TL;DR: Notion is better-linked, more comprehensive, more collaborative version of Google Docs that you should move your team onto.
I used to work at Google, on Hangouts Chat (we sat in the same building as the Google Docs people). Google Docs was pretty good, I thought.
Then I worked at Streamlit (founded by 3 ex-Googlers). This was my first time hearing about our lord and savior Notion. It was amazing.
Now I work at Manifold (2 of the 3 founders are ex-Googlers). It’s incredibly hard to imagine operating without Notion.
I would happily pay $1000 each month to keep Notion in my life, over the next best alternative. Which means I value Notion more than a car (total cost of ownership on a cheap car is ~$600 a month).
Never choose a font or adjust a margin again. Notion is far more restrictive in the styling options it allows you — which is GOOD. You don’t actually want to be spending any time whatsoever on the style for 99% of documents; you want to focus on the substance.
And Notion’s style is quite good; it obeys eg rules laid out for good typography.
You can find all the things Notion supports by typing / . But once you get into the flow of writing, there’s a bunch of really quick shortcuts to pretty up your Notion doc:
@pagetitle |
Link to another Notion page |
|---|---|
- hello |
Bulleted list |
1. goodbye |
Numbered list |
# Heading |
Title (use ## or ### for smaller titles) |
[ ] task one |
Checkbox |
> Extra info |
Toggle (good for footnotes) |
| Paste link | |
| Paste image |
Once again: Linking to any other Notion doc you’ve ever written is trivially easy: just type @pagetitle and pick the Austin's Notes.
Sure, you could do this in Google docs by going to find the thing you want to link, and then putting the URL in, and creating a hyperlink; but that 1 minute process is 3 seconds. Notion removes the trivial inconvenience of linking between things, meaning that
One amazing thing about Notion is that if you just copy the whole thing, it pastes with