Throughout the years, we’ve experimented with nearly every project management solution available. Whether it’s Trello, Asana, ClickUp, Coda, Notion, or Airtable, we’ve dabbled in all of them at some point to organize our work. Although Notion stands out as a valuable tool, there exists a multitude of alternatives, each with its unique features. In this evaluation, we’ll delve into Notion’s strengths, areas for enhancement, and guide you through selecting the most suitable plan, drawing from our practical encounters.
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Notion Compared to the Best Project Management Software
The effectiveness of project management software hinges on its adaptability to your workflow.
Our aim isn’t to dictate the ultimate solution, but rather to guide you in discovering one that aligns with your preferences. Consequently, while Notion may have served us well, it might not suit your needs.
Here’s a brief overview of some notable alternatives :
Monday.com offers a comparable level of flexibility and customization, alongside enhanced visualizations, advanced automation capabilities, and comprehensive project management features.
ClickUp is a conventional project management tool, straightforward to set up, with a strong emphasis on team collaboration through a diverse array of collaboration tools. While it’s less customizable than Monday.com and Notion, it’s ideal for those accustomed to traditional project management methodologies.
Conversely, Smartsheet provides sophisticated work management, automation, and no-code capabilities for constructing entirely bespoke systems.
Explore our comprehensive list of top project management software to delve deeper into our preferred tools, our firsthand experiences with them, and their distinctive attributes. Additionally, you can peruse our comparative analyses such as Notion vs. Monday, Airtable vs. Notion, or Notion vs. Asana to gauge how Notion fares against its primary competitors.
Since you’re still with us, let’s proceed to the review.
It offers a high level of customization and impressive capabilities, provided you invest the effort to configure it. However, this power and flexibility come with certain drawbacks – getting started can be challenging, and the platform may feel cluttered until you refine it to your needs.
In our previous experiences, we’ve utilized it for work management and even organized all our research for this review, including drafting the entire document. This enabled us to explore its latest features and enhancements.
What Is Good At
Its versatility is unparalleled: once configured effectively, it can replace a multitude of tools. There’s no need for separate solutions for task management, note-taking, documentation, CRM, agency management, or content creation. Notion allows you to tailor your workspace to fulfill all these requirements.
For instance, imagine you operate a marketing agency managing numerous clients and campaigns simultaneously. With Notion, you can create individual pages for each client, housing details such as objectives, timelines, and essential documents. Within these pages, you can develop task lists, calendars, and content repositories to ensure everyone stays aligned and on schedule. With the luxury of unlimited storage and content blocks on most plans, you can effortlessly accommodate as many clients and campaigns as necessary.
Notion facilitates asynchronous collaboration seamlessly within its platform, enabling your team to work in real-time or at their convenience. With a centralized repository for documents, spreadsheets, tasks, notebooks, and project boards, everything is conveniently accessible. Updates occur instantaneously, ensuring everyone remains abreast of the latest changes.
The platform’s adaptable structure allows you to designate owners and collaborators for any page or block of information. Every modification is tracked, and users can leave comments for feedback, questions, or to progress discussions. Customizable notifications guarantee that no update, mention, or comment goes unnoticed, alleviating the need for incessant follow-ups.
Moreover, it integrates effortlessly with your existing tools such as Slack and Google Calendar, facilitating seamless communication and coordination across various platforms.
It simplifies the process of connecting and managing information across databases, even without requiring a computer science degree. You can effortlessly create intricate interfaces that consolidate various content types—text, images, files, clients, projects, and more—into a single location.
For example, if you aim to link your project management tasks with key clients and files, Notion streamlines the process. Connecting your tasks database to your client and file databases merely takes a few clicks. Consequently, you gain a comprehensive overview of everything related to each project. Need to review all tasks due this week for Client X? Simply filter for that client and the desired date range. Curious about the status of feedback for Task Y? Check the relation to ascertain if the file has been uploaded yet. Additionally, with roll-ups, you can display total task counts for each client or project. The intuitive interface empowers you to visualize and manage complex data according to your specific requirements.
Although it may not substitute for a full-scale database solution, Notion serves as a simple yet potent option for anyone seeking to organize information in a flexible, user-friendly manner.
The concept of “Everything’s a page” lies at the core of Notion’s unmatched flexibility. In Notion, a page can range from a simple document containing text and images to a gateway leading to an interconnected wiki or a database containing tasks, events, contacts, and beyond. Each page serves as a blank canvas, awaiting your customization according to your specific requirements.
With over 50 different block types at your disposal, it empowers you to create pages that transcend mere content storage. Blocks within Notion serve as unique elements, allowing you to design pages with diverse functionalities. Whether you aim to embed a Google Map visualization or a social media post, simply drop in an Embed block. Need to run equations or computations? Utilize the Math block alongside Notion’s LaTeX syntax. Additionally, you can integrate AI blocks, buttons that trigger automations, or synced blocks that update across all instances with a simple slash command, enhancing the versatility of your pages.
It offers granular sharing permissions, providing you with complete control over sharing workspaces, pages, and content. You have the flexibility to create permission groups, which automatically grant the appropriate level of access to specific team members—simply add someone to a group, and they’ll gain access to the relevant content.
Moreover, you can invite guests and external collaborators to particular pages without granting access to your entire workspace. With Notion’s Enterprise plan, admins enjoy advanced controls, including the ability to override settings for specific groups, restrict page sharing, disable guest access for select pages, or implement rules across the entire workspace. Additionally, they can designate special admin users with the authority to make changes while restricting access to billing details.
The Notion AI add-on, priced at an additional $8 to $10 per user per month, can prove beneficial if you require assistance with organizing ideas, summarizing documents or meetings, generating content, brainstorming, or any task ChatGPT can assist with. While Notion AI significantly boosts productivity, it does have its constraints. It won’t autonomously compose full blog posts or memos; instead, its purpose is to augment and complement human thinking, not supplant it.
What Notion Is Lacking
Notion’s out-of-the-box readiness can be both a blessing and a challenge. While its flexibility is a significant asset, it can also lead to feelings of uncertainty and overwhelm, particularly if you seek a solution that’s ready to go from the outset. Figuring out how to harness its potential may require a significant investment of time, especially if you’re aiming for a hit-the-ground-running approach.
You’ll need to dedicate time to conceptualizing the optimal structure for workspaces, pages, projects, tasks, and tables for your team. Moreover, grasping Notion’s advanced features, such as relational databases, may entail a steep learning curve, particularly if you’re unfamiliar with them.
For us, it took weeks of building, testing, and refining to tailor Notion to our needs. However, because Notion offers such flexibility, there’s no definitive “right” way to utilize it. While Notion does provide templates to kickstart your journey, ultimately, you’re tasked with discovering what works best for your unique requirements.
Text formatting in Notion differs significantly from conventional word processors like Google Docs, which may initially pose a learning curve. Notably, lists function differently in Notion, and mastering these nuances can be frustrating initially.
When pasting content from external sources into Notion, discrepancies in formatting may arise, including extra spaces, undefined bullet points, and lost formatting. It adheres to its own set of rules for importing and displaying content, often necessitating cleanup of pasted text. Nevertheless, Notion offers customization options not typically found in traditional document tools, such as layouts with up to five columns and the ability to embed various elements.
It boasts robust project management capabilities, although it lacks certain desirable features found in other tools. Notably, it does not include built-in time tracking functionality, although you can manually add time using custom fields—however, you won’t find timers or similar tools. Surprisingly, creating charts and graphs directly from your data isn’t straightforward.
For analyzing productivity, workload, or other metrics, you may need to export data or invest in add-ons. While this absence of built-in reports may not be a concern for some users, data-driven teams might find it limiting.
Furthermore, Notion lacks built-in team chat functionality that many other project management platforms offer. While you can comment on tasks and projects within Notion, it’s not designed to replace dedicated chat apps like Slack. Nonetheless, Notion’s integration with Slack partially addresses this gap.
Notion’s capability to handle large databases is notably limited, particularly for intricate datasets or demanding calculations. During our tests, attempting to paste sizable amounts of data into a Notion database frequently resulted in app crashes or freezes. In our experience, inputting approximately 1,000 rows of information or more overwhelmed the platform, necessitating a restart. Additionally, as databases expand or incorporate more advanced formulas, Notion’s performance deteriorates.
Furthermore, Notion lacks options for data visualization, impeding interactive analysis or reporting within the platform. Users are restricted to viewing raw numbers, text, and basic sorting functions. To visualize data through charts, graphs, or dashboards, users must export Notion information to external tools or invest in premium third-party solutions.
Plans and Pricing
It 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
Final Thoughts
Notion serves as a dynamic digital workspace and collaboration solution, ideal for teams committed to customizing their workflow. While it requires time and effort to tailor to your needs, once optimized, you’ll find it indispensable to your workflow.
However, if you seek an out-of-the-box project management solution, robust data visualizations, or enhanced automation capabilities, alternatives like Monday.com, ClickUp, or Smartsheet may better suit your requirements.
