Dropbox Paper is a web-based, co-editing tool that includes word processing, document creation and coordination features.
The tool is free to use and allows multiple people to collaborate on a document.
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Notion
Score 8.7 out of 10
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Notion aims to present users with an all-in-one workspace — for notes, tasks, wikis, and databases, from Notion Labs in San Francisco.
When collaborating with a team on content creation with the purpose of bringing multiple inputs in a nonstructured or nonfixed media type, this is a great choice because of its diversity of content and collaboration tools, however, if you are looking to have high flexibility in a particular content creation stream, for example, sophisticated text editing or presentation, there are a lot of strong competitors out there.
If you want a customizable solution that can be adapted for just about any scenario, I recommend using Notion. If you need a solution that's easy to share with people outside your organization, Notion is great and allows individual or team permission-setting. If you want a turnkey solution, Notion might not be the best since it requires a fair bit of set-up. There are templates that can be purchased to handle this, but I haven't found them very helpful.
With Dropbox Paper, I can insert images and videos into your document, to make the document more visual, which is helpful for creating newsletters and simple flyers.
Once you create a document, you can save it as a template to be reused as a starting point for creating new documents.
Dropbox Paper has some basic formatting features like bolding text, adding links, and creating H1 and H2 headings.
You can insert tables into your Dropbox Paper document
Dropbox Paper also has an unusual but helpful feature, and that is the time line feature.
I use Notion on my personal tablet, and unlike on the computer, I have a lot of difficulty editing backgrounds, GIFs, and page dividers. It's not as user-friendly, and often the elements end up cut off or misaligned, which is frustrating.
While the current calendar feature is helpful, I'd love to see more customization options. The Google Calendar style isn't always ideal, especially for tasks without specific times or for ongoing projects that require daily maintenance.
It would be fantastic to have more flexibility in customizing Notion pages. For example, I'd love to create planners with the freedom to add illustration boxes, stickers, or GIFs without being restricted to a fixed layout.
Very easy to use (I learned how to use everything on my own) and I was able to set up an entire ecosystem without any courses or other tools. I often say that Notion is like Lego for adults, because there we can use all the available tools to create a multitude of things, from funnels to projects with calculated deadlines and tags.
I was not part of the decision making to acquire the Dropbox tool against any of the other options and competitors. However, I can assume that the fact that we have been using Dropbox File Management for many years and many important files are stored and shared in the tool everyday, the adding of Dropbox Paper should have been felt very natural.
The company uses both Notion and Trello within the company. Notion is more for North America employees while Trello is used between Operation team overseas and in North America. Sometimes it's a preference of how the tools look like for project management. I would say both Notion and Trello are nice tools and serves our needs.
Dropbox Paper has allowed all of our employees to be much more productive and on track even when we can't be in the office, which from a management standpoint is a huge positive impact. They know that productivity isn't slowing or lacking when everyone isn't actually sitting in the office under their watchful eye.
It has had a huge impact on our turn around time and speed of getting more work and projects completed. The more work you can effectively get done in a time period means more money for the bottom line.
It has made the majority of our team members more accountable and reliable when they know everyone is working together on something and each person has their own checklist of items to complete. It is especially helpful that everyone can see the same checklist, so everyone knows what each other is accomplishing.
