Notion Review

What Notion Is

Notion is a workspace application built by Notion Labs, founded in 2016 in San Francisco. It launched publicly in 2018 and as of 2024 reports more than 35 million users across millions of teams, ranging from individual knowledge workers to large enterprises including Figma, Pixar, and Ramp. Its core premise is a block-based editor where text, databases, code, embeds, and linked pages all coexist in a single document-like interface, giving teams a single tool for notes, wikis, project tracking, and internal documentation.

Notion’s project management capabilities expanded significantly with the launch of Notion Projects in 2023, which introduced timeline views, sub-tasks, and project-specific properties to the platform’s existing database infrastructure. This brought Notion closer to purpose-built PM tools without fully bridging the gap: the fundamentals of a wiki and database platform remain the product’s identity, and teams that need Agile-specific workflows still find gaps.

Key Features

Pages, Databases, and the Block System

Notion’s foundational building block is the page: a document that can contain any combination of text, headings, tables, images, callouts, code blocks, embeds, and linked databases. Pages can contain other pages, creating a hierarchical wiki structure of arbitrary depth. A team can build an entire company knowledge base inside a single Notion workspace, with nested pages for each department, project, and document type.

Databases are the project management layer. Any page can become a database with typed properties (text, number, date, select, people, checkbox, file, relation) and multiple views. The same database of tasks can be displayed as a table (like a spreadsheet), a board (Kanban by status), a gallery (card grid), a calendar (by date), a timeline (Gantt-style), or a list. The view is a presentation layer: changing from board to timeline does not change the underlying data. This flexibility is one of Notion’s strongest characteristics and one of its biggest setup challenges.

Notion Projects and Task Management

Notion Projects adds a dedicated project management layer on top of the database infrastructure. Projects get a dedicated layout with grouped tasks, sub-tasks (one level deep), project-level properties (status, owner, due date), and timeline and board views pre-configured for project use. For teams coming from Asana or Trello, Notion Projects provides a familiar project tracking interface without the full configuration overhead of building a project database from scratch.

The gap relative to purpose-built PM tools: no sprint planning or velocity tracking, no resource management, no burndown or burnup charts, and no cross-project portfolio reporting beyond manually constructed linked database views. Teams that build a project management workflow in Notion get something that works well for straightforward task tracking and works less well for complex project governance.

Notion AI

Notion AI is an add-on feature available on all plans for an additional charge. It integrates AI directly into pages and databases: summarizing long documents, generating draft content from a prompt, answering questions against a team’s Notion workspace, translating text, and filling database properties based on existing content. The Q&A feature, which queries the team’s full Notion workspace to answer natural language questions, is particularly valuable for teams that have accumulated significant institutional knowledge in Notion and need a way to surface it without manual searching.

Notion AI is charged separately from the base subscription: approximately $8 per user per month billed annually at the time of this review. Teams evaluating Notion should include this cost in their per-user calculation if they intend to use AI features.

Integrations and API

Notion has a public API and native integrations with Slack, GitHub, Google Drive, Jira, Asana, Figma, and others. The API is well-documented and actively maintained, which has produced a large ecosystem of third-party integrations through tools like Zapier, Make, and custom scripts. Teams that need Notion to feed data to or from other systems in their stack will generally find an integration path. Native integration depth varies: the GitHub integration is more mature than many others and populates Notion databases with repository data automatically.

Who Should Use Notion

Teams that need knowledge management and documentation alongside project tracking are Notion’s strongest fit. A product team that maintains engineering decision records, feature specifications, meeting notes, and sprint tasks all in one workspace avoids the context-switching between a documentation tool and a project management tool that most software teams manage. Notion is the most practical single-tool answer for this combination.

Teams that are already using Notion for documentation and want to add basic project tracking without adopting a separate tool benefit from Notion Projects without requiring migration or new tool adoption. The existing Notion wiki becomes the project management home, which reduces the overhead of maintaining separate systems.

Individual knowledge workers, researchers, and content creators who need a flexible personal workspace for notes, tasks, and content organization consistently find Notion’s free and Plus plans more appropriate than purpose-built PM tools that are optimized for team coordination.

Who Should NOT Use Notion

Teams that need Agile sprint management will find Notion insufficient without significant custom configuration. There is no backlog, no sprint velocity tracking, no burndown chart, and no sprint-specific reporting at any plan level. Notion Projects improved the task management experience significantly, but the gap between Notion Projects and a purpose-built Scrum tool like ClickUp or Jira remains meaningful for teams that need the full ceremony structure.

Teams that need time tracking cannot get it in Notion at any plan level. There is no timer, no manual time logging against tasks, and no time-based reporting. Teams that bill clients by the hour or need to track project profitability will always need a second tool alongside Notion.

Large teams with complex reporting requirements will find Notion’s dashboard capabilities insufficient. Notion has no native dashboard tool: reporting requires constructing linked database views manually, which becomes difficult to maintain at scale and cannot produce the workload, portfolio, or cost-variance reports that enterprise PM tools provide natively.

Notion Pricing

Notion offers four plans. Prices are per user per month billed annually. Notion AI is an additional charge on all plans.

The Free plan covers unlimited pages and blocks for individuals and small teams, with up to 10 guest collaborators and seven days of page version history. It is a genuine working tier for personal use and small collaborative teams, though it limits the page history and guest access that most team contexts require.

The Plus plan at $8 per user per month (billed annually) adds unlimited file uploads, unlimited guests, 30 days of page version history, and API access. This is the entry point for most professional teams using Notion for work.

The Business plan at $15 per user per month (billed annually) adds SAML SSO, private teamspaces, advanced page analytics, bulk PDF export, and 90 days of version history. Enterprise security and compliance requirements typically land here.

The Enterprise plan is custom-priced with advanced security controls, a dedicated customer success manager, custom contracts, SCIM provisioning, and unlimited version history.

Verdict

Notion is the best tool in the category for the specific use case it serves best: unified knowledge management and documentation with workable project tracking alongside it. Teams that live in Notion for their wiki and want project tracking in the same workspace get significant value from staying in one tool. Teams that need Agile-specific functionality, time tracking, complex reporting, or purpose-built resource management will always be working around Notion’s gaps rather than within its strengths.

The setup investment is real. A well-configured Notion workspace that serves a team’s project management needs typically represents dozens of hours of initial configuration and ongoing maintenance. Teams that want project management to be usable on day one without configuration are better served by purpose-built tools. Teams that are willing to invest in the setup and whose primary workflow is documentation-adjacent will find the investment worthwhile.

Affiliation disclosure: This review was produced by ClickUp’s editorial team. ClickUp is a direct competitor to Notion. We evaluated Notion based on three weeks of hands-on testing and have disclosed where ClickUp offers comparable features. Readers should weigh this context when interpreting our assessment.