Notion

Notion is the everything-document. Wiki, database, task manager, notes app, light CRM, project planner, personal journal, half the documentation pages on the internet. The breadth is the appeal and also the trap. Every team that adopts Notion eventually has a chaotic workspace with three pages titled 'Roadmap', four databases that overlap, and a sidebar nobody can navigate. For founders, Notion is genuinely valuable if you discipline yourself. The databases are powerful. Real relations between collections, formulas, rollups, views (table, board, calendar, timeline, gallery) that all share the same underlying data. You can build a custom CRM, a customer feedback DB, a content calendar, or a product roadmap in an afternoon. The pages-with-databases-inside model is still unique to Notion and remains its strongest moat. Notion AI ($10/user/month add-on) is now genuinely useful. Summarise meeting notes, draft pages from prompts, write SQL queries against your databases. It's less ambitious than the all-encompassing 'agent' play from some competitors but more reliable for everyday writing tasks. Worth the $10 if you have a few teammates. The annoyances are well-documented. Notion is slow. Large workspaces feel laggy compared to Apple Notes or Obsidian. Mobile apps are workable but never quite as fluid as desktop. The free tier is real and usable but team features (advanced permissions, version history, audit log) hide behind Business and Enterprise. And the open-ended nature means every team's Notion looks different. Onboarding new people into a sprawl is painful. Where Notion truly wins: company wikis, lightweight CRM, content planning, and any 'we need a shared brain' situation. Where it loses: real engineering issue tracking (use Linear), real customer support (use Intercom or Plain), real spreadsheets (use Airtable or actual Excel). My advice for early-stage startups: yes, use Notion. But spend an hour on day one designing a structure (categories, templates, naming conventions). You'll save days of re-organising later. And resist the temptation to make Notion do everything. The teams that get the most out of Notion are the ones that use it as a wiki plus a few opinionated databases, not as the One Tool.