Notion: What It Does, What It Costs, When It Fits.
Notion is one of the most widely used productivity tools of recent years. Flexible, versatile, and sometimes exactly what a team needed. Sometimes not.
A workspace that defines itself.
Notion is an all-in-one workspace that connects documents, databases, wikis and project management in one tool. Instead of using five different apps for notes, tasks, documentation and team communication, everything lands in one interface.
The core principle: everything in Notion is a page. Pages can contain text, databases, embedded media or other pages. Databases are the heart of it: they can be displayed as a table, kanban board, calendar, gallery or list. The same database model, four different views.
Notion is not a classic tool for one use case, but a flexible platform that teams can shape according to their own needs. That is the strength. And sometimes also the weakness.
Four use cases that work in practice.
Four use cases that work in practice.
Internal wiki and knowledge base
Notion is excellent as a living company wiki. Onboarding documents, process descriptions, meeting notes, product documentation: all in one place, searchable, linkable, collaboratively maintained. Better than a Confluence graveyard because the barrier to writing and updating is much lower.
The result: Knowledge stays in the company instead of in individual people’s heads.
Lightweight project management
For teams that do not need a full PM tool like Jira, Notion is a good choice. Tasks, owners, deadlines, status: all in one database, displayed as kanban or table. Not as powerful as specialised tools, but sufficient for most teams and with significantly less overhead.
The result: Track projects without introducing another tool.
Remote team hub
For distributed teams, Notion is often the central hub: team updates, decision log, shared resources, onboarding new team members. Everything that would otherwise be spread across email, Slack and Google Drive, in one place.
The result: Less “where does that live again?” in the team chat.
Simple CRM for small teams
Notion can be used as a lightweight CRM. Customer database, contacts, deal pipeline, notes from conversations: all mappable in one database. Not a replacement for HubSpot or Salesforce, but often sufficient for early sales stages or small teams.
The result: Structure your sales process without immediately investing in a full CRM.
Free, Plus, Business, Enterprise: who needs what?
Free: Unlimited pages for individuals, limited team functions, maximum 10 guests. Good for trying it out, quickly too small for teams.
Plus (approx. €10 per user/month): Unlimited blocks for teams, unlimited file uploads, 30-day version history. The right starting point for most small to medium teams.
Business (approx. €15 per user/month): SAML SSO, advanced page analytics, 90-day version history, private teamspaces. Relevant from a certain company size or with stricter security requirements.
Enterprise: Extended security and compliance features, unlimited version history, dedicated support. Prices on request, for large organisations with corresponding requirements.
What is often overlooked: Notion charges per user. For larger teams that adds up quickly. Anyone wanting to onboard 50 people should calculate in advance whether the pricing model still works.
What Notion genuinely does well.
Flexibility is the biggest strength. Notion can be shaped for almost any use case: wiki, PM tool, CRM, documentation, personal note system. Teams that know what they want quickly arrive at a setup that works.
The low barrier to entry helps with adoption. New team members understand Notion in hours, not weeks. That is different with tools like Confluence or Jira.
Notion has a clean REST API and recently also an official MCP server. This makes Notion an interesting building block in automated workflows: read data from Notion, create entries automatically, synchronise databases with external systems. Those using n8n or similar tools can integrate Notion seamlessly.
Many developers use Notion as a personal knowledge base. Snippets, documentation, resources: all versioned and searchable. Outside of work we also know some who build their private knowledge database with it, from book notes to recipes to travel planning.
And: Notion is available as an app for iOS and Android. Mobile works well for reading and quick notes, for more complex database work the desktop is more comfortable.
What Notion is not. And does not want to be.
Notion is not a full project management tool. Those who need complex dependencies, Gantt charts, resource planning or sophisticated reporting are better served by Jira, Asana or Linear.
Performance with very large databases is a known issue. Those managing thousands of entries in a database will notice that Notion has its limits there.
Permissions are complex. In larger teams with different access rights, rights management quickly becomes unclear. This is solvable, but requires maintenance.
Offline use is limited. Notion is primarily a cloud tool. Those who work a lot without an internet connection have a problem.
And: Notion is a flexible tool, not a structured system. Without clear team conventions, a messy pile of pages that nobody can navigate quickly emerges. The tool does not solve an organisational problem, it just gives you the possibility to solve it yourself.
What Notion AI can do. And where external tools deliver more.
Notion AI is integrated directly into the workspace and costs approximately €10 per user additionally. It can summarise texts, generate pages, query database content and write drafts. For teams already using Notion it is a sensible add-on.
A practical feature that is often overlooked: Notion AI automatically suggests suitable fields and data models for new databases. Those who want to set up a private video collection, book library or recipe database get a sensible basic structure generated automatically. This saves time and is a good starting point for anyone who does not know where to begin.
Where Notion AI hits its limits: complex workflows, external system integrations or structured data processing. Those who want to automatically process Notion data, synchronise it with other systems or integrate it into AI workflows need external tools like n8n. Notion has an API that is well suited for such integrations.
From Confluence graveyard to living wiki.
A remote team had its knowledge spread across Confluence, Google Drive and various Slack channels. Onboarding new team members took weeks because nobody knew where anything was. Confluence was barely maintained because the barrier to writing was too high.
After migrating to Notion: clear page structure, templates for recurring documents, an onboarding section that is actually kept up to date. The barrier to contributing is low enough that the team actually does it.
- Confluence and Google Drive replaced by Notion as central knowledge base
- Onboarding time for new team members reduced from weeks to days
- Team maintains documentation themselves, without prompting
- Meeting notes, decisions and processes in one place
- Clear conventions defined so the structure holds
- Notion AI used for summaries and first drafts
MANY USE NOTION. FEW ACTUALLY USE IT WELL.
Those who introduce Notion without clear conventions end up with an unstructured pile of pages in six months. How we approach things like this is in the playbook.