Quip

It does the job, but we are looking for options that we have more control over.

• Price per person goes up from $6/person to $10/person as you add people. Should be the other way around. I guess they know they have got you.
• You need to contact them to get some things done that you would expect to be able to do via a management dashboard.
• Unclear trial period. Not based on time or amount of pages created. Just suddenly expect them to contact you and say something like: hey you seem to be getting a lot of use of out it, pay up or we will just delete your data if you don't want to continue."
• Too easy to share something with someone by mistake, including with their employees or past guests. We should not be having to see their names pop up.

Came here looking for alternatives. We prefer tools that have an open source and self-hosted options to migrate over to the day when — not if — they screw us over.

Worth checking out though. Gets the job done.

Quip is allows teams to collaborate on text and spreadsheet documents and organize them into either private or shared folders. Some initial impressions:

SIGN UP & RELATED

• You can sign up for a free trial, but how long is that for?
• Tedious sign-up procedure that offers you a free t-shirt in exchange for co-workers' email addresses and the promise that I'll share a doc with one of them and they edit it within 7 days. A pointless and distracting gimmick doesn't make a good impression for a productivity app.
• Privacy: website says your data is protected by encryption. Meaningless statement without details. Data in transit (TLS?), at rest on their server or end-to-end encryption? Or do they mean I can encrypt a document or folder. Who knows.
• Expensive compared to Nuclino.

FUNCTIONALITY

THE GOOD:

• You can create & organize text and spreadsheet documents, but not presentation-type documents
• Useful collaborative functionality, including sharing into diff. folders, tracking changes, flexible comment system.
• Text documents: tags, mentions, links, html support, image import, rich text format, checkboxes/to-do lists, document duplication, basic formatting (e.g. can decide if an image is centred, floats, etc.)
• Text document functionality is Quip's greatest strength.
• Text and spreadsheets are easily exported to pdf. Nice!

THE NOT SO GOOD:

• Editing a document? You can't upload a document to embed. Oh, except if you comment on it. Then you can upload a document to the comment and then it's included. Why like this? Dunno. Not obvious or handy.
• You can upload documents (e.g. pdf) to a folder. Then it's not part of the document you're working on. Which I thought was the point of Quip.com. So I tried it anyway on 97kB .pdf file. It got stuck and never uploaded. Then I checked the folder. Oh, it's there after all. I click to open/preview it. Never displays correctly.
• Spreadsheets are pretty basic.
• It seems you can't import data from a spreadsheet you already have, e.g. locally in Excel. That's a huge fail. I have a company, we have data. Quip is supposed to allow me to collaborate on my data with colleagues. I can't import my data. What?!
• Slow, slow search within documents: I set up two text based documents (one a copy of each other). That's all I had. Took 10 seconds or so to find a word both had.

Anything beyond the above either doesn't immediately stand out or isn't there. Additional functionality is largely brought in via integration with other services (e.g. Dropbox - which I don't use because of the horrific security/privacy implications), Evernote (same), Twitter (same), Slack (same...) and so on. So none of these really appeal to me.

ALTERNATIVE APPS

It's been compared to Evernote. Ignore that. This isn't a personal data organizer. Quip offers integration with Evernote, which it wouldn't if they were replacements for each other.

The most obvious alternative Quip I'm aware of is Nuclino, which is a team-based Wiki thing. Quip is also that kind of thing, but rather than collaboration on a web-page type thing it has flexible, Word-type documents. It's halfway there to being an electronic lab-book, almost.

it has integrated spreadsheet option and it's free for unlimited docs, sheets and storage in free storage... I like it very much..