Notion is a wiki for the ages

Notion is a premium knowledge organization app with collaboration features that can appeal to enterprises.

Sick of jotting ideas on paper and having to-do lists scattered in Apple's Note app on your iPhone? Your job only allows OneNote and you desperately need to get out of the Microsoft ecosystem? Want to impress your Dungeon and Dragon crew with a wiki chronicling your adventures? Notion might have the answer to your needs. Dragons not included.

My organized memory

Below is what I was able to accomplish in the past year using Notion every day. Using only drag and drop components on my desktop, I built a homepage to sort my ideas for the site, a social media planner, and a news aggregator for this website. Notion boasts a collection of emojis that would make any Slack user proud.

The fourth image displays Notion's appealing Templates marketplace, which can be gathered either from the Notion team or from the community. Notion even offers paid third-party content. The paid templates range from the expected job application tracker all the way to an almost fully featured freelancer productivity app.

What about AI?

Notion integrated quickly with OpenAI's Large Language Model (LLM), GPT. Below are some "Ask AI" features. In principle, I could generate a blog post out of a given topic. Using built-in functions, Notion makes re-purposing and editing the text a seamless experience.

However, the issue lies in that everything about the Ask AI feature feels like a wrapper around ChatGPT. "Improve writing", "Make shorter", and "Make longer" is an engineered prompts sent to GPT. It's exactly like telling ChatGPT itself to do these actions.

In the end, I felt using AI to create content had the same core problem as ChatGPT: it's bad at writing engaging content.  Summary function seems like a better avenue.

Recommended Use Cases

Based on my exploration, Notion is an absolute must for students. Notion solves the following problems:

• Grants the ability to sort massive amounts of knowledge in a convenient, eye-pleasing way
• Built-in agenda and calendar functions to prepare for these handouts and exams
• Basic collaboration features for the hassle of teamwork (version history can be dug up with some effort, but it's worth it to build a case to kick out lazy people from your team)
• Compatibility with desktop and mobile with an offline version
• Many available third party templates
• Using the Ask AI for basic editing (and hopefully not cheating)
• Cloud saving so you can't lose your work

Alright, that last one may not be an advantage for some students who always seem to have their hard drive crash the day before a term paper is due.

Limitations

While Notion can thrive with small teams, hobbyists and small businesses who want a fabulous-looking wiki, I am concerned with the app's capacity to convince people like, say, "Uncle Larry, CPA, 25 years of experience", to suddenly add emojis to his team's knowledge hub. Sometimes you just need to write things down while you are on a call, and I feel Notion does not give such an easy opportunity for Larry to scribble elucubrations swiftly. The rich editor becomes a double-edged sword. There was some occurrence, both on mobile and on desktop, where I pushed the wrong button and ended up in a menu, where I had to undo some additions. Sometimes you want your notes to be messy!

Pictured: Messi notes

I agree I am sounding paradoxical: the very same capabilities that differentiate Notion from SharePoint/OneNote are also the reason why Larry would stick with OneNote. Maybe Notion is just not made for the Larrys. I bet they can fix it though.

Pricing

Personal use is free, with a Personal Plus Plan giving more collaboration features. The team's plan starts at $8/user/month. If you are say, a retailer with 20 employees doing administrative duties, you are looking at less than a $2000 expense. The big question is whether the enhanced editing experience and templates are sufficient to convince your boss to switch away from Google Docs.

Enterprise pricing is not explicit. I would have to guess around $12-$15/user/month to benefit from enterprise features (more below). The enterprise tier is piquing my interest since I do not envision banks suddenly moving away from SharePoint to embrace a new knowledge base. Migration costs are a massive deterrent. Atlassian's Confluence is a natural competitor but once again enterprises will not take massive risks solely for the sake of employee experience. That and Larry needing training.

Notion's enterprise potential is, therefore, in my opinion, in departments that are so sick of the aforementioned tools that grew into mammoths of badly archived Word copy-pastas that they are willing to shell out $5 000 from their budget to start over on the side!

Yes, IT people: Notion is probably in your top 5 shadow IT tools to monitor.

Conclusion

Pros

• Amazing, rich text editor
• Visually stunning wikis
• Templates marketplace provides endless possibilities for customization and monetization
• Charts and real-time collaboration built-in
• Market-leading vision and user experience

Cons

• The editor is almost too ric: Notion should be more directive.
• Competitors such as "Migration Costs" in large enterprises may limit enterprise features growth.
• Questionable ability to scale to thousands of employees.
• "Gimmicky" LLM integration

Verdict

• Notion is an absolute must-have for students, creative-minded teams, medium-sized knowledge-based businesses, freelancers, self-employed, hobbyists, and knowledge nerds.

Speaking of nerds, I love you Notion (from your contact page):