Item: Notion
Rating: 8
Author: Long Nguyen Vu

Overall Satisfaction with Notion

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

As a research engineer, I have to work with a lot of opensource projects on GitHub. At the same time, given a subject to research, I need to conduct a survey about different perspectives of the topic. For example, what should be the right tools to use, what approach would save more time etc. Taking notes is a crucial task that I have to do constantly. Notion turns out to be quite useful for such tasks. However in recent year, there's a shift of my usage behavior which I will describe later in this survey.

Pros and Cons

Pros

Table
Search
Organizing text
Nested pages

Cons

Customized template for individuals. Current template categories too broad and are not tailored for personal settings.
Navigation with search sometimes is cummbersome. The search button is too small to see and it blends in other buttons such as Home or inbox.
Web version somehow is much lighter than app version

Return on Investment

inprove at least 20% of my productivity for documentation
Save me about 5 minutes every hour to look for what I jotted down

Usability

Notion is really easy to use and it scales as you need it. There's no doubt about that. However it is less usable on phone and tablet, most of the time I use Notion is when I am on my MacBook. The app sometimes logs me out which is quite annoyning, but I guess that's a security feature.

Alternatives Considered

ClickUp and Atlassian Confluence

Notion is less complicated than ClickUp and more user friendly, especially for those who prefer simplicity. I am aware that ClickUp does offer simple template and let us scale it but Notion is one step ahead because of the UI design is easier to use.
I like Confluence at work too, the code embedding looks so nice, but I think the table of content is a bit worse compared to Notion.

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?

I wasn't involved with the selection/purchase process

Did implementation of Notion go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy Notion again?

Other Software Used

Atlassian Jira, Atlassian Confluence, GitHub, GitHub Copilot, ChatGPT, Anthropic Claude, DeepSeek, Codeium, Cursor

Likelihood to Recommend

For note taking, Notion is really great. Nested paging and heading toggles are easy and convenient to use. For task tracking it needs a lot of improvements. Notion is more suitable for team documentation than becoming a full fledged tasking tracking tool like Jira. The last time I use task tracking was from a template where the author had to hack his way to make the progress update between table cells.

Notion Feature Ratings

Comments

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So far so good, but can be further improved

Software Version