I'm not affiliated or sponsored by Notion. This is personal opinion only based on real experiences.

What is Notion?

Notion is an all-in-one productivity tool. Write documents, collaborate, plan and manage tasks, set reminders, create forms, calendars and more.

I've always thought of Notion a bit like Lego. You have a series of 'Blocks', a giant canvas and the ability to create what you need and collaborate with others.

If you need to write documents, create databases and lists of content, organise and share policies or processes then Notion can do that and it does it very well. Recent additions around forms, timelines and a variety of integrations to other tools like Slack and Github that create an eco-system to help you, your team and business create, connect and collaborate. 

Why I love Notion so much

It's incredibly easy to get started

Notion has a long learning curve for sure. But it's not steep at all. You can get in, create a document, add images, add headers all using the keyboard and no extra menus. It's so easy to create a document in Notion and start exploring the different blocks. I've seen many people dive into Notion feeling overwhelmed, then get started and realise how simple it is to get a document looking great even with the most basic of blocks.

It works for individuals, teams and businesses

I've seen Notion used by all different types of companies, individuals and teams of all different sizes. Creating those first few documents, sharing them, commenting and collaborating - it's fairly frictionless to start building out a space that is useful. 

Working with different companies (and giving advice to others out there), I've seen a lot of different use cases and found very few things that Notion couldn't solve for. There's the occasional edge case sometimes, but most of the time if you focus on what you're trying to do and drop the "it should be done this way" Notion can do it.

I've seen career maps, HR policies for multiple regions, technical documentation, kanban boards, essays, CVs, personal sites. All in Notion.

I wrote about one of the journeys I took on Notion's blog, you can find it here.

It keeps getting better

When I started with Notion, there were no forms, charts or team-spaces. A lot of features that let me recommend it so heavily now hadn't been developed yet.

I've seen my feedback taken on and turned into features and ultimately improve the product. I can say categorically that Notion is better than it was a year ago, which I think is getting harder and harder to do - lots of products get stuck and don't improve, some don't manage to solve those bigger problems (looking at you Jira workflow management) but Notion does. 

The community

In 2020 Notion went big because of a viral Ticktock showing off a lesson plan. There's huge Twitter (X) communities, consultants, companies, Youtube channels and more generating guides and tutorials, templates and services - all showing what's possible with this tool. I think it's important to have those options when you are using something so critical to yourself, or your business. It's only a search away to find inspiration, or help on a formula or set up that solves your problem that you didn't think of before.

There are plenty of tools out there with little to no community, you can feel the difference when it comes to problem solving or being inspired. Notion has really embraced this community and leverages it with over 30,000 templates listed on their site all built by the community (some paid, most free). 

This is a core part of Notion's strategy, discovered by accident and still going strong 5 years later.

I've built multiple templates myself that are free, you can find them here.

Who does it work for?

For individuals

I've used Notion personally for almost 6 years now. It's been invaluable for me to store information, draft ideas, manage projects and to-do lists and for a long time was the first version of this site! 

Notion is free to use. With some inevitable limitations aimed to move you to a paid tier. They aren't so restrictive that as an individual you'd be unable to do what you needed to. Store documents, create your own 'second brain' or manage your tasks or projects.

I don't think the paid tier for an individual is too expensive for what you get either, allowing you to share pages and collaborate, while giving you unlimited restrictions in your own workspace.

I would not recommend AI at the moment (February 2025) - I hope Notion reduces the cost and integrates it into a base price rather than having it as an add-on. But fundamentally you're better off with a subscription to ChatGPT or similar as Notion AI doesn't give you the same feature set.

For teams and businesses 

I've brought Notion into the last two companies I've worked at, moving away from Atlassians Confluence in both cases.

Notion becomes a different beast when using it for a company or even a team. The problems you are solving are largely the same, you're still creating documents, managing tasks and storing files. 

What does change is how you manage documents, collaborate and share. 

You will need to think very carefully about how you organise the overall structure of your Notion workspace. Where do you store your projects? What about your HR policies? Company comms? Who has access to what? How quickly can people find what they need?

Another challenge is likely to be people moving to this new tool or at the very least using it. Change is always hard and this is no different. Even if you are starting from scratch, processes and behaviours will need to change and you'll need to find ways to make this as frictionless as possible.

Notion thankfully has a set of tools from templates, to team-spaces to be able to support you and your business. Their training, CSM and community is strong and there's no shortage of media out there to help.

The community is one of the stand out things for Notion, with hundreds of consultants, template builders and guide authors to provide help and guidance.

Any limitations? Things I should know?

Notion is online only.

Notion is completely online. There is no offline version as of February 2025. It's on the roadmap, but has been for a while.

Notion is still a growing company and so is the space.

Notion is also still growing and scaling. They've been growing massively since 2020 and exploded during Covid. It's been a long time since there's been performance issues and that's clearly been a focus for a few years and never gone back.

Newer features are still 'early' - AI, Calendar, Mail.

It's clear Notion wants an eco-system, they launched Notion Calendar to general release in 2024 and have a beta for Notion Mail (February 2025).
When ChatGPT exploded AI onto the scene, Notion was one of the first implementations I saw done in a productivity tool. 

But that doesn't mean it's great. While there's a huge potential for all of these things, Calendar and Mail only really work with Gmail (and therefore are more of a proxy app) and don't quite feel part of the eco-system yet. A good example is databases and calendar, it's incredibly tricky to get working and isn't quite as frictionless as it could be, yet anyway.

But you'd still recommend it?

I would. Absolutely. I've tried a few other tools similar, like Obsidian, Coda and Tana. There is a lot of similarity and in some cases you'd be hard pressed to find a difference when looking at two screenshots. If there was one to watch, I'd probably say Tana.

I believe Notion is still the most feature rich, well crafted and best supported tools out there. The team are truly passionate about crafting the best experience for their users and have created an eco-system that just works whether you're an individual, small team, or massive company - Notion can help stay coordinated, aligned and reduce friction when creating and sharing information.