Review
Six months, one company wiki, three abandoned dashboards and a database habit I had to break. An honest look at what Notion is genuinely good at.
As a company wiki and shared documentation home, Notion is close to unbeatable. As a task manager it is fine, and as a personal life-operating-system it is a beautifully designed procrastination trap.
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Notion has two reputations. To teams, it is the place the company handbook finally stopped being a folder of stale documents. To individuals online, it is the app people spend a weekend configuring and never open again. Both are accurate, and after six months of daily use I can point to exactly where the line sits.
Typing in Notion is quick and quiet. Slash commands do everything, pasted content lands cleanly, tables and callouts look good with no effort. Compared with Confluence — its nearest enterprise rival — writing a page takes half the time and the result is far more readable.
That matters more than any feature list, because documentation that is unpleasant to write does not get written.
Relations, rollups, filtered views and formulas give you a small no-code application inside your notes. Our editorial calendar, review pipeline and supplier list all live in one now, each with a different view of the same data.
Heavy pages with several databases take a beat to load, and the mobile app is slower than the desktop one. Offline access remains the weak point: better than it was, still not something to trust on a flight without checking first.
Ten dollars per user per month for Plus, fifteen for Business, and AI billed on top. The AI is a useful summariser and a mediocre writer — worth adding for teams that keep long meeting notes, skippable for everyone else. The free personal plan remains one of the best deals in software.
Use Notion as your team's shared brain and it repays you every week. Use it as a personal productivity system and be honest about whether you are working or decorating. Six months in, our wiki is thriving and my personal dashboard has been deleted twice.
| Free plan | Unlimited pages for personal use |
|---|---|
| Plus plan | $10/user/mo annually |
| Business plan | $15/user/mo annually with SAML SSO |
| Notion AI | Add-on, per user per month |
| Offline | Partial, recently improved |
| Apps | Web, macOS, Windows, iOS, Android |
Scores from our own testing. Prices are launch RRP in USD.
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