The 9 best Notion alternatives in 2026

Notion is a special app. Starting from an empty screen, you add notes and documents in a freeform way. Then, when the original page is too crowded, you create your first database and the possibilities explode: you can create a custom productivity system and change it as you evolve.

But productivity is evolving. Knowledge management platforms need to support human teams while making room for AI agents, with automation and guardrails in place to make sure you do more work, not spend more time reviewing everything. Depending on the shape of what you do, Notion might not fit the bill anymore.

If you’ve been considering a Notion alternative—or strapping a dozen apps together to get all the features you want—you’re in the right place. I’ve been keeping an eye on this category for four years now. I’ve considered over 100 Notion alternatives with similar features; while most aren’t even close in user experience, there are more and more worthy possibilities. Let’s check them out: the best Notion alternatives.

The best Notion alternatives

• Superhuman Docs for powerful formulas and databases

• Mem for AI-powered personal knowledge management

• Tana Outliner for turning daily notes into networked hubs

• Microsoft Loop for Microsoft 365 users

• Slite for teams managing knowledge with AI

• Fibery for building apps on top of your knowledge

• Anytype for privacy, security, and data relationships

• Scrintal for mind mapping

• Obsidian for fearless tinkerers

And, of course, Notion itself.

What makes the best Notion alternative?

Ideally, a great Notion alternative gives you the freedom to create your own productivity system—your network of documents, databases, and references—without forcing an inflexible user experience on you.

A bit like a sandbox video game, this app category (which doesn’t really have a name yet, but I’ve seen Work OS, Knowledge Management, and Digital Workspace rising as possible ones) gives you the possibility to mix and combine different elements to create your or your team’s all-in-one workspace.

Each of the picks on this list has something unique to offer, along with some twists on the original experience you’re used to. But to start, I evaluated all the apps I tested using the same criteria:

• Document and note-taking features. How easy is it to create, format, share, and embed content? This blank-slate document vibe is the bread-and-butter of Notion, so I wanted to be sure the alternatives stacked up.

• Project management and collaboration features. Can you create to-do lists? Kanban boards? What about leaving comments on documents? Can you mention coworkers?

• Data organization. Notion offers databases to help you organize your pages and create systems, so I looked for equivalent features: folders, tags, views, or other original methods.

• Performance and user experience. I was paying attention to speed, how the search function works (and where it searches), as well as other details, like the quality of the user interface, onboarding experiences, and available support.

• All-in-one potential. Based on all the above, could this app reliably hold all your information and processes in one place without requiring you to connect loads of apps together?

In making my final picks, I tried to make sure that each app was relatively well-rounded, even if each one takes a unique approach.

The best Notion alternatives at a glance

The gold standard

Notion (Web, macOS, Windows, iOS, Android)

Notion pros:

• Extremely flexible

• Generous free plan

Notion cons:

• Server-client sync in offline mode can create some temporary page version problems

A list of Notion alternatives wouldn’t be complete without naming the elephant in the workspace. Unique and powerful, using Notion for the first time feels like you found the One App, the app to replace them all. You can finally focus on building your own information hub and customizing it the way you want to.

Why is it so easy to love? The user experience is super clean. The interface is uncluttered, leaving plenty of open space for your content, with buttons disappearing to let you work undisturbed. But when you need anything, a mouse movement or typing a forward slash reveals all the tools you need to customize documents, integrate external files, or mention someone on your team.

Databases are the top feature. Easy to create and configure, you can group similar data types, label them with fields, and then create filtered views to work with them daily. No more squinting at a large list of sorted projects: just add a status field, filter by “in progress” to only see those you’re working on, and the cognitive overwhelm you experience in the morning is gone. Later, you’ll find that the Notion API lets you use databases like an actual data infrastructure, so you can build an app on top of it.

Notion has been following the AI development curve, first introducing generative AI for creating and editing content in your workspace. Next, it built AI-powered search to help you surface long-lost notes from your workspace, as well as from other apps you choose to connect, such as Gmail, Microsoft SharePoint, or GitHub. More recently, it has AI agents that you can set up with instructions to carry out work in your workspace.

More than just cute icons, these AI agents can take a prompt to create or edit a database for you, transform a page from meeting notes into a project proposal, and even carry out updates in multiple pages. It works like a chat interface to interact with your workspace, making it easier to run many actions based on written instructions, either on-demand or on a recurring automation.

If you’re here, still love Notion, and want more of it, you can also grab the Notion Calendar for planning your day, with meeting scheduling and AI meeting notes included; the now-defunct Notion Mail had a good run, but was replaced by Notion AI’s email agents, since most folks were chatting with their inbox, not using the visual interface.

You can also connect Notion to Zapier to upgrade your Notion experience and connect it to the other apps you use. Automatically track and update tasks, organize customer information, or log research based on activity in 9,000+ other apps—and use Zapier’s built-in AI to create fully automated, intelligent systems for your work. Learn more about how to automate Notion.

But if your Notion love story has reached long silences and cold shoulders, keep reading for some options to ignite your all-in-one productivity spark again.

Notion pricing: Free for unlimited blocks for individuals, up to 5MB per file upload, and 10 guest collaborators. Plus plan starts at $12/user/month.

Best Notion alternative for powerful formulas and databases

Superhuman Docs, formerly Coda (Web, macOS, iOS, iPadOS, Android)

Superhuman Docs pros:

• More structured workspace experience

• Better integration of AI with databases

Superhuman Docs cons:

• Steeper learning curve than Notion

Notion edges ahead in managing documents and creating wikis. Coda, recently acquired by Superhuman and renamed Superhuman Docs, is strong in databases, offering a slightly different philosophy that gives more control over the user experience and automation possibilities.

There are a lot of features that contribute to this. Packs help you display and interact with external apps directly from your workspace. I connected Superhuman Docs with Google Calendar, which unlocked a set of elements and formulas I could put in the document to show my schedule and add new events with a button. It’s like a toolbox to bring Superhuman Docs together with other apps, so you don’t have to keep a billion tabs open to get around your workday.

More than storing your data, the databases have native automation capabilities that help you run multiple changes and save time by doing so. With four triggers—a row change, time-based, on form submission, and based on a webhook—you can set up what happens next. The range of possible actions is varied, including manipulating data in the database, interacting with Packs, or even changing state management values to support more advanced workflows.

Built on this robust infrastructure, Superhuman Docs offers finer control over the data viewing interfaces when compared with Notion. It feels more like an app builder, actually: there’s a draggable and configurable card for every data field, easy to organize in columns and rows. You can change the data displays or even hide them entirely. When you finish editing, the view sits inside your documents, and you can open it to interact with it more deeply.

Inching closer to that app builder aspect, the formulas make your docs even more dynamic. Start by typing = anywhere, and away you go: calculate/transform data, reference anything outside the doc, write logic functions, and program configurable buttons to run complex actions. These work inside Coda and through the Packs I mentioned earlier, so they can interact with third-party software too.

In addition to summarization, chatting with your docs, and generating content, AI in Superhuman Docs also lets you add database columns that run AI actions on the row’s content, filling it automatically. This is useful, for example, for generating personalized sales emails and then sending them out via an integration. Beyond that, AI content blocks will dynamically update based on the page’s content, great to keep up with what’s changing. Finally, the AI reviewer can read your docs and leave comments to help you improve, as if it were someone on your team.

When you connect Superhuman Docs with Zapier, you can build end-to-end workflows that keep information flowing smoothly across teams and tools. For example, automatically collect inputs from anywhere—forms, Gmail, and Slack—and organize them in Superhuman Docs. Or you can access and act on your Superhuman Docs straight from your AI chat window. Learn more about how to automate Superhuman Docs.

Superhuman Docs pricing: Free plan offers up to 50 objects (pages, tables, etc.) and up to 1,000 rows per doc for shared documents (private ones are unlimited). Pro starts at $12/document maker/month—viewers and editors are free.

Best Notion alternative for AI-powered personal knowledge management

Mem (Web, Windows, macOS, iOS)

Mem pros:

• Easy to jump around your notes and reference information

• Smooth user experience

Mem cons:

• Very focused on personal productivity

When Mem originally launched, it was already a breath of fresh air in how it used AI to automate the busywork of keeping a workspace organized. In 2025, it got a complete revamp, taking a step toward being an AI-native platform. Now, it’s taking root as a personal chief of staff, handling your notes, tasks, and calendar, so nothing falls through the cracks.

Adding new content is super easy to start with a voice note and let AI transcribe and organize your thoughts into a new note. Need to repurpose this into a proposal or a document? Don’t do it by hand: ask Mem to transform it into a new type with a prompt, ready to share with anyone you want to present it to.

When accessing the workspace on the desktop app, I like how the tab on the right side shows you notes that might be connected to what you’re writing as you write it. This creates opportunities to connect or revisit ideas you stored previously, which helps organize the workspace as you add more content and surface what you already have there. Another plus is how you can open any of the suggested notes side-by-side with the one you’re currently editing, super useful to reference data as you go.

The AI chat experience is also in this tab, where you can issue commands or ask questions about your workspace. It has time awareness: you can ask about the notes you created yesterday or last week’s meeting. Simply mention that in the prompt in natural language, and Mem can get to work in searching for it and making it available for you in the chat.

Searching for notes got a revamp as well. In addition to displaying the traditional search results, it can also run an AI-powered deep search into your workspace to find everything you need. It’s not only initiated by you, either; Mem can also ping you for tasks in your notes and act as an AI project manager to keep you on track.

To make things even smoother, connect Mem to Zapier. This way, you can build complete knowledge workflows across all the tools you use. For example, you can automatically route inputs from email, chat, and content feeds into Mem, or add notes to Mem directly from your AI chat window. Learn more about how to automate knowledge management with Mem.

Mem price: Free plan for 25 new notes and 25 messages to Mem per month. Mem Plus at $9/month for 50 new notes and 50 messages.

Best Notion alternative for turning daily notes into networked hubs

Tana Outliner (Web, Windows, macOS, Linux, iOS, Android)

Tana Outliner pros:

• Rapid note capture and organization

• MCP server available

Tana Outliner cons:

• Steep learning curve

When Notion’s doc and database experience feels a bit slow and forces you to plan your data types, Tana Outliner offers a more direct experience. With daily notes at the heart, it’s a workspace ready to fill with content, classify with Supertags, and then revisit in dedicated hubs. It was formerly known just as Tana, but that’s now an AI meeting assistant built by the same team.

The philosophy can be initially challenging to grasp, but it makes a lot of sense once you watch the intro video and start jotting down notes. After you type out the name of a task in a note, tap #, and add the Supertag Task to it: it’s now a task inside Tana Outliner, with a status and due date property. In Notion, you’d have to create a tasks database and then add a new row; in Tana, you type out your task and then assign it to a Supertag, which acts like a super database that keeps track of everything of the same type.

Every time you assign a Supertag to any note, they’re stored automatically in the corresponding tab on the left side. You can choose which view you want to see them in, from outline to cards, and save all of them for easy access at the top. In the settings view, you can edit which fields each note should have, create a template for every new note, and even set custom autofill behavior using AI.

Speaking of AI, Tana Outliner promotes itself as an AI-native workspace. Start a new voice note in the mobile app, and it will transcribe what you say and autofill any custom Supertag fields. When you chat with an AI model, you can Supertag any part of its response to add it to your workspace, saving the best bits of a deep dive with AI. If you’re having trouble finding anything, the AI-powered search can find it for you, letting you chat with your notes.

Tana Outliner offers a user experience that prioritizes speed when adding content into your workspace, heightened by Supertags, which make organizing your workspace a breeze. Definitely worth giving it a try and seeing if it matches the way you think and work.

Tana Outliner pricing: Free plan includes all note and Supertag features, with 500 AI credits, 3 workspaces, and 0.5 GB of storage for uploaded files and 5 MB max upload size. The Plus plan at $10/month increases AI credits to 2,000, adds meeting transcription and notifications, selecting your favorite AI model, and creating custom AI agents.

Best Notion alternative for Microsoft 365 users

Microsoft Loop (Web, Windows, iOS, Android)

Microsoft Loop pros:

• Deep integration with the rest of the Microsoft 365 suite, including Copilot

• Offers dynamic content blocks that you can embed in other 365 apps

Microsoft Loop cons:

• No relational database features

Microsoft has been hard at work lately. If you use Office apps and have all your data on the Microsoft cloud, Microsoft Loop is a great option to tie it all together. It’s not as feature-rich as Notion, but it has all the features to start gathering information and collaborating with your team without leaving the Microsoft ecosystem.

You can create documents, adding content blocks with slash commands, styling and sharing them with others as needed. There’s a section to jot down your ideas, and you can always access these from the left-side menu, no matter which workspace you’re hanging out in. Loop also integrates with Figma, GitHub, Trello, and Jira, so you’ll have more context about your projects in Loop.

When creating a new workspace, you can fill it with documents created inside Loop and also add links to the left-side menu, just in case you need to link to valuable resources quickly. You can leave comments on each block or react with emoji to let your teammates know they’re on the right track.

But the best feature available is Loop Components, which lets you convert any content block into a component. Then, you can share it via Teams, Outlook, or Word, and the content will always be synced no matter where it’s showing. It will also be updated no matter where you interact with it, so it’s really handy to share live updates or gather feedback. It feels like Loop is meant to be the connector that brings all Microsoft 365 apps together, making it a great addition to the software suite.

There are AI features here, too. Microsoft Copilot—the product that brings AI features to Microsoft apps—is there to generate content, rewrite text, and summarize pages for you. It’s only available on paid plans, so make sure you’re on the right one if you want to take advantage of it.

Microsoft Loop price: Free for personal Microsoft accounts for a maximum of 250 Loop workspaces, 50 Loop workspaces per user daily, and 1,000 total workspace members. Also part of the Microsoft 365 for Business subscription, starting at $23.50/user/month for the Standard tier, including Teams and Copilot.

Best Notion alternative for teams managing knowledge with AI

Slite (Web, iOS, Android, macOS, Windows)

Slite pros:

• Slite Agent and MCP help gather and fact-check information

• Top-notch knowledge verification tools

Slite cons:

• Light database features

AI may still have a way to go as far as creativity goes, but it’s already superb for summarizing, analyzing, and formatting data. If your workspace is a mess of information that’s hard to search, Slite will help you make sense of everything.

Unlike Notion, Slite makes sure that every piece of information is up to date and reliable, with manual and automated tools to help you do that without too much extra work. On the manual side, you can assign owners to each document, and they’re responsible for assigning the Verified stamp, which can be set to expire to force a check in the future. If you read a doc and suspect it’s out of date, you can ask for verification right there: the owner receives a notification and it’s up to them to review it.

The automated side is all about Slite Agent. Start by connecting context sources such as Google Drive, Slack, or Salesforce. With those sources at hand, the agent looks for evidence that your knowledge base might be outdated and proposes a set of fixes that you can approve or discard easily.

When you ask a question, it treats verified and more recent docs as better sources, so you get answers based on the freshest information, not a stale snapshot. Every answer comes with a clickable source, so you can easily jump to the source either inside Slite or an external connected app and check important information.

Beyond acting as an MCP client, Slite also has an MCP server: you can connect your Claude or ChatGPT account to it. Unlike a direct connection to an app like Google Drive, the Slite MCP server handles the search, prioritizing verified information, and queues external agent actions in the Triage tab so you approve them before they actually take place. It serves as a kind of single connector to all your company knowledge, with guardrails that protect what’s inside while surfacing what’s true and useful.

Want to extend these connections even further? When you connect Slite to Zapier, you can build sophisticated, end-to-end knowledge documentation workflows. For example, create or update a Slite doc based on information shared in your other tools, and automatically notify teammates when new knowledge is ready to reference.

Slite price: Basic plan at $12/user/month for unlimited docs, basic AI features, knowledge management tools, and MCP/API access.

Best Notion alternative for building apps on top of your knowledge

Fibery (Web, iOS, Android)

Fibery pros:

• Includes whiteboards

• Advanced database features, like user access control and custom logic builder

Fibery cons:

• Interface is heavier than Notion

Notion is awesome for managing knowledge and displaying it in a clean way. That becomes a problem when you optimized your workspace and still feel friction in key workflows, as the block-based editor can only do so much. If that’s you, Fibery adds a vibe-coding layer on top of your workspace, an extra layer of freedom and flexibility.

It markets itself as an operating system for nerds, which means it’s complex at the start but ends up opening up some pretty cool possibilities. First off, it comes with a user mode that you can toggle on or off by double-tapping shift: off means you can build the workspace; on means you work on your documents and don’t accidentally move things around.

At the workspace level, you can create a lot of useful page types. There are basic documents, but also whiteboards, forms, and embeds, among many more. Databases are called spaces, and they’re one level more powerful—but also more complex—than in Notion. There are dedicated tabs that handle the database’s fields, relations, and even automation rules. I like how there are validation rules: you can stop wrong data from being written in instead of having to clean it up later.

But what takes the crown here is the vibe-coding tool, letting you build an app on top of your workspace data with prompts. It works like an AI coding tool: it looks up resources in your workspace, goes through build and testing steps, and presents a polished result—it one-shot a Kanban project management request that I sent. This releases the last of the user experience constraints of Notion, letting you adjust the interface and flow to the way you work.

After you set up your workspace just the way you want it, why not connect all your apps and start automating them? Connect Fibery to Zapier to open up access to over 9,000 integrations with other apps you use for work and take action in Fibery straight from your AI chat window.

Fibery pricing: Free plan for up to 10 users, 10 databases, and unlimited entities. Standard at $15/user/month adds unlimited databases, AI, and human support. Observers and guests are free.

Best Notion alternative for privacy, security, and data relationships

Anytype (Windows, macOS, Linux, iOS, Android)

Anytype pros:

• Full offline mode available

• Encrypted, Swiss-based cloud option available for business use

Anytype cons:

• Limited cloud storage

Tunnel? Middle of nowhere? Anytype doesn’t care. Everything happens on your device, so you can stop relying on the internet for interacting with your workspace. That also means that your data is local and always yours, so you don’t have to worry about service terms or cloud glitches—but please save the passphrase you get during setup, as you won’t be able to read your data without it.

There’s more beyond the privacy angle. Everything within Anytype is an object. I’m an object with the “human” property. I set relationships with the objects I create, be it documents, notes, or invoices, to name a few. An author of a book I read is an object, the books they wrote (also objects) appear in relation to the author, and the notes I’ve made about each book (yup, objects) are related to each book in the same way.

This kind of linking through relationships doesn’t happen in just one way. Anytype has something called bidirectional linking: linking one object to another enables you to move from A to B, and also from B to A, a bit like backlinks with more features built upon it. This allows you to see information in a visual constellation chart and as a sequence of relationships, where you can navigate upstream or downstream to see how information is connected.

Anytype offers cloud servers to save your data in the cloud and to collaborate with others—enabling the “multiplayer” experience. After you spend some time offline, Anytype will sync up with the cloud when you’re back online. This is also the app’s monetization model, so if you want more cloud storage and better collaboration, you’ll have to hop into one of the paid plans.

The brand new Chats for shared spaces add a new way to collaborate with others inside Anytype. This is a real-time, threaded chat experience: you can drop objects into it, create and edit them there, and see everything you created together in a dedicated sidebar. Add a user experience that feels smoother every time I go back, and a range of infrastructure improvements to make it more stable, useful, and connected, and Anytype is looking great for personal and small group settings.

Anytype pricing: Free to use locally, with 100 MB of remote storage and up to 10 shared channels. Plus plan at $5/month includes 1GB of remote storage and unlimited shared and private channels.

Best Notion alternative for mind mapping

Scrintal (Web, Windows, macOS)

Scrintal pros:

• Gobu AI offers AI-powered research and study assistance

• Good card organization and hierarchy features

Scrintal cons:

• Not much power beyond mind mapping

Notion and Miro crashed into one another: the result is a powerful app called Scrintal. If you think in images and diagrams and want a more interesting user experience, you have to check this one out.

The user interface is very similar to Notion: the left-side menu contains links to pages separated by content type, starred, and recently accessed. You can also search from here. Once you’re browsing the My Desk section or a board you created, I recommend you collapse the menu: having the canvas fill out your entire screen is much more comfortable.

This is the end of the similarities with Notion. Now, for the Miro part of the deal. With the canvas open in its full glory, click the plus button on the left side to add a new card. Give it a title and some content. You’ll notice there are four circles around the card: use these to click and drag to connect it to other cards. If there are none, clicking and dragging will create a new card for you, so it’s faster to connect ideas without hitting the add button every time.

There are more kinds of elements that you can add to a board; for example, daily cards for journaling or tracking your progress in a project. You can add new boards as well, opening up an entirely new canvas. Or add text, columns (a kind of Kanban view), and web links.

There are formatting controls for the cards, so you can leverage colors and font weights to differentiate knowledge in a visual way. Drag and rearrange everything to make the information clearer and easier to navigate. There are three card layouts—small, only title, or title and content—which lets you create hierarchies among them. When you’re happy with your layout, invite people to see your board or publish it to the web with a link in read-only mode.

You can use this one either on your browser or in the desktop versions. It’s smooth as butter to move cards and elements around, but I haven’t tried zooming out with hundreds of cards with multiple content types on the screen. If you don’t have a powerful computer, I recommend you separate your cards using more boards instead of keeping everything in one massive canvas.

Scrintal price: Pro plan goes for $9/month (billed annually), unlocking all features and having no limitations.

Best Notion alternative for fearless tinkerers

Obsidian (Mac, Windows, Linux, iOS, Android)

Obsidian pros:

• Full offline mode available

• Now includes simple databases with tablecard, and Kanban views

Obsidian cons:

• Can be very complicated to set up extra features

Obsidian brings a unique open-endedness, inviting you to customize it with dozens of plugins. At heart, Obsidian is a note-taking tool with a graph view, allowing you to see your ideas in a constellation. Most of the advanced features and plugins are turned off by default, but going to the settings menu will give you a long list to play around with. And while you can do a lot already with these first-party plugins (such as enabling a slash command menu), the community plugins allow you to add extra functionality to the app itself.

The most exciting part of this app is that you can transform it to suit your needs. Depending on your technical knowledge (or fearlessness), you can set up Kanban boards, calendars, and to-do lists; configure a spaced repetition system; and even add sketches to your notes. This isn’t even the full list; there’s a lot more to discover.

All your documents live inside a “vault.” Since everything is stored locally—in a folder on your computer as Markdown files—your data is always yours. If you want to sync your data to the cloud, you can upload this folder to your file storage app of choice.

Collaborating with others requires some acrobatics, at least while the Obsidian team builds those features into the app. The easiest way is to create a vault, upload it to Google Drive, and share it with your team. Other methods include (brace yourself) setting up a free-tier server on a cloud hosting provider and connecting a live editing plugin.

Is there all-in-one potential in Obsidian? Absolutely. Will it require you to learn as you go and invest a lot of time and patience? Yes, it will. And the end result might be a tool perfectly tuned to the way you gather, think about, and communicate information. High investment, high reward.

Obsidian pricing: Free for personal use. Sync add-on enables cross-device syncing for $5/month. Publish add-on lets you create a site for your notes for $10/site/month. Commercial licenses available at $50/user/year.

Read more: Obsidian vs. Notion

Can Notion be beaten?

This category of Notion alternatives includes all sorts of approaches and features—some solutions start with entirely different mindsets. Most of the platforms on this list are either free or have a free plan to help you evaluate the features on offer, so take your time to experiment and see which one matches best with what you need. And hey, maybe Notion is the app for you after all.

Related reading:

• Build a second brain in Notion (with template)

• Notion comparisons: Notion vs. Roam, Notion vs. OneNote, Notion vs. Evernote, Craft vs. Notion

• How to use Notion AI

• The best AI notes apps

This article was originally published in April 2022. The most recent update was in October 2026.