Notion Alternatives in 2026: The Practical Guide for B2B SaaS Teams

Notion still works. That is worth saying upfront, because this guide is not an argument against it. But three things have shifted the calculus for a lot of SaaS teams in 2026: full AI now requires the Business plan at $20 per seat per month, performance degrades on large workspaces, and the export story for relational databases remains incomplete. If your team is 10 to 50 people and treating Notion as your operational backbone, the annual spend is real and the lock-in is real.

This guide helps you make a clear-eyed decision. It covers the tools that actually replace Notion for specific jobs, the honest cost comparison at team scale, what you will genuinely lose if you switch, and how to migrate without losing three months of productivity.

Why SaaS Teams Are Re-Evaluating Notion in 2026

The AI Pricing Restructure

The biggest change in 2026 is the AI bundling shift. Until May 2025, Notion AI was a $10 per user per month add-on available on any plan. That add-on was retired. Full Notion AI — including the Notion Agent, AI Meeting Notes, and enterprise search — now requires the Business plan at $20 per user per month (billed annually). Custom Agents add a further metered layer: $10 per 1,000 Notion credits on top of your seat price, with no rollover. A 25-person team that was paying $10 per seat on Plus is now looking at $20 per seat on Business to maintain the same AI access. That is $6,000 more per year at 25 seats, with no change to anything else.

Performance at Scale

Notion loads slowly on large workspaces. Teams that have used it for two or more years with hundreds of databases, long-form pages, and nested structures report meaningful latency — pages that take 3 to 5 seconds to load, search that misses recent updates, and mobile that lags behind desktop. For a fast-moving SaaS team, this becomes a daily friction cost that compounds.

Offline and Mobile Gaps

Notion requires an internet connection to function fully. The mobile app caches some content but editing offline is unreliable. For distributed teams with frequent travel or spotty connections, this is a workflow blocker that most tools built after 2020 have solved.

Export Incompleteness

Exporting a Notion workspace preserves pages and basic content but loses relational database structure: rollup values, formula results, linked views, and cross-database relations all break on export. If your team leaves Notion, it cannot simply download and open its data in another tool at full fidelity. This is not unique to Notion, but it is worth naming explicitly before any switching conversation.

What Notion Still Does Well

Real-time multiplayer editing across large teams, a mature permissions model, polished public sharing, a broad integration ecosystem, and the flexibility to build almost any internal tool from a blank canvas. Nothing in this guide replaces all of these at the same depth. The question is whether your team's primary use case requires all of them, or whether a more focused tool serves the job better.

How to Choose: A Decision Framework for 2026

Before evaluating specific tools, identify your team's primary job-to-be-done. Most Notion use cases fall into one of five categories:

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Three questions sharpen the decision from here.

How much do you value data ownership? If the answer is "completely" (compliance requirements, privacy mandates, or just principle), you need a local-first or self-hosted tool. Obsidian, Anytype, and AppFlowy are the serious options.

How central is real-time multiplayer editing? If 10 or more people edit the same workspace concurrently and depend on live sync, many alternatives will disappoint. Coda and ClickUp handle this well. Obsidian does not.

What is your AI cost tolerance? If you need AI deeply integrated into your workspace, Notion Business is still a reasonable option at $20 per seat. If you want AI without the workspace cost, tools like Obsidian with Claude or Anytype's model-agnostic approach keep AI costs separate and controllable.

Quick Picks by Use Case

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Deep Dive: The Strongest Alternatives in 2026

Obsidian — Local Markdown Ownership

Best for: Individual contributors, researchers, and technical writers who want permanent ownership of their notes as plain-text Markdown files.

Obsidian's value proposition has not changed: your notes live on your device as plain .md files, readable in any text editor, now and forever. No vendor can take that away. The plugin ecosystem has grown to over 1,700 community plugins in 2026, covering everything from Dataview (query-style database views on your vault) to Git sync to daily note templates.

Strengths. Completely free for personal use. Sync is $4 per user per month (annual), Publish (turning notes into a public website) is $8 per site per month. Commercial licenses are $50 per user per year. The old Sync Standard/Plus split is gone — it is one plan. The plugin ecosystem covers most productivity workflows a solo practitioner or small team needs.

Real weaknesses. Obsidian is not a team collaboration tool. Shared vaults via Sync plus other services are functional but not smooth — real-time editing can cause sync conflicts and file corruption if not managed carefully. There is no native relational database equivalent to Notion's database views (Dataview approximates it but requires learning a query syntax). The mobile app is functional but slower to start than cloud-native alternatives.

TCO for a 10-person team. $4 per user per month for Sync + $50 per user per year for commercial licenses = approximately $98 per month. With no relational databases and limited multiplayer, this works for teams of primarily individual contributors, not cross-functional wikis.

Migration notes. Markdown export from Notion is clean for pages. Databases export as CSV, which can be opened in Obsidian as tables or processed through Dataview. Relational structure is lost.

SaaS relevance. Strong for technical documentation, personal research vaults, and content writer notes. Weak for cross-functional team wikis with linked databases.

AppFlowy — Closest Open-Source Notion Shape

Best for: Teams that want Notion's structure — databases, wikis, kanban — with full data sovereignty and no per-seat SaaS bill.

AppFlowy is built with Rust and Flutter and is the most structurally similar open-source alternative to Notion. It has documents, relational databases, kanban boards, and an AI layer. The free tier supports two members with 5 GB storage. Pro is $10 per user per month (annual), which includes unlimited storage, up to 50 workspace members, 100 guest editors, and unlimited AI responses.

Strengths. Self-hostable at no license cost (though multi-user self-hosting requires an AppFlowy self-hosted license). The structure maps closely to Notion: blocks, databases, views, and nested pages feel familiar to a Notion user. AI is included in Pro, not gated behind a higher tier. Active open-source development with regular releases.

Real weaknesses. Self-hosted multi-user collaboration requires more infrastructure management than most SaaS teams want. Performance on large databases is behind Notion's. Mobile apps are less polished. The plugin ecosystem is smaller than Obsidian's or Notion's. Some advanced Notion database features (rollups, complex filtered views) are still in development.

TCO for a 25-person team. Pro at $10 per user per month = $250 per month. Versus Notion Business at $20 per seat = $500 per month. At 25 seats, AppFlowy is $3,000 per year cheaper, with AI included.

Migration notes. AppFlowy has a Notion importer that handles pages and basic databases reasonably well. Relational database structure requires manual rebuild.

SaaS relevance. Best fit for teams with data sovereignty requirements or developer-led teams comfortable managing infrastructure. Weaker for teams that need polished public sharing or the Notion integration ecosystem.

Anytype — Local-First Object Model

Best for: Privacy-conscious teams and individuals who want a structured knowledge system with end-to-end encryption and peer-to-peer sync.

Anytype is architecturally different from every other tool in this list. Instead of pages and databases, everything is an "Object" — a note, a task, a person, a project — connected by relations to form a graph of knowledge. End-to-end encryption means Anytype cannot read your data. Sync uses a peer-to-peer protocol built on IPFS.

Strengths. Free tier includes 1 GB network space, 3 shared spaces, and 3 space members — enough to evaluate seriously. Builder plan is $99 per year for individuals and small teams (not per seat), covering 128 GB network space and up to 10 editors per shared space. The object model is more expressive than page-based tools once you internalize the mental model. No data is on a vendor's server in readable form.

Real weaknesses. The object model has a significant learning curve — teams expecting a Notion-like transition will spend weeks adapting. No native web collaboration or mobile web access. Large-scale concurrent editing is behind cloud-first tools. Business plans require contacting Anytype directly — pricing is not published for larger teams.

TCO for a 10-person team. At Builder pricing ($99/year flat for up to 10 editors), this is approximately $8 per month total. At Business plan pricing for larger teams, contact Anytype for a quote.

Migration notes. No official Notion importer. Markdown and CSV files can be imported, but relational structure requires manual reconstruction.

SaaS relevance. Strong for research-heavy and compliance-sensitive teams. Weak for teams that need a polished team wiki accessible to non-technical stakeholders.

Coda — Docs That Become Lightweight Apps

Best for: Teams that need documents with database logic, automations, and buttons built in — essentially a Notion replacement for teams that were using Notion's formula layer heavily.

Coda's unique pricing model is worth understanding before anything else. Only "doc makers" (people who create or edit documents) pay. Viewers are always free. A 50-person team with 10 people building docs and 40 people reading them pays $100 per month on Pro (10 makers x $10). The same setup on Notion Business would be $1,000 per month. For organizations with a high ratio of viewers to builders, Coda is dramatically cheaper.

Strengths. Formulas, buttons, and automations work across the document layer. Pages can behave like lightweight apps — forms, conditional logic, dynamic tables — without writing code. Integrations with Jira, Slack, and other SaaS tools are strong. The viewer-free pricing model is genuinely powerful for larger teams.

Real weaknesses. The doc-maker pricing confuses teams until it clicks. Pro is $10 per doc maker per month but Team is $30 per doc maker per month — the jump is steep for teams that need the Team features (version history, advanced permissions, bulk exports). Viewer experience is functional but read-only users cannot contribute. Real-time multiplayer is present but less fluid than Notion's.

TCO for a 25-person team (10 doc makers, 15 viewers). Pro: 10 x $10 = $100 per month. Versus Notion Business: 25 x $20 = $500 per month. Coda is $4,800 per year cheaper in this configuration.

Migration notes. No official Notion importer. Pages migrate reasonably through manual copy-paste or Markdown export. Database structure requires rebuild.

SaaS relevance. Strong for internal tools, request trackers, content operations systems, and lightweight approval workflows. Weaker for public-facing knowledge bases.

ClickUp — Project Execution + Docs

Best for: Teams that were using Notion primarily for project and task management and want a tool purpose-built for that job.

ClickUp is not a like-for-like Notion replacement. It is a project management platform that added a docs layer. If your Notion usage was dominated by task tracking, sprint planning, Gantt views, and goal management, ClickUp does all of that better and at lower cost.

Strengths. The free tier is genuinely useful (unlimited tasks and users). The Unlimited plan at $10 per user per month unlocks serious capabilities. Business plan at $12 per user per month adds timelines, workload management, and advanced automation. The docs feature is functional for wikis and meeting notes. Integrations with Jira, GitHub, Slack, and HubSpot are mature.

Real weaknesses. Feature density is overwhelming for new users. Expect 2 to 3 weeks for a team to reach productivity. The docs feature is a secondary feature — it works but it is not as flexible as Notion's block-based editor. Large-scale knowledge management is not where ClickUp shines.

TCO for a 25-person team. Business at $12 per user per month = $300 per month. Versus Notion Business: $500 per month. ClickUp is $2,400 per year cheaper at this team size.

Migration notes. Notion databases can be exported as CSV and imported into ClickUp as lists or databases. Hierarchical page structure requires manual rebuild.

SaaS relevance. Strong for product and engineering teams running sprints and roadmaps. Weaker for content and knowledge-heavy teams.

Craft — Beautiful Documents (Apple-First)

Best for: Writers, designers, and small teams on Apple devices who prioritize document aesthetics and fast writing experience over database power.

Craft is the most polished document writing experience in this category on Apple hardware. It is native macOS and iOS, fast to start, and produces beautiful output. The free plan covers personal use. Pro is $4.99 per user per month — the lowest price of any credible Notion alternative with multiplayer editing.

Real weaknesses. Windows support exists but is behind the Apple experience. Relational databases are not a Craft feature. It is a document and note-taking tool, not a project management or knowledge-base platform. Not a realistic replacement for teams using Notion's database layer heavily.

SaaS relevance. Useful for design teams, founders, and content writers who want a fast, beautiful writing environment. Not a full Notion replacement for SaaS operations teams.

Other Notable Options

AFFiNE combines docs, databases, and a whiteboard in one canvas. Open-source with self-hosting available (3-user cap unless on cloud). Pro at $6.75 per month (annual). Best for teams that want the whiteboard alongside their docs. Weaker on mobile and large-scale team features.

Outline is a clean, Notion-flavored team wiki purpose-built for knowledge bases. Self-hostable for free. Cloud from $10 per user per month. Strong search and permissions. No relational databases. Best for teams that primarily need a company wiki rather than a full workspace.

Logseq is a local-first outliner built on Markdown and plain text. Free and open-source. Strong for personal PKM and daily notes with a graph-based linking model. Not designed for team collaboration.

Capacities is a typed-object personal knowledge manager similar to Anytype in philosophy but with a more polished visual interface. Strong for personal research and second-brain workflows. No team collaboration.

Heptabase is a visual research tool with a whiteboard-first canvas. Strong for synthesizing large amounts of research. Not a team knowledge base or project management tool.

Pricing and Total Cost of Ownership at Realistic Team Sizes

All prices are annual billing rates verified from official pricing pages, July 2026. Always confirm at source before purchasing.

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The cost story: for a 25-seat team currently on Notion Business, switching to AppFlowy Pro saves $3,000 per year with AI included. Coda saves more if your team has a high viewer-to-builder ratio. Obsidian costs approximately the same as Notion Plus but without multiplayer databases.

What You Actually Lose When You Leave Notion

This section is important enough to read before looking at any alternative.

Real-time multiplayer editing. Notion's multiplayer is mature, fast, and reliable for large teams. Most alternatives handle this less gracefully. AppFlowy and Coda are credible but not identical. Obsidian, Anytype, and Logseq are individual-first tools with limited or no live multiplayer.

Relational databases with rollups and formulas. Notion's database layer — linked databases, rollup values, formula fields, filtered views — is the hardest thing to replace. AppFlowy and Coda come closest. No tool replicates it exactly without manual rebuild.

Polished public sharing. Notion pages shared publicly are clean, fast, and require no setup. Some alternatives (Outline, Craft, Obsidian Publish) handle this but require more configuration.

The ecosystem. Notion integrations with Zapier, Make, HubSpot, Slack, and hundreds of other tools are mature. Most alternatives have fewer native integrations and require workarounds.

Template community. Notion's template library is enormous. Switching means rebuilding operational systems from scratch or finding community equivalents.

If all four of these are critical to your team's daily operations, staying on Notion — or switching to a hybrid model — is often the correct decision. Do not switch because an alternative is cheaper. Switch because it fits your primary job better and you can accept what you are giving up.

Migration Reality Check: Effort, Risk, and a Practical Playbook

Export Realities

Notion exports pages as Markdown or HTML files and databases as CSV. Relations, rollups, and formula values are not preserved in exported files. What you get out is: pages as text, database rows as flat CSV files, and images as separate files in folders. Linked database views are lost. Formula columns export as their last computed value, not the formula logic.

Migration Difficulty by Tool

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The 90-Day Playbook

Weeks 1-2: Export and audit. Export your entire Notion workspace. Identify your most-used databases and categorize them: pure documentation (no relations), relational databases (linked databases, rollups), and hybrid pages (mix of text and embedded databases). This audit determines migration complexity.

Weeks 3-6: Dual-run. Run the new tool in parallel. Move documentation-only content first — meeting notes, SOPs, onboarding docs. These migrate cleanly. Do not migrate relational databases yet.

Weeks 7-10: Rebuild critical databases. Rebuild your three to five most critical relational databases natively in the new tool. Do not attempt to import them; build from scratch using the exported CSV as reference data. This is the hardest work and the most common failure point.

Weeks 11-12: Cutover. Move the team to the new tool as primary. Archive (do not delete) the Notion workspace for 30 days. Handle questions and edge cases as they arise.

The most common failure mode: teams underestimate the relational database rebuild and try to rush it. The second most common: migrating everything at once and spending weeks untangling a partially-migrated state.

Hybrid Stacks That Work for SaaS Teams

Pure replacement is often the wrong goal. Many high-functioning SaaS teams run a hybrid stack deliberately.

Notion (team collaboration) + Obsidian (personal knowledge). Keep Notion for shared databases, project trackers, and meeting notes that require multiplayer. Each individual maintains a personal Obsidian vault for research, note-taking, and writing drafts. The handoff: when a personal note becomes team knowledge, it moves to Notion. This captures Obsidian's offline and ownership benefits without losing Notion's collaborative layer.

Coda (internal tools) + Obsidian or Anytype (individual knowledge). Use Coda for the operational layer — intake forms, content calendars, approval workflows, and reporting dashboards. Use Obsidian or Anytype individually. This is particularly effective for content and marketing teams where operations need a structured app-like tool but individual contributors prefer local ownership.

AppFlowy (team wiki) + Notion (legacy databases). For teams not yet ready for a full migration: move new documentation to AppFlowy while maintaining legacy relational databases in Notion. Run this for six months to evaluate AppFlowy's database maturity before full cutover.

Hybrid stacks add context-switching overhead. They make sense when the cost of losing a specific capability (Notion's multiplayer, AppFlowy's ownership) exceeds the friction of maintaining two tools.

Implications for Design Systems, Content Ops, and Public Websites

How you document things internally affects how your website and design system perform externally. This is a connection most tool-evaluation guides skip.

Design-system documentation. If your team uses Notion to document design tokens, component guidelines, or brand systems, tool choice affects how easily those docs can be published publicly, integrated with Webflow, or kept in sync with a living design system. Outline's clean wiki structure and Obsidian Publish both produce public documentation that integrates better with technical workflows than Notion's public pages, which are visually polished but hard to structure programmatically. For teams building a design system that needs to coexist with a Webflow site, our Figma design system guide covers the upstream documentation requirements that your knowledge tool needs to support.

Content operations for SEO. Teams using Notion as a content calendar and editorial workflow tool should evaluate how the alternative handles content velocity. Coda's formula layer makes it straightforward to build a content tracker with automated status changes, publication checklists, and distribution workflows. ClickUp has a native content management template. Notion Plus (without AI) remains competitive here if AI is not the primary need.

Public knowledge bases. If your team uses Notion to publish a public help center, documentation site, or resource library, switching tool affects your external SEO. Notion's public pages are indexed by Google but lack custom URL control, structured metadata, and technical SEO depth. Outline produces cleaner public documentation with more control. For teams whose documentation needs to become a meaningful SEO asset, the better path is often a purpose-built knowledge base published through or alongside Webflow, rather than a Notion public page. Our Webflow development team has helped SaaS teams migrate documentation from Notion into structured Webflow CMS setups that perform significantly better in search.

Technical marketing infrastructure. The knowledge tool a SaaS team uses shapes how easily technical marketers can build, update, and publish content at scale. Tools with good API access and predictable export formats (AppFlowy, Outline, Coda) integrate more cleanly into content pipelines than tools with proprietary export formats or inconsistent API behavior.

Final Recommendation Matrix

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The honest verdict: there is no drop-in Notion replacement in 2026. Every alternative wins a specific job and loses one that Notion handles. The teams that switch successfully are the ones that identified their primary job clearly, accepted the trade-offs in writing, and ran a structured dual-run migration rather than a "switch everything on Monday" approach. The teams that regret switching are the ones that picked the cheapest option without auditing what they were giving up.

Work with Hedrick

If your knowledge tool evaluation is connected to a public website, design system, or Webflow migration, that is a more complex project than just picking a new tool. Hedrick is a Webflow-exclusive development and design agency. We help SaaS teams build the documentation and content infrastructure that supports both internal operations and public-facing SEO — from Webflow CMS architecture to design system documentation that stays in sync with your design files.

Get in touch

A Note on Sources

Notion pricing (Free $0, Plus $10/user/month, Business $20/user/month annually; Custom Agents at $10 per 1,000 credits) verified from multiple sources including felloai.com and usecarly.com, July 2026. Confirm current pricing at notion.com/pricing before purchasing. The standalone Notion AI add-on was retired in May 2025; full AI now requires Business tier.

Obsidian pricing (Sync $4/user/month annually, Publish $8/site/month annually, Commercial $50/user/year) verified from PulseSignal citing Obsidian's official pricing page, July 31, 2026.

AppFlowy pricing (Pro $10/user/month annually) verified from toolquestor.com and AppFlowy's official documentation.

Anytype pricing (Builder $99/year, free tier included, Business by request) verified from checkthat.ai citing Anytype's official pricing, July 2026.

Coda pricing (Pro $10/doc maker/month, Team $30/doc maker/month) verified from costbench.com and aiproductivity.ai, June-July 2026. Note Coda's doc-maker model — viewers are always free.

ClickUp pricing (Unlimited $10/user/month, Business $12/user/month) verified from multiple sources, 2026.

All prices are annual billing rates. Monthly billing is typically 20% higher. Verify all pricing at official vendor sites before committing.

Frequently Asked Questions

What Is the Best Notion Alternative in 2026?

It depends on your primary job. For local markdown ownership: Obsidian. For the closest open-source Notion structure: AppFlowy. For docs with automation and viewer-free pricing: Coda. For project management: ClickUp. For encrypted local-first with a structured object model: Anytype. No single tool replicates Notion's full feature set — every alternative wins a specific job and trades off others.

Is Obsidian Better Than Notion for Teams?

No, for most teams. Obsidian is a personal knowledge management tool with limited multiplayer capability. Shared vaults via Obsidian Sync can cause conflicts with concurrent editing. It works well for teams of individual contributors who each maintain a personal vault, but it is not a replacement for a shared relational database or team wiki. For personal use, Obsidian is significantly cheaper and more ownership-preserving.

What Is the Closest Open-Source Notion Alternative?

AppFlowy. It is structurally the most similar to Notion: documents, relational databases, kanban boards, and nested pages. It is built in Rust and Flutter, self-hostable, and free at the base tier. Pro is $10 per user per month with AI included. The main trade-offs are lower mobile polish and some advanced Notion database features still in development.

How Much Does It Cost to Switch from Notion at Team Scale?

Direct tool cost savings vary significantly. A 25-person team on Notion Business ($500/month) that moves to AppFlowy Pro ($250/month) saves $3,000 per year. The real cost of switching is not the tool price — it is the migration labor. Rebuilding relational databases from scratch and running a dual-system period typically costs 4 to 12 weeks of reduced team productivity depending on workspace complexity. Factor this into the total switching cost.

Can I Fully Migrate Notion Databases Without Losing Relations?

No. Notion exports databases as flat CSV files. Rollup values, formula results, and cross-database relations are not preserved in the export. Every tool that receives a Notion export gets flat data that needs relational structure rebuilt manually. This is the single highest-effort part of any Notion migration and the most common reason migrations stall or get abandoned.

What Are the Best Self-Hosted Notion Alternatives?

AppFlowy (self-hosted with an AppFlowy license), Outline (clean wiki, free self-host), AFFiNE (docs and whiteboard, 3-user cap on self-hosted), and Anytype (local-first by default, no server required). AppFlowy is the best self-hosted alternative for teams that need relational databases and wikis. Outline is the best for teams that primarily need a clean wiki without database complexity.

Does Any Alternative Match Notion's Real-Time Collaboration?

Coda comes closest for document collaboration. ClickUp is comparable for project management workflows. AppFlowy's collaboration is functional but less fluid than Notion's. Obsidian, Anytype, and Logseq are not designed for real-time multiplayer editing at team scale. If live collaborative editing across a large team is a primary requirement, Notion remains the strongest option in this category.

How Do I Handle Notion AI Costs with Alternatives?

Two approaches. First, move to an alternative that includes AI at a lower per-seat cost — AppFlowy Pro includes unlimited AI responses at $10 per user per month, versus Notion Business at $20. Second, decouple AI from your workspace entirely and use a dedicated AI tool (Claude, Perplexity, or similar) alongside a lower-cost workspace. This is increasingly common for teams where most members do not use Notion's AI features daily but are paying Business tier pricing to unlock them for a subset of users.

Should SaaS Teams Use a Hybrid Notion + Local Stack?

Often yes. The most functional hybrid for a SaaS team: Notion for shared databases, project trackers, and meeting notes that require multiplayer, plus Obsidian or Anytype for individual research and knowledge management. This preserves Notion's collaborative layer while capturing local ownership benefits for personal knowledge. The overhead is manageable if you establish clear rules for when content moves from personal vault to shared Notion workspace.

How Does Choosing a Notion Alternative Affect Design-System Documentation and Public Content?

Significantly, and in ways most evaluation guides ignore. Tools with clean Markdown export and strong API access (Outline, AppFlowy, Obsidian) integrate better with technical content pipelines, design system documentation workflows, and Webflow CMS setups than tools with proprietary export formats. If your documentation needs to become a public SEO asset or stay in sync with a living design system, tool choice affects content velocity and technical complexity downstream. For teams building documentation that feeds into a Webflow site, our Figma design system guide and Webflow development services are natural next steps after the knowledge tool decision is made.

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