Notion is a note-taking app widely used inside the software industry but little known outside it. You can use it to take simple notes or manage projects using databases with a variety views. Notion can be as simple or as complex a tool as you want, but it has a steep learning curve—most people can't go from taking simple notes to managing databases in an afternoon. This complexity, combined with a heavy bias toward people who work for software companies, makes Notion hard to recommend to the average person. If you're looking for a powerful note-taking app, whether as a replacement for Evernote or not, we recommend Editors' Choice winners OneNote and Joplin. We also rate Obsidian highly for power users.
Note that this review looks at Notion as a note-taking app. The company behind Notion refers to it as a "workspace," suggesting it might also be classified as a collaboration app.
How Much Does Notion Cost?
Notion has a free tier for individuals. This version limits file uploads to 5MB, collaboration to 10 guests, and page history to seven days. You can make as many notes as you want and use almost all the features without paying. The free version is pretty compelling, although OneNote has an even more generous free version.
Notion Plus ($10 per person per month or $96 per year) removes the file size restriction, gives you 30 days of page history, and lets you invite up to 100 guests. This tier is meant for individuals and not business users. All things considered, $10 per person per month is a high price for a personal note-taking app. You get a better price with OneNote (free), Bear ($2.99 per month), Joplin Cloud (2.99 euros per month), and Obsidian ($50 per year).
Notion Business ($18 per person per month or $180 per person per year) gives you a 90-day page history, the ability to invite up to 250 guests, bulk PDF exports of your pages, support for single sign-on, and a few other features for businesses.
Notion also has an Enterprise plan with custom pricing. That version comes with everything in Business plus unlimited page history and a few other standard enterprise-grade features, such as user provisioning, advanced security and controls, and an audit log.
When it comes to value, the free Microsoft OneNote is hard to beat. OneNote doesn't have an individual file size limitation but instead limits you to 5GB of storage—though that's contingent on your OneDrive storage. You may have more storage if you pay for other Microsoft products.
Evernote, one of the most expensive note-taking apps, charges about the same as Notion for a Business account ($17.99 per person per month), and it's not a great value. Notion's free version is markedly better than Evernote's, though, and the personal plan costs less ($10 per month versus $14.99 per month for Evernote).
AI Add-Ons
Notion can include artificial intelligence (AI) features, but they're sold as an add-on for an additional $10 per person per month or $96 per person per year. So, for Notion Plus, you double the price to get AI. AI note-taking applications are relatively new, and it's still early to make price comparisons. However, as of this writing, Evernote does not charge extra for its AI, and Microsoft Copilot doesn't cost extra if you run Windows 11 or Windows 10.
Getting Started Can Be Overwhelming
Notion primarily runs in the web browser on the desktop. The two most recent releases of Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and Edge are all officially supported. Notion has desktop apps for macOS and Windows, but they're essentially just a dedicated browser window—there's no offline access or additional features.
Notion has mobile apps for iPad and iPhone (version 15.0 and higher) and Android (Android 8 and higher).
To start with the app, head to Notion.so and sign up for a free account. You need a working email address, or you can sign up by authenticating through an Apple or Gmail account. The signup pages ask you how you plan to use the app: for your team, for personal use, or for school. State that you're using it for your team, and the app asks a bunch of questions about your workplace.
Based on your answers, Notion sets you up with a few sample templates. For example, if you say that you're a student, you see a database for class notes and a template for the Cornell Notes System—useful if you plan on taking digital notes for class. Teams get many templates that are strangely specific to the software development industry (more on that later) and individual users see templates for a task list, journal, and reading list.
The templates feel more burdensome than helpful. Instead of trusting the user to explore, Notion fills your notebooks with examples. Trying to edit those examples—most of which are built around databases, a concept the examples don't do a great job explaining—gets overwhelming quickly. This app is for people willing to spend plenty of time customizing and fine-tuning their tools.
Taking Basic Notes in Notion
Taking basic notes is relatively straightforward, though even it takes some getting used to. You can apply formatting to text notes using markdown, standard keyboard shortcuts, or by highlighting text and using the toolbar that pops up.
The confusing part for many people is Notion's "blocks." Every line or paragraph of text is considered a block; a six-dot icon to the left of the current line lets you drag blocks into any order. Blocks don't have to contain text. They can have images, subpages, tables, and even databases. Typing a forward slash (/) at the beginning of any block brings up a list of options.
Once again, what you see is overwhelming: a list of menu options that scrolls and scrolls and scrolls. Most of what's in that menu isn't even useful if you're mostly interested in taking notes. If you want more than that, though, there's an awful lot to dig into.
One thing I noticed about Notion—and I'm not alone—is that the app feels extremely slow, even if you only use it for text notes. I found this to be true in my browser, in the Mac app, and on my iPad. I won't speculate on why this is, but I will say that the sluggishness is noticeable and annoying when you're trying to write a simple note.
A Different Method for Organizing
Anyone used to OneNote, Evernote, Joplin, or another standard note-taking app will find that using Notion requires some adjustment. Yes, you get the usual left sidebar with a list. But everything there is a page, not a notebook, as in other apps. You can add subpages to any page, and they appear both on the page itself and in the left-hand menu. Delete the note from the page or the menu, and it's gone. In other words, Notion uses a very different paradigm for organizing thoughts.
You can add all sorts of databases to any Notion page and see them in the following views: Table, Board, Gallery, List, Calendar, and Timeline. These databases show information outside your list of pages and subpages, though each item in the database can have a page. You can also add automations and all kinds of bells and whistles that are more relevant if you use Notion to manage a team's work and organize notes. Needless to say, you can customize these databases to work in all kinds of ways.
Strong Support for Collaboration
Notion is built with collaboration in mind. You can share any page or workspace with any other Notion user. You can also publish any note to the open web, meaning a public URL to a read-only version of your note that you can share with anyone regardless of whether they have a Notion account.
You can use Notion alone or as part of a group and collaborate in near real-time. When multiple people log in and view or edit the same note, their profile images appear at the top. Clicking on anyone's image jumps you to the text block where they were most recently active.
If you follow a page, you receive notifications of changes to it. Notion also supports @ comments for flagging someone's attention. Sharing notes so the recipient can only read and comment on them is also possible.
An OK Web Clipper
I like that Notion has web clippers for Chrome, Safari, and Firefox. The problem is the clipper is light on features. You can clip the contents of any website and decide which note it should be added to, and that's it. You can't configure what text is or isn't clipped, and you can't highlight text before clipping. OneNote has all those features.
Notion's clipper is also a little slow. At first, I thought it didn't clip the full text of articles, but it turns out it takes a few minutes for the text to show up. I haven't seen this problem while testing any other note-taking application, so it was a little surprising.
Capable at Importing, Less So at Exporting
Notion can import data from many applications, including Evernote, Google Docs, Quip, and Asana. A Universal import feature lets you upload a ZIP file containing text, markdown, CSV, and other files. I tested it with a large folder full of Markdown files, and it worked, though it took around 20 minutes! Notion offers useful, clear instructions for importing information from a variety of applications.
Exporting is a little less extensive. You can export any page as a PDF, HTML, or Markdown file. You can also export databases to CSV. In the settings, you can export your entire workspace as HTML, Markdown, or CSV files.
Is AI in Notion Useful?
In general, I'm not a fan of adding AI features to existing apps that don't already have them. They often feel tacked on to take advantage of The Next Big Thing instead of for your benefit.
Notion's AI integration is better than that, assuming you already have a lot of data stored in the application. The superpower here is being able to ask questions about that data. The best example is the Q&A feature, which you can use to ask a chatbot about the contents of your own notes. For example, I clipped a bunch of my own articles and then used the feature to ask questions about those articles. The results were generally accurate and included a link to the relevant pages. If you take a lot of notes and struggle to find a specific piece of information you remember writing down, I can imagine this Q&A feature working to your advantage.
Another clever AI feature lets you add a block to any page that automatically shows a summary of said page. It even occasionally updates itself. Another option is to let the AI automatically pull action items out of meeting notes.
The rest of Notion's AI capabilities will be familiar to anyone who has used ChatGPT or similar generative AI chatbots. Built-in tools let you write blog posts, summarize the current page, and even quiz yourself on your own notes if you're a student, for example. You can expect a familiar stew of technically readable and occasionally accurate prose we've all come to expect from large language models. All this makes Notion one of the best AI-powered note-taking apps.
The major downside to all the AI is the cost. As noted, adding AI to Notion costs $10 per person per month on top of what you already pay to use the app. That's hard to justify.
Notion’s AI utilizes models from Anthropic, OpenAI, and a Notion-hosted model from Cohere, according to the company. From a privacy standpoint, that means information from your notes is sent to those companies for processing when you use the AI features, though the privacy policy states that all information is encrypted in transit and none is used to train large language models.
What's Missing in Notion?
Several features common in note-taking applications are missing from Notion. There's no optical character recognition (OCR), meaning you can't upload an image or PDF that contains text (handwritten or otherwise) and have that text become machine-readable and searchable. OneNote, Evernote, Google Keep, and even the intentionally minimalist Bear all have some form of OCR.
You also don't get any tools for scanning paper documents. There's also no sketching, so you can't use a stylus or Apple Pencil to write notes by hand. Notion comes off as a text-document, digital-first kind of application, so maybe people attracted to the app don't need or want these features. It wasn't made for people who have paper or handwritten documents, annotate digital files, or sketch ideas.
The bigger problem is the total inability to work offline. Like many people, I take notes in all kinds of contexts, and not all of them include access to the internet. Notion is useless in those contexts, even if you install the app. Notion is the only note-taking application I've reviewed or am aware of that doesn't work offline.
Notion's Target Audience: Silicon Valley
Have you ever used an app and slowly realized it wasn't made with you in mind? That's how I feel when I use Notion. The app is full of language that's cryptic to anyone who hasn't worked inside a software company. Notion's website uses screenshots that show things like OKRs, PCI compliance, and weekly syncs. I wouldn't expect the average person to know what those are.
The app itself isn't much better. Use Notion, and you will notice that every example of how to use the application is oriented around the software industry in general and Silicon Valley startup culture in particular. Click the large Templates button in the sidebar, and almost everything you see is related to running a software company. The categories listed are the divisions inside a standard software company; the templates are for things like Tech Spec, Funding OS, and API Reference. It gets worse if you try to use one of them. I added a Product Launch Tracker and was greeted with example tasks like "Enhance permissions levels" and "Public API release."
It's as though Notion were built by people who've never worked anywhere outside the Silicon Valley software industry, and never even talked with someone who has. All kinds of businesses have information that needs organizing. Why aren't there templates for local retailers or law firms or—I don't know—farmers? Notion comes across as being built by people who don't have much regard for other kinds of businesses.
Because of this, Notion may feel unwelcoming to the vast majority of people, most of whom don't work in tech. I'm a technology journalist who used to work at a software company, and I still struggle to comprehend much of the jargon in the user interface. I can only imagine how users who hadn't been exposed to the industry would feel.
A Few Good Notions, But Not Enough Guidance
I've read that Notion has a very active Reddit community—an article cited it as evidence that the app is growing quickly. I checked that Reddit page. The top posts included someone complaining about the lack of an offline version, someone asking why the app is so slow, someone else saying the app is too busy, and a fourth person asking if the iPad version will ever get any better. It wasn't all griping. A few people had shared screenshots of custom dashboards they made, for example. But overall, the tone was negative, even for Reddit.
I'm willing to admit that it's possible the app simply doesn't click with me. There are some good ideas at the heart of Notion. Combining note-taking with other productivity functionality—you can use Notion to keep up a company wiki, for example, in addition to maintaining database sets—isn't a bad idea if you're guided through how everything works. Notion is missing that help. It could work well in a company where a Notion evangelist sets up elaborate dashboards for the entire team, for example.
Verdict: A Powerful Tool That's Tough to Recommend
For most people, Notion is hard to recommend. Maybe if you have a job in software development and plan to use the tool for work, it could be a fit. If you really just like customizing your note-taking app, however, check out Obsidian instead. It works offline and is just as flexible as Notion, if not more so. Most everyone else should look into OneNote, an Editors' Choice winner that's far easier to wrap your head around. And if you don't want to leave your notes on Microsoft servers, try Editors' Choice winner Joplin, an open-source app that works entirely offline and is free if you bring your own storage.