Hey @Sebastien_Fichot
Thanks for the great feedback! Sorry to hear you’ve only had a low success rate with this template - I’ve not heard from anyone else with this complaint so appreciate you bringing it up.
1. The n8n forms issue seems to be quite common and from what I understand, this is affecting many self-hosted and locally-hosted users. I’m not sure of the root cause but some have suggested it’s likely related to how webhooks are configured for the instance.
The good news is the forms are optional and technically not required to run this template - they’re just a nicer user interface! Try swapping the forms out for webhooks or go with a simple manual trigger and “Edit Fields” node.
2. Updating Notion is a pain! The LLM-conversion of “markdown to Notion blocks” approach I’ve used wasn’t the best idea but allowed usage with installing external libraries/dependencies.
If you are self-hosting/locally-hosted, I would suggest swapping this part out with code-based solutions such as the following (note I haven’t tested any of these so YMMV)
- 【Now Available】Notion ⇄ Markdown Conversion Community Node
- GitHub - tryfabric/martian: Markdown to Notion: Convert Markdown and GitHub Flavoured Markdown to Notion API Blocks and RichText 🔀📝
- GitHub - brittonhayes/notionmd: 🪄 Convert Markdown into Notion Blocks
3. n8n performance feeling slugglish depends on many things eg. If you have a lot for data fetched and held in memory, this is known to degrade the canvas responsiveness! For this particular template, here are my thoughts
- Reasoning models are slow in general but get slower the more learnings/context it gets. I think the first few cycles take 1-2mins but by the 20th cycle, the model might be taking 10+ mins to respond.
- Webscraping might be slow because I’m trying to keep things cheap - every request spins-up a new Apify instance and shuts it down after so they’re not long lived. You might want to swap this for other services like Jina.ai which might return faster results (trade off is less control).
- Markdown-to-notion-blocks conversion is using an LLM which for 100+ headings, paragraphs etc actually takes ages! Swap out for custom node or code-based solution as mentioned.
Finally, this type of template is resource intensive. Boosting your server specs (easy) or switching to queue mode (harder) is generally the way to get better performance.
Hope this helps!