For those like myself ignorant about the company, Notion appears to be a project management tool with integrated wiki and docs support. With at least a claimed strong user focus.
Notion makes a decent tool for a personal/organizational wiki but it’s too slow/unresponsive/janky to use for many other purposes IMO.
I’ve been using it for a couple years and I used to hold out hope that the performance could be optimized, but at this point I think it must be some fundamental issue with their tech stack (or some other organizational issue). It just feels bad to use. The pages take forever to load, the search is slow, and the actual page editing feels sluggish.
It’s a shame because otherwise I really like the core ideas of how Notion works. If someone released a tool that was “Notion but fast”, I’d switch in an instant.
I found it very difficult to figure out how to use the tools beyond very narrow use-cases they provided in examples.
And I found the docs were almost useless in explaining the overarching design. As a result, despite a lot of time spent, I kept bumping into unexpected limitations or design corners with no way out other than to scrap the document type I was trying to construct.
I went back to Trello for project management, Todoist for to-do's, and my Dropbox-backed markdown files for notes.
It's a shame because with more attention to the user experience and better docs, I think they'd have a killer product.
It has been great so far as a lightweight CRM, and a collaborative meeting note—taking tool with backlinks into CRM. Also documenting our internal processes.
Project management and ToDos haven’t stuck.
We also use a Notion database with various views for tracking customers, sales pipeline, rewards, and a lot more.
When we bring on a new customer, we quickly create (from a template) a personalized welcome page for them with an embedded copy of their service agreement and a few other things. Notion can generate a public link so we send this right away and it makes a nice impression.
Performance isn't great but it is so useful for us that I don't mind. I do hope they provide an offline version soon as that is my biggest wish right for it right now.
* I'm not affiliated with the company, just a pleased customer.
You’d have to shoehorn project management into their database paradigm, which definitely seems subpar compared to a purpose-built task/project manager. But the “personal wiki” aspect of it is fantastic.