Notion
Productivity · Freemium
Overview
A workspace that combines notes, documents, tasks, and simple databases in one place. It is made by Notion Labs, a San Francisco company founded in 2013 and used by millions of people and many companies. Instead of fixed apps for each job, Notion gives you pages and blocks that you arrange yourself, so one workspace can hold a company wiki, a project tracker, and meeting notes together. Databases can be shown as tables, boards, calendars, or timelines. It now includes built in AI that can write, summarize, and search across your content, and connect to outside tools.
What people use it for
Teams run their internal wiki in Notion, keeping policies, onboarding guides, and how to documents in one searchable place. Product and engineering groups track projects and tasks in linked databases tied to goals and roadmaps. People take meeting notes on a page and assign follow up items in the same view. Startups use it as a lightweight CRM, a hiring pipeline, or a content calendar by building a database and adding the fields they need. Individuals use it for personal notes, reading lists, and planning. Many teams publish public pages, like help centers or job boards, straight from Notion. It is also common to use Notion AI to summarize a long doc, draft a first version of a page, or answer a question using content from across the workspace and connected apps.
Key capabilities
Notion is built from pages and blocks, with databases that display as tables, boards, timelines, calendars, galleries, or lists, and relations that link records across databases. It has a public API, webhooks, and native connections to tools like Slack, GitHub, Jira, and Google Drive. Notion Calendar is a separate calendar app that ties into the workspace. Built in AI can generate and edit text, autofill database fields, take meeting notes, and run enterprise search across connected apps, with a choice of underlying models from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google. The free plan gives unlimited pages for individuals, a 5 MB file upload limit, up to 10 guests, and 7 day page history. Paid plans add unlimited file uploads, unlimited guests, longer page history, custom sites and forms, and charts. The Business plan bundles full Notion AI and adds SAML single sign on and private teamspaces. Enterprise adds audit logs, user provisioning, and zero data retention for AI.
Limitations
Notion's flexibility is also its main problem: teams can spend hours building and rebuilding systems instead of doing the work. Pages that are large or heavily linked can load slowly, and search has long been weaker than users expect for a knowledge base. Offline access is limited and unreliable. Full Notion AI is only included on the Business plan and above, so smaller teams pay 20 US dollars per user per month to get it. The free plan limits file uploads to 5 MB each. Permissions are less granular than dedicated document tools until higher tiers. Exporting a complex workspace to move elsewhere is messy, since formatting and database relations do not carry over cleanly.
Insight
Notion is genuinely useful as a single place for a wiki, task tracker, and notes, and the block system makes it easy to shape a page around a specific need. The same freedom is the trap. Teams treat setup as a hobby, build elaborate structures, and then nobody keeps them current. Performance on big workspaces and weak search make it frustrating as the source of truth once a company grows. The move to bundle full AI only into the Business plan also raised the real cost for teams that want those features. Notion works best when one person owns the structure, keeps it simple, and resists the urge to model everything. For pure documentation at scale, or for serious project management, a focused tool often beats it. For a small team that wants one flexible space, it is a reasonable default.
Pricing
Freemium
Website
Last checked 2026-08-30