Item: Notion
Rating: 10
Author: AJ Franchino

Overall Satisfaction with Notion

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Notion serves as an extensible database, documentation, and workflow manager for our small business. We operate across a number of business units, with some being largely technical roles, and other being customer, finance, or process-focused. Notion is both customizable enough to support development life cycles, sprint planning, QA workflows, all while providing an easy to contribute to wiki foundation. This allows our business side to author and update SOPs, while also allowing our technical folks to share code snippets, draw architecture diagrams, and plan, track, and communicate deployments to stakeholders.

Pros and Cons

Pros

Low barrier to entry for note-taking, brainstorming, and gathering asynchronous input and feedback
The AI is not gimmicky. It reads context across all relevant articles and provides relevant suggestions that I find myself accepting 90% of the time
Notification system for getting teammates input and attention on whatever it is that I'm working on

Cons

Building out the databases is not a very friendly experience on mobile. You can use and contribute to a well-defined database on mobile platforms, but defining them is nearly impossible.
Merging/using blocks could be a more intuitive process. I find that my coworkers adoption of the platform is hindered by their understanding of the block system of Notion.
The ability to launch a saved set of tabs. When I use Notion to perform a workflow, or to follow SOP, I often find myself opening the same 2-5 articles. Tab groups would be incredible for this!

Return on Investment

We've had significantly less "collisions" between teams and work streams
Cuts down on the constant pinging of teammates to see what they're working on
Allows new hires to self ramp much more effectively than other knowledge bases

Usability

Very intuitive on a laptop, with some left to be desired on mobile. That being said, I use mobile to read and consume things that have been authored previously. I use the desktop apps when I am contributing or planning a project. The desktop apps are perfectly capable and perform well even with a number of tabs and windows open. It can be easy to "make a mess" and have too many duplicate articles or databases, but again the clean up is so easy that it's not necessarily a detractor.

Alternatives Considered

OneNote

While I have not used OneNote since 2022, I can say that it got the "binder" organization completely right. I loved bucketing my work into those notebooks, with tabs containing all the subdomains. Notion keeps that momentum going, with the welcomed addition of rich multimedia and collaboration tools. The / commands get my creativity going in a way that OneNote did not. OneNote is still great, but Notion is WONDERFUL

Key Insights

Do you think Notion delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with Notion's feature set?

Yes

Did Notion live up to sales and marketing promises?

Yes

Did implementation of Notion go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy Notion again?

Yes

Other Software Used

Tableau Cloud, Statuspage

Likelihood to Recommend

Notion is incredible for the ideation and planning stages of nearly any project. Its collaboration tools make contributing a breeze. Any sprawl or apparent mess can be cleaned up quickly by moving brainstorm sections into "toggle" drop-downs or subpages. It does not, however, have a very strong approval workflow built in. While you can lock and verify pages, I wish that there was a way to stamp an approval, complete with a timestamp and record of the page when that approval was given. If this was an option, we could replace a number of other change management tracking tools.

Notion Feature Ratings

Comments

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The only platform everyone at my startup agrees on

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