Notion at a Glance
Notion made it to our list of best project management apps for 2024. We highly recommend it for content creators, whether you are a solopreneur or have a small team collaborating on multiple projects. It has a forever free plan with enough features included to get you started.
Notion is organized as pages that can be interlinked or nested. When you sign up, the Welcome screen has all the tips you need to get started, complete with videos to create your first page, first to-do list and more.
The left side of the window shows a list of all your pages, and you can add a new page from there. For each new page, you can add a personalized header image, associate an icon with it and add descriptive comments.
You can click anywhere on the page and add blocks to create whatever you want, from to-do lists and sub-pages to videos and Google maps. The blocks can be added using hot keys, which makes it faster if you are a keyboard geek, or typing “/” to bring up the menu.
Notion Pricing
Notion offers four pricing tiers for its users:
- Free: This is the forever free plan for individuals.
- Plus: Individuals who want to use Notion beyond the basics can sign up at the cost of $8 per month, billed annually. If you want to bill monthly, that would be $10.
- Business: If you have a small team for which you want one collaborative workspace, you can sign up for Notion Team at the cost of $15 per user per month, billed annually. If you want to bill monthly, it will set you back by $18 per user per month.
- Enterprise: If you want to use Notion for your company, Notion Enterprise is the right plan, but to understand its pricing, you need to contact its sales team.
All plans include:
- Unlimited pages and blocks
- Real-time collaboration
- Link sharing with comments and editing
- 50-plus starter templates
- Databases with rich property types
- Capability to build wikis
- Table, list, calendar, Kanban board, gallery and timelines use
- Synced databases with Jira and GitHub
- Access to Notion API
Features
The best part about Notion pages is that they can be organized anytime you want. Each block is a Notion object and you can drag and drop them anywhere on the page to change page structure. Notion does not restrict the structure of a page, so you can customize it in any way you want.
When you have lots of information on a single page, it can get overwhelming. But not so with Notion. Collapsing arrows hide tons of information and you need to expand them only when you want to explicitly access the information.
Notion tables are very powerful and very useful for project management. Besides task name and details, you can add columns such as due date, status, priority level and anything else that you want to store for future reference. These columns can be filtered in a variety of ways so that at any given point of time you view only the information that you need; the rest is hidden.
Notion provides multiple views for project management—timeline, board, calendar. Plan your project in board view and then add a timeline view on the page to see how tasks are related to each other.
Each item in a board is a page in itself, with related information stored there for easy access.
Featured Partners
1
monday.com
Yes
From $8 monthly per user
Zoom, LinkedIn, Adobe, Salesforce and more
2
HubSpot
Yes
Available
Google Contacts, Mailchimp, Xero, Aircall, Airtable and more
3
Smartsheet
Yes, for one user and two editors
$7 per user per month
Google Drive, Slack, Tableau, Miro, Zapier and more
4
ClickUp
Yes, for unlimited members
$7 per month
Slack, Microsoft Outlook, HubSpot, Salesforce, Timely, Google Drive and more
Other Benefits
You can make any page live on the internet by choosing the “Share to web” option. Thus, Notion can be used to create simple websites or wiki pages with information about your organization or a product. If you allow edits and comments, Notion users can work with you on the page.
Fine Print
Notion security features are not top notch, especially for the free version. So, you need to be careful about the files you are uploading on the pages. Paid versions have better security features including SAML plus SSO, but basic features such as two-factor authentication are not yet implemented.
Notion also lacks advanced project management features such as time tracking or Gantt charts.
How Notion Stacks Up
Notion, ClickUp and Trello are excellent project management apps for small businesses with growing needs. All three have a free plan, which is convenient for getting a feel around the apps before making the final choice. As per our review of scores of project management apps in the market, Notion is perfect for individual or small team creatives and ClickUp is well-suited for agile project management teams.
Trello is a Kanban style project management tool but both Notion and ClickUp allow you to view projects in multiple views – list, timeline, Gantt chart and more. With Notion, you can even have different views of the project organized on the same page.
Users have reported security issues with Notion, so you should be careful with the files that you upload to its pages. However, its free plan has all the features needed to manage unlimited projects for individuals, complete with real time collaboration, link sharing and access for up to 5 guests. Trello doesn’t allow guests in its free plan and ClickUp doesn’t allow permission customizations.
Featured Partners
1
monday.com
Yes
From $8 monthly per user
Zoom, LinkedIn, Adobe, Salesforce and more
2
HubSpot
Yes
Available
Google Contacts, Mailchimp, Xero, Aircall, Airtable and more
3
Smartsheet
Yes, for one user and two editors
$7 per user per month
Google Drive, Slack, Tableau, Miro, Zapier and more
4
ClickUp
Yes, for unlimited members
$7 per month
Slack, Microsoft Outlook, HubSpot, Salesforce, Timely, Google Drive and more
Is Notion Right for You or Your Business?
If you are a part of the creator economy or into marketing with a small team that needs a collaborative workspace, Notion is ideal for you. You can keep all information—whether it’s in the form of text, visuals, files or databases—in one place, interlinked, tagged and categorized for easy search later on. If you are a freelancer or small business, Notion Personal or Personal Pro is good for keeping all your needs in one place and tracking all your projects.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
Is Notion any good?
Notion is the best project management tool for content creators and other creatives, especially if you operate solo or in small teams. Notion is a affordable, flexible and customizable app for project management.
Can Notion be trusted?
Notion uses TLS 1.2 for encrypting network traffic and AES-256 for encrypting data at rest. All the data is stored on AWS and it has completed SOC Type 1 and Type 2 reporting. You can check out Notion’s security practices before signing up.
Is Notion really free?
Notion’s forever free personal plan has sufficient features to get you started on any note-taking or project management tasks. The Team plan also has a free trial with a 1,000-block limit.
What are the benefits of project management software?
Project management software helps you to plan, organize, budget and track the progress of a company project. It also unites a team around shared goals so all are working toward a successful project completion. In dispersed teams, growing businesses or across multiple departments, this can be difficult to do without a software people can join and access from their own devices wherever and whenever they work.
