Google Docs is owner-visible by default, whereas Notion is organization-visible by default.

Google Docs (until recently?) doesn’t really do links between docs that well.

The slash-based (/) UI in Notion is huge for onboarding. The different content types you can insert are super discoverable compared to Google Docs where you have to dig through the menus.

You can’t fuck with the styles in Notion that much, which prevents people from becoming “format astronauts.”

Notion has an organization-global index (like most wikis) which makes document discovery a bit easier.

Notion has document metadata, which lets you get something like a simple database out of a set of documents. You can have a set of docs with custom fields (due date, point of contact, whatever)

Notion gives you an inbox for notifications when you’re mentioned/stuff gets edited.

Google Docs is catching up on some of this in the last couple years, but IMO they have been sleeping on this space since pretty early in Google Docs development.

Just wanted to chime in. I have my own Publishing Platform on top of Google Docs. It's called https://docswrite.com

It can bulk publish your Google Docs to WordPress also it can create you a blog from Google Docs.

Coda is much more techie-focused, their powerpacks are 2nd to nobody. Notion is more for everyone. Literally after spending a week - it's pretty obvious how to use Notion because it's not super-feature-heavy. It just works.

Basically if anyone wants to build an extremely beautifully crafted UI on top of Google Drive/Docs, you could perhaps have the same advantages of Notion in Google Docs (that would be my dream tbh)

Notion is Emacs for Gen Z.

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Change my mind.