Can you pull off mixing task management, content creation, and a knowledge base in one platform?

As a bit of background, I’m one half of a two-person studio making a farming and creature collection game called Ooblets.

Working on a relatively big game means juggling an abundance of game data, design documents, product management, task management, and marketing. Previously, we’d been handling all that across a bunch of different products and platforms like Google Docs & Sheets, Trello, Dynalist, and Scrivener. While most of those are free, the cost became information disjunction and unnecessary mental overhead.

Enter Notion

I stumbled upon Notion from Product Hunt recently, and it was billed as an all-in-one workspace, which I wasn’t sure was something we needed. The workspace consists of the functionality of a text editor, to-do list, task manager, knowledge base, calendar, spreadsheet, CRM, and a couple other things.

It treats all data similarly and lets you organize that data in a few different formats that make up most types of productivity tools’ functionality. Wrapping all that functionality together is a sidebar file manager that’s deceptively powerful in maintaining a sense of organization, continuity, and accessibility.

So far, for Ooblets, we’ve used Notion to replace most of our usage of Trello, Dynalist, and Google Docs. While its authoring abilities are slick, it’s no replacement for a serious word processor, so when we need to edit a contract, we’re still using Docs.

We’ve also been using Notion for things that we weren’t handling very well beforehand, like more serious task management (like Asana or Jira) and a centralized knowledge base.

What it does well

UI/UX

Notion has a WYSIWYG editor where all data is treated as blocks. A block could be a line of text, an image, a list item, or a bunch of other things. Where a lot of content managers feel like word processors with the option to awkwardly shoehorn in other types of formatted data, Notion’s take on it feels much more natural. If you’re familiar with Medium’s editor, it’s similar but much more powerful.

Besides the editor, the overall UI is self-explanatory and minimalist and honestly some of the best I’ve seen for something that does so much. Their choices of what to limit and what to give you control over make sense and feel right.

Nested lists

One thing I had lamented about Scrivener was its lack of functional nested lists, but Notion really gets it right. All of its list types support nesting with tab and shift-tab controls, and it also has a specific block type for collapsable nested lists.

Mixed content

Having so many different data formats all in the same application is really valuable for a small team like ours. Not having to switch between a bunch of different websites and apps and keeping track of where everything is lets us focus on more important things.

Besides offering the functionality of Trello, Workflowy, Sheets, etc., Notion makes it pretty seamless to also combine and mix all those systems within the same document (if you want to).

Search

They have two types of search: An in-document search that works like Chrome’s find function (which is my favorite search interface) and a project search that looks for instances throughout all your documents (which I haven’t actually used much yet, but is more similar to Slack’s search).

It’s missing find+replace, but for our use case I don’t see that being a real problem.

Collaboration

We haven’t tested it in extreme, but so far collaborative editing seems to work as expected and similar to Google Docs.

There’s a private folder that isn’t shared with the rest of the team which is valuable for people like me who have a bit of anxiety when composing things while people might be watching.

Personalization

Despite the simple controls, Notion makes you feel like you’re crafting the entire system to fit your workflow instead of trying to modify your organization to fit it. I’m also a fan of the little aesthetic controls you have to make everything feel a bit more personalized.

What it could do better

All of the issues I have with Notion are pretty minor and not deal-breakers to me, but there are some caveats depending on your goals and a few things that could just be improved:

Split pane

It’s missing split pane window controls. Sure, split panes are cramped and a little ugly, but so much of my workflow involves going back and forth between different documents that I know I would use it if it were an option in Notion.

Exporter limitations

The exporter only generates PDFs and markdown files and could definitely benefit from the ability to also generate HTML directly. It also doesn’t export images but rather links to where the files were uploaded to on Notion’s CDN. This might be considered a feature but I’m not sure what the usage limits are on hotlinking. As it stands, when I write devlogs in Notion and export, I manually replace all CDN URLs with my own hosted image URLs for fear I might trigger some unspoken bandwidth or hotlinking limit once it goes live on our website.

I’d also like to see them explore their web authoring functionality more, since the product seems pretty well-suited for it. Also, while their sharing options seem pretty good, they could probably be expressed in a more descriptive way.

Little things that need work

Copying and pasting. Empty lines are often discarded and depending on what the originating program you’re copying from, it will either consider multi-line text a single block or broken-up blocks for each new line.

Shortcut system. When you type a forward slash (/) it opens the block content type menu which starts messing things up when you’re just putting slashes in your text for other reasons. It steals focus and changes how hitting return behaves, sometimes deleting text (e.g. type “UI/UX” and hit return and it will delete the “/UX”). They could fix this by only opening the block type menu if it’s the very first character of a new block.

User mentions. They could probably be presented in a more attention-grabbing and present way.

Web paths. Their current system feels a bit clunky. When you access help articles for Notion, they show up in your project’s path (e.g. notion.so/your-project/not-your-file) in the URL and it’s disconcerting regarding where your files exist vs. other, shared stuff.

Emoji search. I really like having this tool, but in their implementation, the input you enter has very little bearing on the results.

Who it’s not for

Notion’s main limitation is its minimalist word processing, which is clearly by design and a valuable element of using the application, but it is a definite trade-off. You won’t be able to create or import heavily-formatted documents like a script or contract. I haven’t played around with it, but there are a lot of integrations that could help you work around this to still organize your external documents within Notion, but that still means it can’t fully replace Docs/Word/Scrivener.

I’ve also not played around too much with their spreadsheet and CRM tools, but I can’t imagine their implementation will satisfy power users of Excel, Sheets, or Salesforce, which again is something I hope they don’t change for the overall usability of the application.

Cost

Notion costs $8 per month per user, which fits in with my expectations. We run on a pretty tight budget but I didn’t cringe at paying for Notion.

There’s a free tier that lets you create up to 600 blocks (which are basically every line of text, piece of data, or anything). It was enough for us to actually test if we’d use it and decide we wanted to subscribe without hesitation.

Conclusion

We’ve only been using Notion for a short while, but I’ve found it to generally live up to its claims of being an all-in-one workspace, and as such, it’s been quite valuable for our productivity and organization of data. I honestly wish we had been using it from the very beginning of development.

It’s great for avoiding having a diaspora of information across a bunch of different services and all the mental overhead that adds, and for an indie game developer, that’s a big burden to lift.

There are a few competitors like Airtable, Basecamp, and Dropbox Paper. Of those, I’ve only played around with Dropbox Paper, but it seems that Notion’s got quite a few more features, better overall UX, and the side-panel organizer that makes it faster to use. Basecamp seems like it’s more about team management than data management, and Airtable seems to focus more on tables (go figure) than anything else.

I’d love to hear your opinions about Notion and what you’re using it for, or if you’re using something else. We’re still figuring everything out, but if you have questions about using Notion, I’ll try to answer them.

You can check out Notion here. You can follow me on Twitter here.