Notion

Overview

Notion is an interactive, information-sharing platform useful for team collaboration and management. Think of it as an overly-robust wiki that is flexible enough to handle several applications. Notion has been used as a note-taking app, team document collaboration software, task tracker, and now an employee information portal. It has the ability to handle hundreds of users and can create pages by importing .CSVs. Another helpful feature is the ability to create tags which are searchable. This helps the user find and organize information quickly. Notion allows integration with several apps including Slack, Figma, Zoom, Dropbox, and more, so it will likely fit with whatever software fleet your client currently has.

Pros

• Very cheap 4 dollars/month for a personal pro plan
• Very low code so it is easily manageable for someone with no technical experience
• Various aesthetic pre-built templates provided
• Easy to maintain
• It’s cute
• Easy way to get centralized information
• Free trial is based on how much functionality is used, not on a time period (could be a con depending on context)
• Lots of documentation and tutorials online

Cons

• Not very customizable
• Restraints on fonts, colors, and layouts
• Permission-setting is tedious
• Some of the Notion lingo is hard to understand at first (e.g. “blocks” and “databases” don’t mean what you think they mean)

How We Used Notion

We used Notion to create an intern portal for the summer interns of HEB. Our portal included pages to ask and answer FAQs, view and edit user profiles, download and view documents and resources, and see posts from other users. Our client praised it as “user-friendly” and “trendy”. On the development side, it takes little technical knowledge to configure, but it has some limitations such as its lack of role-based permissions. Notion is constantly rolling out new features, so be sure to look at the most up-to-date information if you’re considering it for your client project. We’re happy we used Notion!