Notion.so - All-in-one workspace that can challenge Atlassian?

Notion.so is a relatively new product, but it is already making some waves and is often mentioned in comparison with Atlassians products. At first glance it has a good spread of functionality and a price that can really challenge the Atlassian giant, especially for small to medium companies.

"Write, plan, collaborate, and get organized. Notion is all you need — in one tool."

Notion.so started in 2016 in San Fransisco and it has already attracted many users to its simple, yet powerful features. On their website they have 4 areas that they see as their core: Notes & docs, Knowledge base, Tasks & Projects and Database. If we compare these with the Atlassian suite it is pretty much Confluence with Trello baked into one product.

The editing capabilities are not bad and Notion.so uses an inline editing function rather then the old click to edit function in Confluence. It is very nice and uses the "/" command to access the functions rather than a toolbar. The permissions system is a bit different, but seem pretty solid from what I can tell. Once you get the hang of things it is very, very easy to build content with Notion.so.

The capabilities for Tasks & Projects are very similar to Trello so if you know how to work with Trello you should have no issues with Notion.so. If anything I feel that Notion.so actually have a more capable feature set than Trello by allowing a ton of fields that can be customized to create some pretty sophisticated setups. While not nearly as powerful as Jira for development purposes, this is is more than enough for many other situations.

Databases follow pretty much the same capabilities as for tasks and pages. In fact tasks comes from a database by default. This means that you can create pretty awesome databases with multiple views, including tasks, lists and even a calendar view. Personally I love the feature that each row in my table can be edited as a separate page.

At a very affordable price compared to Confluence and Jira with pretty solid features this is not a bad alternative. There are some concerns regarding security as Notion.so do not have any ISO, SOC 2, HIPAA certificates, but considering they have passed reviews from companies such as Slack and Intercom that is probably not a big thing for it's user base.

I see Notion.so as a good alternative for small to medium non-development companies. It can work for smaller development companies as well as for large non-development companies, but I think the sweet spot is in the small to medium non-development area. The price also suggest that as it is user based and at the top tier with 20 dollars per user it is getting pretty expensive.

I like Notion.so and I think it definitely have a place in some organizations. It is clearly being developed with passion where the goal is not to make money, but to make people's life easier and more organized. As always they get an extra gold star for giving students and educators this awesome product for free.

Notion.so comes as an online cloud solution, a mobile app as well as downloads for mac and windows that even allow offline editing....and did I mention it has a dark mode that is simply amazing?

If you have not tried it, then go and sign up for a free account today and give it a go.