Over the years, we’ve tried just about every project management solution out there.
From Trello and Asana to ClickUp, Coda, Notion, and Airtable, we’ve managed our work at one time or another in all of them. While Notion is a great tool, there are dozens of others out there, each with its own quirks.
In this review, we’ll cover what it’s good at, where it could improve, and which plan you should choose—all based on our hands-on experience.
Notion Compared to the Best Project Management Software
Project management software is only as good as its ability to fit how you work.
Our goal isn’t to tell you which option is the best of the best, but to help you find one that syncs with your style. In light of that, Notion may not be the right fit (even though it worked well for us).
Here’s a quick overview of our favorite Notion alternatives.
Monday.com is similar in terms of flexibility and customization, but comes with more visualizations, advanced automations, and project management features.
ClickUp is a traditional project management tool that’s easy to set up. It focuses on fostering teamwork with a wide range of collaboration tools at your disposal. It’s less customizable than Monday.com and Notion, but can work well if you work well with traditional project management styles.
On the other end of the spectrum, Smartsheet delivers advanced work management, automation, and no-code capabilities to build entirely custom systems.
Check out our full list of the best project management software to learn more about our favorite tools, how we used them, and the standout qualities of each one. You can also check out our head-to-head comparisons of Notion vs. Monday, Airtable vs Notion, or Notion vs Asana to see how Notion stacks up to its biggest competitors.
Since you’re still here, let’s get to the review.
Notion: The Good and the Bad
Notion is customizable and insanely powerful if you’re willing to put in the work to configure it. That power and flexibility doesn’t come without it’s downsides—it can be hard to get started and the platform will likely feel messy until you get it right.
We’ve used it to manage our work in the past and we organized all of our research for this review (plus wrote the entire draft in Notion) so we could learn about it’s newer capabilities.
What Notion Is Good At
Unmatched versatility: When configured well, Notion can replace a bunch of tools. You won’t need separate solutions for task management, note-taking, documentation, CRM, agency management, and content creation. You can set up Notion to fulfill all of these needs in a tailored workspace.
Say you run a marketing agency that juggles multiple clients and campaigns at once. You can create separate pages for each client to store details like objectives, timelines, and key documents. Within each page, you’ll be able to build task lists, calendars, and content libraries to keep everyone on track. With unlimited storage and content blocks on most plans, you have the freedom to add as many clients and campaigns as you need.
Asynchronous collaboration: Inside the Notion platform, your team can work together in real-time or on their own time. With one place to store everything from documents and spreadsheets to tasks, notebooks, and project boards, everything is centralized. It’s easy for everyone to find what they need… when they need it. Updates happen in real-time, too, so you’ll always be in sync with the latest changes.
Notion’s flexible infrastructure means you can assign owners and collaborators to any page or block of information. You can track every change and users can leave comments to provide feedback, ask questions, or move the discussion along. Customizable notifications ensure that no update, mention, or comment goes unseen, eliminating the need to chase down colleagues.
Plus, it integrates with tools you already use, like Slack and Google Calendar, for seamless communication and coordination across platforms.
Relational databases: Notion makes it easy to connect and manage information across databases. You don’t need a degree in computer science to build them, either. You’ll be able to create multifaceted interfaces that bring together all types of content—text, images, files, clients, projects, whatever you want—into one place.
Say you want to link your project management tasks to key clients and files. In Notion, it’s a breeze. Connecting your tasks database to your client and file databases takes a few clicks. Now you have a holistic view of everything for each project. Need to see all the tasks due this week for Client X? Filter for that client and date range. Wondering if you’re still waiting on feedback for Task Y? Check the relation to see if the file has been uploaded yet. With roll-ups, you can even display total task counts for each client or project. The intuitive interface means you can visualize and manage complex data in whatever way makes sense for your needs.
While Notion won’t replace a full-scale database solution, its simple yet powerful option for anyone looking to organize information in a flexible, user-friendly way.
Everything’s a page: This concept is the secret behind Notion’s unparalleled flexibility. A page in Notion can be as straightforward as a document with some text and images. But it can also be a doorway to an interconnected wiki or a database housing tasks, events, contacts, and more. Each page is a blank canvas for you to customize as needed.
50+ block types: Blocks in Notion serve as unique elements within a page, helping you build out pages that can do a whole lot more than store content. Notion comes with over 50 different block types that you can place anywhere with an easy drag-and-drop interface.
Want to embed a Google Map visualization or a social media post? Drop in an Embed block. Running equations and computations? Deploy the Math block and Notion’s LaTeX syntax. AI blocks, buttons that trigger automations, synced blocks that update everywhere—with a quick slash command, you can implement it into a page.
Granular sharing permissions: Notion gives you full control over sharing workspaces, pages and content. You can create permission groups that automatically provide the right level of access to certain team members—all you have to do is add someone to a group and they’ll have access to what they need.
You can also invite guests and outside collaborators to specific pages without sharing your whole workspace. On Notion’s Enterprise plan, admins have advanced controls like overriding settings for certain groups, restricting page sharing, disabling guests for select pages, or applying rules across the entire workspace. They can also designate special admin users who can make changes but not view billing details.
Notion AI add-on: Although it costs an extra $8 to $10 per user per month, it might be useful to you if you need help organizing your ideas, summarizing docs or meetings, generating content, brainstorming, or anything else ChatGPT can help with. While Notion AI turbocharges productivity, it does have its limits. It won’t write full blog posts or memos from scratch—rather than making something out of nothing, it’s meant to enhance and support human thinking, not replace it.
What Notion Is Lacking
Out-of-the-box readiness: Making sense of how you want to use Notion can be overwhelming and time consuming if you’re looking for a hit-the-ground-running sort of solution. Its flexibility can leave you unsure of where or how to start. You’ll need to invest time thinking through how to best structure workspaces, pages, projects, tasks, and tables for your team. And understanding Notion’s advanced features, like relational databases, involves a steep learning curve if you aren’t sure what they are.
It took us weeks of building, testing, and tweaking to get things right for us. But, because Notion is so flexible, there’s also no consensus on the “right” way to use it. Notion offers templates to get you started, but ultimately you’re on your own to figure out what works for you.
Easy text formatting: Building documents and formatting content is very different from what you’re probably used to (i.e. word processors like Google Docs). Lists, in particular, work differently in Notion and can be frustrating until you’ve mastered the nuances.
Pasting content into Notion from other sources often doesn’t translate well and can result in issues like extra spaces, undefined bullet points, and lost formatting. Notion follows its own set of rules for bringing in and displaying content, so you’ll often have to clean up pasted text. That being said, Notion offers some elements of customization not found in traditional document tools, like layouts with up to five columns and the ability to embed anything.
Key project management features: Notion offers robust project management capabilities, but is missing a few nice-to-have features found in other tools. Notion lacks built-in time tracking, though you can add time manually using custom fields–you won’t get timers or anything like that. Surprisingly, there’s also no easy way to create charts and graphs from your data.
To analyze productivity, workload, or other metrics, you’ll have to export or pay for an add-on. For some, Notion’s missing reports won’t matter, but data-driven teams may want better reporting.
The software is also missing built-in team chat that so many other PM platforms deliver. You can comment on tasks and projects, but Notion isn’t meant to replace chat apps like Slack. Notion’s Slack integration helps fill this gap to an extent, though.
Suitability for large databases: Notion’s databases have significant limitations for large, complex data sets or intense calculations. For example, pasting in large amounts of data to a Notion database often caused the app to crash or freeze on us. In our experience, adding around 1,000 rows of information or more overwhelmed the platform, forcing us to close and start over. Notion’s performance also suffers as your databases grow bigger or you add more advanced formulas.
Notion also fails to offer data visualization options for interactive analysis or reporting. You have access only to raw numbers, text, and basic sorting. To visualize data in charts, graphs, or dashboards, you’ll need to export Notion information to other tools or purchase premium third-party tools.
Notion Plans and Pricing
Notion doesn’t have different products, but it does have four different plans and a separate AI add-on. Those plans include:
- Free – unlimited for solo users and a usage-based free trial for teams
- Plus – $8 (annual) or $10 (monthly) per user per month for smaller teams
- Business – $15 (annual) or $18 (monthly) per user per month for use across multiple functions
- Enterprise – custom pricing
From a high level, Notion is affordable compared to most other project management tools on the market. Here’s a closer look at each plan.
Free
Notion’s free plan is great for individuals or teams that want to try it out. With unlimited blocks, you have the flexibility to build any page for any purpose.
Although if two or more of you collaborate, you can only test out blocks temporarily as a free trial.
A shared workspace brings your team together to work on documents, projects, or whatever you need. You’ll also be able to use some of Notion’s integrations–few PM platforms offer this for free.
Notion’s free plan gives you seven-day page history, the ability to invite up to 10 guests, a 5 MB upload limit, and 100 rows per database.
Plus
Notion’s Plus plan gives small teams fewer limitations. For $8 (annual) or $10 (monthly) per user per month, you get unlimited content blocks, storage, and file uploads.
With unlimited blocks, you have the flexibility to build any page for any purpose without restriction. With no file upload limit, you can also add content or assets of any size. Notion extends the page history to 30 days, plus you’re able to invite up to 100 guests.
The Plus plan maintains the same integrations, workspace, and page analytics as the Free plan but with greater capacity and functionality.
Business
Notion Business is a great choice for larger companies looking for an intuitive way to bring multiple teams and tools together into one platform. It is $15 (annual) to $18 (monthly) per user per month.
With SAML single sign-on, your team gets secure and simplified access to Notion. Private teamspaces give you better control over workspace and data access.
Notion also extends stored page history to 90 days so you have ample time to review versions and rewind to old ones. You’re able to invite up to 250 guests to collaborate in your workspace. And with advanced page analytics, you gain detailed insights into how your team interacts with and views the content in your Notion workspaces.
Enterprise
Notion Enterprise is the solution for businesses that need more. You’ll get robust customization, tight security controls, and dedicated support, to.
This top tier lets you tailor nearly every feature to match your needs.
You can set custom limits for guests, create as many workspaces as you’d like, and enjoy unlimited document history so you never have to worry about outgrowing the plan.
In terms of security, you get detailed audit logs that offer unparalleled oversight into every activity happening on the platform. The Enterprise plan also comes with more granular permission controls to keep everything secure, plus an admin search feature that makes it easy to ensure everyone has the right access—or fix it if they don’t.
You can even automate user provisioning to minimize risk of human error while getting new team members up to speed as fast as possible.
For companies needing over 100 seats, a dedicated success manager can help you get set up, make sure everything’s configured in the best way possible, and guide you through new features so you’re always ahead of upcoming changes.
Final Thoughts
Notion is a dynamic digital workspace and collaboration solution for teams willing to put in the work to customize it.
It takes time to get it right, but when you do, you’ll wonder how you ever worked without it.
Alternatives like Monday.com, ClickUp, or Smartsheet might be better for you if you want an out-of-the-box project management solution, data visualizations, or more powerful automations.
