Notion

Notion is an app for writing and organizing almost anything: personal notes, meeting minutes, a team wiki, a project plan, a reading list. It is made by Notion Labs, a San Francisco company founded in 2013 by Ivan Zhao and Simon Last. The version that made it popular, launched in 2018, spread first among startups and students.

Its central idea is the block. Every piece of a page, a paragraph, a heading, a checkbox, an image, an embedded video, is a block you can drag, nest or turn into another kind. Pages can contain other pages, so you build your own structure. And some blocks are databases: tables whose rows are themselves pages, which you can view as a list, a Kanban board, a calendar or a gallery. That is how people build trackers for tasks, clients or recipes without writing code.

Notion is freemium: free for personal use, paid for teams that need more members, permissions and history. It has a large community that shares templates, and it has added AI features that summarize pages, draft text and answer questions about a workspace's content. Its rivals include Google Docs, Microsoft's Loop and OneNote, Confluence from Atlassian, and a long list of note-taking apps.