During this time, I have also tested 20+ project management and note-taking tools, which gave me a clear perspective on where Notion truly stands—both as a note-taking app and as a flexible project management solution.

In this review, I’ll combine my personal experience with direct comparisons to other tools, so you can clearly see Notion’s strengths, weaknesses, and whether it’s the right fit for your workflow.

Let’s dive in!

Verdict

Here’s the quick verdict if you don’t want to read the full review:

Tested with our review & scoring methodology Real-world testing Unbiased evaluation

How We Test Project Management Tools (and how flexible tools like Notion are evaluated)

To keep our reviews & final score for each project management app fair and consistent, we evaluate every tool using the same testing framework based on real-world usage, feature depth, and overall value.

Our scoring breakdown after testing 20+ project management apps:

Want a detailed breakdown of how we test each category?

Learn exactly how we test tools → Review methodology

Since tools like Notion, Coda, and Taskade are not traditional project management apps, we also evaluate how well they can be adapted into project management systems, including flexibility, structure, and scalability.

Short on time? Here’s a quick overview of Notion

What is Notion?

Notion is like a Swiss army knife; you can use it for many purposes. It provides a centralized workspace where you can organize your thoughts, notes, tasks, projects, and documents in one single app. Personally, I use Notion to write scripts, track projects, and organize learning.

You can create pages for almost every purpose, such as reading lists, meeting summaries, goals, etc. Every item on a page is customizable; you can easily drag and drop items and insert pictures or videos.

It is also a great app with numerous team collaboration tools. You can invite your team members to work on pages in real-time, create and assign tasks and projects to others, and much more.

My experience after 2+ years of daily use

After using Notion daily for over two years, it has become a must-have tool for me to keep my notes and projects organized, even while constantly testing other alternatives.

While there are tools with more advanced note-taking or project management features, Notion’s flexibility and all-in-one approach make it an ideal choice for anyone who wants to avoid using separate tools for notes, projects, email, and more.

That said, it does come with a learning curve, especially compared to simpler tools. But if you invest the time, Notion can easily replace 4–5 tools and become the backbone of your entire workflow.

Why Notion didn’t score higher (and where it loses points)

Notion earned a strong overall score thanks to its excellent customization (5/5), integrations (5/5), user interface (4.5/5), and pricing (5/5). In my experience, you get this flexibility even with the free plan, which makes it powerful if you need a no-budget setup to manage notes and projects.

However, the lower scores in project & task management (4/5), automation (2.5/5), and reporting (3/5) reflect its biggest limitations. Don’t expect it to become a robust project management software; it lacks advanced automation and reporting tools, and you’ll need to invest time in setting up workflows before it becomes truly efficient.

These trade-offs, combined with limited offline and password support, are the main reasons it doesn’t score higher. While Notion is extremely versatile, it’s not the best choice if you need advanced project management or note-taking features.

Who Notion is a good fit for

Who Notion is not ideal for

Let’s take a closer look at the features to see why I reach this conclusion.

Notion’s key features

Here, I collected all the essential features I found during my Notion review.

Note-taking app

Notion is one of the most popular note-taking tools, and it is not an accident. Just to give you a background on how this app works: You can have multiple workspaces in which you structure your notes and basically everything. For example, you can have a workspace for personal or work-related items. The workspaces include your pages.

The Notion pages are the fundamentals of your workspaces. You can use them for notes, projects, tasks, and so on. There are no strict rules on how you structure your pages or what information you want to include in them.

For instance, in my Notion’s workspace, there are pages dedicated to self-development, money plans, YT scripts, admin info, and notes. Now, let’s go back to note-taking!

Notion is a sophisticated text editor that allows you to easily add and organize different types of content called blocks. When writing your notes, you can add headings, sub-pages, bullet points, and tables without touching your mouse.

In your notes, you can insert images, bookmarks, videos, code, kanban board, and more by simply hitting the “/” button on your keyboard. I especially love the embedded functions. Notion offers multiple embedded forms like YouTube videos, Google Docs, Google Maps, Miro, and more.

Notion is incredibly useful for note organization and knowledge management. You can tag notes with custom keywords, add teammates, set a due date, etc. You can access all your notes with your sidebar on the left.

Overall, Notion is a solid note-taking app, but it lacks some advanced features to connect your notes compared to some dedicated note-taking apps I tried, like Obsidian or Anytype.

Project management tool

Notion also works as a lightweight task and project management software, where you can plan and execute your projects with your team. Let’s start with the project management features.

With Notion, you can visualize your projects’ workflows in different formats, from calendars to boards. Depending on the format you choose, Notion allows you to use progress bars to show how your project is moving forward.

You can also create charts or visualize dependencies to see when one task is blocking another and avoid bottlenecks. Such data visualization options help a lot in project tracking.

When checking your projects, you can utilize filters to show only the tasks assigned to you or the urgent ones.

Notion’s task management features have everything that you need. You can break your projects into manageable tasks and add status, assignee, or due dates.

Nevertheless, if you need in-depth reporting features or automation, you’ll need to set them up yourself. For automation, you can connect Notion with third-party apps, and the reporting needs to be updated manually. Therefore, I can only give 2.5 stars for automation and 3 stars for reporting.

As for the pure project management features, I think 4 out of 5 stars is justified for Notion’s project and task management features. While it lacks a few advanced features and takes longer to set up projects manually than dedicated project management apps, it still provides the features most teams need.

Templates

Whether you want to use Notion for project or task management, you do not have to spend hours creating the proper form for you or your team. This is where you can use the templates.

Notion currently has more than 20,000 free templates from which you can browse. This is an insane number. Just to give you an example: if you want to create a to-do list, you can choose from almost a thousand templates.

Utilizing the templates, you do not have to go through the time-consuming process of creating pages to track your projects or tasks. With a few clicks, you can insert a template you like, and you just need to add the databases.

Collaboration features

You can share workspaces and pages with others. Here, you can customize access levels so others can comment, edit, view, or all of them.

Furthermore, you can create pages and publish them on the web. Once it’s done, anyone with the link can view the page’s content and see contributor names and emails.

Moreover, when managing projects, you can assign tasks to your team members, add comments, and enable simultaneous editing, mentions, and granular permissions.

Ultimately, I give 4.5/ 5 for collaboration for Notion. It’s because it offers significantly more team features than note-taking apps but a bit fewer than project management tools.

Notion AI writing assistant

Notion’s AI writing assistant is one of Notion’s AI features. It can greatly improve your writing by detecting errors and correcting misspelled words and incorrect grammar. But it can do much more.

In the bottom left corner of Notion, you can access the AI assistant feature that answers your questions, gives you summaries, translates your page, finds action items, and helps you improve your writing. Basically, it works like a built-in ChatGPT.

But it can do more than just work with text. The AI writing assistant’s feature can help you gather information from various file types, including PDFs and images.

Overall, these tools help you to become more efficient when taking notes. However, it’s worth noting that Notion AI is not included in the standard plans and requires a separate paid add-on.

For individuals or teams who heavily rely on AI for daily workflows, this can be justified, but for casual use, the additional cost may feel unnecessary.

Wikis & knowledge management

Team members often struggle to find the information they need. Using Notion, you can create your own knowledge library. These hubs can help your team members find and understand the information they need to do their jobs.

Imagine how powerful it could be when onboarding new employees or just wanting to have organized databases where your team members can access the information they need to do their jobs.

Calendar

You can connect your Google Calendar with your existing Notion workspace, so you will be able to see your meetings and appointments in your Notion calendar. Notion’s calendar is synced with your entire workspace, so you can make references to specific pages in the meeting invite.

Notion Calendar is available for iPhone and Android devices and integrates with Google Calendar and Apple iCloud, while Outlook support is still pending.

Ultimately, Notion’s integrated calendar helps you to centralize your calendar management, notes, and project management tasks in a centralized app.

AI meeting notes

Notion recently released its AI note-taker for Zoom, Microsoft Teams, and Google Meet calls. Basically, it joins your calls without a bot and transcribes & summarizes them.

It is a useful AI feature for your calls, as it can turn your conversations into insights and action items in your Notion workspace.

Notion’s integrations

During my Notion review, I realized this is one of the note-taking apps with the most integrations. You can connect Notion with many other tools. First of all, you can connect it with Zapier, which will give you access to more than 8000 apps.

Besides the Zapier integration, you can integrate Notion with more than 100 other apps including Asana, ClickUp, Dropbox, Google Drive, or Jira.

Notion’s user interface

Notion’s user interface is simple. It has a minimalist design with white space, clear typography, and subtle colors as the focus. Even if you are a first-time Notion user, you will be able to quickly navigate the pages, as you will find all the important information on the sidebar.

As you can see, Notion has many features. This is the only thing that might feel overwhelming at first. Even though I have used Notion for more than 2 years, I have not fully explored its features or potential.

When working in Notion, you will quickly realize that it uses a block system that works like Lego. It transforms all the content into movable, customizable pieces, which gives you the flexibility to move these blocks around.

Notion’s pricing plans

Notion has a free plan and three paid plans.

The free plan includes a collaborative workspace, basic forms and sites, Notion Calendar and Mail. It also supports databases with subtasks, dependencies, and custom properties. Based on my experience, Notion’s free version is totally sufficient for individuals to organize their notes and projects.

The plus plan is $10 per seat per month. It has unlimited collaborative blocks, unlimited file uploads, charts, custom forms and sites, and basic integrations. The plus plan is ideal for small teams and individuals who work a lot with others.

The business plan costs $20 per seat per month. It offers features such as granular database permissions, private teamspaces, domain verification, conditional form logic, and premium integrations. Business users also get access to Notion AI features, including AI meeting notes. I recommend the business plan for bigger teams that want to utilize more advanced features.

Finally, Notion has an enterprise plan as well with custom pricing. By choosing the enterprise plan, you will receive a dedicated success manager, advanced integrations, and advanced security and control features, among other things.

Keep in mind that, while Notion AI is included in the price of Notion’s Business and Enterprise plans, there is only a trial usage on Free and Plus plans.

For users who rely heavily on documentation and structured workflows, the pricing still makes sense, especially if Notion replaces several other tools.

Notion’s pros and cons

Let’s see the pros and cons I found during my Notion review!

Pros of Notion

Cons of Notion

Notion alternatives

Here are some of the best Notion alternatives:

Compare Notion vs alternatives

See how Notion stacks up against other alternatives

Notion VS ClickUp

Notion vs ClickUp

Notion VS Monday

Notion vs Monday

Notion VS Asana

Notion vs Asana

Notion VS Coda

Notion vs Coda

Notion VS Taskade

Notion vs Taskade

Todoist VS Notion

Todoist vs Notion

Notion VS Motion

Notion vs Motion

Xtiles VS Notion

Xtiles vs Notion

Notion VS NotebookLM

Notion vs NotebookLM

Evernote VS Notion

Evernote vs Notion

Anytype VS Notion

Anytype vs Notion

Final thoughts: Notion review

Even before my Notion review, I knew that it was a fantastic note-taking app. But honestly, it is much more than “just” a note-taking app.

Related article:

• 7 Best Productivity Apps I Use In 2026 | 100+ Tools Tested
• 18 Best Slack Integrations You Are MISSING In 2026
• 15 Best AI Tools | 200+ Apps Tested By A Skeptical (2026)

One of the standout features of Notion is its versatility in organizing information. Notion users can create databases, projects, Kanban boards, and more, all within the same platform. It can effectively replace many other apps, which makes it a must-have app for my tool stack.

With its wide range of collaboration features and affordable pricing, I highly recommend Notion for teams as well.

Why you can trust our reviews

At thebusinessdive.com, our team tests, reviews, and compares hundreds of productivity apps every year — from project management tools to note-taking apps. We dive deep into real-world use cases to help you find the right tools that actually improve your workflow, not just add noise.

Our mission? No fluff, no shortcuts—just honest, hands-on insights from productivity pros.

Discover how we stay transparent, read our review methodology, and let us know about any tools we missed.

Frequently asked questions

Is Notion worth it in 2026?

In 2026, Notion is still a great tool that you can implement in multiple workflows. For example, note-taking, project and task management, generating summaries or to-do lists, or fixing spelling.

It has affordable pricing, especially if you consider how many apps it can replace for this money, whether you’re using it as part of a personal plan or within a team setup.

What is the disadvantage of Notion?

The biggest disadvantage for me is that this note-taking app has no offline mode. It would be awesome if I could reach my notes without an internet connection.

Also, you can not protect your pages with passwords. As my notes include sensitive data, I would feel safer if I could protect them with a password.

What is better than Notion?

Notion is an outstanding app for note-taking. However, if you want to try out other apps, I recommend trying Xtiles, Anytype, Evernote, Taskade, or Coda. They are all great note-taking apps and can improve your productivity.

Related article:

• Best 7 Notion Alternatives In 2026 | 100+ Personally Tested Tools
• 7 Best Note-Taking Apps For 2026 | +2 Years Personal Testing

Is Notion really free?

Notion has a generous free plan. It covers a collaborative workspace, basic forms and sites, Notion Calendar and Mail.

It also supports databases with subtasks, dependencies, and custom properties. Based on my experience, Notion’s free version is totally sufficient for individuals to organize their notes and projects.

Aron Kantor

Hey there! I am Aron, the founder of Thebusinessdive. I have been testing productivity apps for almost three years now. I reach 25.000 -50.000 people monthly with the mission to help you find the perfect productivity apps. Subscribe to my YouTube channel, newsletter, and social media to hear more about the best productivity tools. Let’s dive in!

thebusinessdive.com

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