a small set of tools that cover all our current needs. For product management, file sharing, team communication etc we chose Basecamp and couldn't be more happy about it. For Customer Support and Sales Intercom works amazingly well. We are using MailChimp for email marketing since over 4 years and it still covers all our needs. Then on payment side combination of Stripe and Octobat helps us to process all the payments and generate compliant invoices. On techie side we use Rollbar and GitLab (for both code and CI). For corporate email we picked G Suite. That all costs us in total around 300$ a month, which is quite okay.
- Simple, reliable and fast6
- Enterprise worthy gdocs5
- Has no competitors for team documentation2
- Great UI and easy to find docs in colourful files1