Notion

The idea behind Notion is simple once it lands. Everything's a page.

A database is just a bunch of pages, and you can flip it between a table, a board, a calendar or a timeline.

What does that get you in real life? Your meeting notes sit inside the project they're about, right next to the tasks that came out of the meeting. Not in some other app you forget to open.

That's why teams end up dropping their docs tool, their wiki and their light project tracker for it. One thing to pay for, one place to look.

It keeps growing too. Forms that drop answers straight into a database, pages you can publish as a website, a separate calendar app. The September 2026 release added agent skills, which is basically saving a good prompt so the whole team can reuse it.

And the free plan is lovely. One person, unlimited pages, no trial clock.

You sign up and you get... an empty workspace. Notion doesn't tell you how to organise things. You decide.

Some people love that. But going through the App Store reviews, lots of people said it took weeks before it stopped feeling like homework. It's the most common complaint by far.

So if all you want is to jot something down and find it later, honestly, get a simpler notes app. You'll be happier.

Offline is the other one. For years there wasn't any. There is now, but on the free plan you pick which pages to keep offline, while paid plans do more of it for you. On planes or bad wifi a lot? Check that first.

And there's no Linux app. We looked on the download page and it's not there, so it's browser only.

Just you? You probably won't pay a thing. The free plan really is enough for one person.

The thing to know is that "unlimited" only covers one member. The moment a second person joins, there's a cap.

Plus is $10 a person a month on yearly billing, and it's the one most small teams want. Their pricing page says yearly saves up to 20%.

Now the part we'd want someone to tell us before buying. The AI agent, the AI meeting notes and the search across your other apps are all on Business, which is $20. Free and Plus only get a limited trial.

Custom agents cost extra on top, at $10 per 1,000 credits after a free allowance. So if AI is why you're looking at Notion, you're really shopping for the $20 plan.

Notion has 4.78 on the App Store from around 90,000 ratings, so the people on it mostly like it a lot.

What comes up again and again in the happy reviews? How many other apps it let them delete.

On Hacker News you also see people moving their notes into it because it hooks up to the AI assistants they already have.

The complaints are the same ones every year. It takes a while to learn. It's a bit janky on an iPad with a keyboard. And the old reviews are full of people asking for offline mode, which they've now got.

A few people had billing go wrong after upgrading. It's a small number of reviews, but we'd rather mention it than not.