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Notion is the talk of the town, with everyone praising it as an all-in-one workspace. And while it’s certainly an impressive app, not many are discussing its downsides—something that’s worth considering. No app is perfect, and Notion has some significant drawbacks that you should be aware of.
One major concern is the subscription model. Paying to access your own data is never ideal, which is why many people have avoided apps like Evernote. Evernote charges you to store your documents on their servers, and you can’t download them offline unless you subscribe. Why not choose an app that keeps your notes offline on your device and backs up to a cloud service of your choice? There are plenty of such options available.
Sure, you can use Notion for free if the limitations of the Personal account don’t bother you. But unlocking the extra features in the Personal Pro version will cost you $4 per month. If you’re a student, you can get the Pro version for free by signing up with your school email.
With web-based note-taking apps like Notion, you have less control over your data. Why store your notes on the developer’s servers when so many apps allow you to keep your documents locally on your device? With native note-taking apps, you have a copy of your notes on your device, which you can back up to any cloud service you prefer.
Another issue is the lack of end-to-end encryption. Notion has access to all your notes, which means they can see everything. While we trust that Notion’s employees won’t misuse this access, it’s still a risk. If Notion insists on storing our notes on their servers, they should at least encrypt them.
Only Enterprise accounts can export all their notes, including subpages, as PDFs. PDFs are a universal format for sharing notes between apps, and most people have at least one app that can open and read PDFs. However, in Notion, this option is only available with their most expensive subscriptions. This means your notes are essentially trapped in the app unless you’re comfortable using Markdown, CSV, or HTML formats.
When I tried exporting my workspace from Notion, first as Markdown and then as CSV, the app exported twenty-seven pages. How do three pages turn into twenty-seven? The same thing happened when I exported in HTML format. The app creates a useless copy of the export file on your PC and sends you a zipped file via email—a huge inconvenience! The files I exported looked nothing like what I had created in the app. Essentially, what you create in Notion stays in Notion.
On the bright side, you can export individual pages as PDFs with specific paper sizes, though the choices are limited. But if you want to export subpages, you’ll need the Enterprise subscription. Notion’s inability to easily export notes should make you think twice about relying on the app.
Initially, you couldn’t export photos out of Notion either. The PDF export included a hyperlink to the image in your notes (if they were in a gallery view). Thankfully, this has been fixed, and you can now export your images out of the app.
Notion makes creating notes easy, but exporting them is a nightmare. If you ever want to export anything out of Notion, be prepared for a frustrating experience.
Notion has put a lot of effort into making you love their app. You can create a wide range of content by gathering information from the web and other apps. However, they’ve also made sure your information stays on their servers. This is by design, not a flaw, and it should be a cause for concern.
It might seem like Notion does it all, but the real question is: should you put your entire life into one app? The answer is no, especially when you have limited options for exporting your data.
An all-in-one workspace sounds great—having all your plans, projects, notes, and collaborations in one place. But it’s also a recipe for disaster. Remember when Adobe Lightroom permanently deleted users’ photos? Those who didn’t have backups lost everything. Can you afford to take that risk with your notes? If your answer is yes, then you have nothing to worry about.
With Notion, you have one copy of your work on their servers. Most note-taking apps allow you to sync across devices and back up your notes to a different cloud service. For example, you could sync via iCloud and have a backup in Dropbox. We criticized GoodNotes for not having an auto-backup system for notes that have local copies on multiple devices. Yet, we seem comfortable with Notion keeping our notes on their servers without any kind of backup. Notion should allow users to back up their notes to cloud services of their choice in readable formats.
It’s not rocket science—an app that works offline behaves the same way whether or not you’re connected to the internet. If I want to take notes in Apple Notes, I can just open the app and start typing. I’ll only realize I’m not online when I try to access those notes on another device. With Notion, you need an internet connection to get started, which makes sense since it’s a web-based app. So, it’s safe to say that Notion doesn’t truly work offline. Of course, there might be workarounds, but those wouldn’t be necessary if the app worked as expected.
Using multiple apps means that if one malfunctions, you only lose a part of your work. For example, if something happens to GoodNotes, I’d only lose my planners to Noteful—just my study notes. But if you put everything into one app, you better hope nothing happens to it or its developers. Any small change in their code or policies could potentially cause you to lose everything—decades of notes and documents.
Notion asks you to pay a monthly subscription to add content online, content you don’t have a local copy of or a backup for. Why isn’t anyone questioning this?
Find one aspect of Notion you like, one or two features you love, and use the app for those. Don’t put your whole life into one app, and be cautious of any app that asks you to do so.
We’ve had issues with Facebook asking us to put our social lives online—just our social lives! What do you think might happen when we put our entire lives, including business, creativity, diaries, calendars, and planners, into one app? And this time, they’re even asking us to pay and voluntarily give them our information.
Remember, information is valuable—don’t give yours away for free.
With that said, we’ll be reviewing Notion in the future. At the end of the day, we’re here to help you find productivity apps that work for you. Notion is a fantastic note-taking app, and we hope to help you understand the different ways to use this powerful web-based tool. Let’s encourage Notion to give us more control over the data we store on their servers.
