Notion Review: No Competition for ChatGPT?

Our Experience with Notion AI

To test the tool for our Notion AI review, we traditionally started by asking it to generate an essay on the topic, “Should art be political?” To that end, we clicked Draft anything and typed in our prompt. The tool took under a minute to produce the output:

Much like other general-purpose generative AI tools (ChatGPT, Claude, etc.), Notion AI returned a body of text with subheadings (which aren’t usually allowed under the college essay guidelines) and without any links or citations. The tool cited multiple authors throughout the text but without mentioning specific works.

We tried to hunt down Theodor Adorno’s quote and came up with nothing:

That said, these issues aren’t unique to Notion AI. All generative AI tools suffer from hallucinations to a certain degree.

You can click on the generated text, and Notion will open a page where you can edit the text like in any other Notion page:

This means you don’t have to copy the generated text into a word processor like Google Docs to edit it. We appreciated it; even though it’s not a major time saver, it still makes for a convenient workflow.

Notion AI's Customer Support

If you’re new to Notion in general or Notion AI in particular, the tool comes with a comprehensive help center with tons of tutorials, guides, and reference documentation for reference:

On top of that, you can also take advantage of Notion Academy – a collection of video tutorials for the tool’s various features. There’s a separate collection of videos specifically about Notion AI, too:

While the self-service help is commendable, direct customer support options are quite limited. You can email the tool’s customer support team, join a community, or… hire a consultant. No, there’s no phone number you can call.

When researching the tool for our review of Notion, we also encountered plenty of negative customer support experiences. Subpar customer support experiences were among the main reasons behind negative reviews on TrustPilot, in fact.

That said, however, community-based support can be a good way to resolve many issues or bring yourself up to speed on how to make the most out of the tool. Since the tool boasts a substantial user base, you can easily find community-hosted forums and groups, as well as local and online events:

Notion AI: How Its Generated Text Fares in Quality

The biggest downside of our generated essay is the model’s attempts to quote authors like Theodor Adorno or Hannah Arendt without any links or citations. But once again, that’s a persistent problem with most AI writing tools. Yet, it’s still problematic, so we had to take some points off of our review Notion paper quality score.

If we set that aside for a moment, however, we have to admit the text itself was comprehensive in its approach to the topic. It managed to address three points of view within 500 words: the cases for and against politicizing art plus a more nuanced approach that goes beyond the binary.

The vocabulary and language used in the output are college-level, with the writing style also meeting the academic conventions. Overall, the text was also grammatically correct, with no punctuation mistakes – and it read smoothly, too.

Notion AI: Pricing Breakdown

If you use Notion for personal purposes, you can use it for free without any tangible restrictions on your experience. However, gaining full access to AI features requires purchasing an add-on subscription on top of your plan (even if you remain on the Free one). That means paying an extra $10/month ($8/ month if billed annually).

That said, you can take Notion AI for a test drive for free as long as you’re a registered user, although some advanced features aren’t available during the trial:

If you decide Notion is the right tool for you, you can get 20% off by paying the whole subscription fee once a year instead of monthly:

If you’re a student or an educator, you’re in luck: Notion offers its Plus Plan for free for both categories of users, although you’ll be limited to one member per workspace. (Notion AI isn’t included, however.) To benefit from this discount, you’ll need to use your school email address to sign up:

N.B. Some TrustPilot Notion AI reviews mention that prices may be shown without tax, so be careful.

Other AI Features

It takes one look at reviews of Notion AI to understand that the tool is more than just an AI text generator. In fact, with Notion AI, you can:
- Search your Notion workspace and connected apps
- Brainstorm ideas
- Sum up Notion pages
- Get help with code
- Draft outlines and emails

We decided to test some of these features. We started with the outline for a college essay on the same topic as the sample we generated with Notion AI.

The outline wasn’t quite as detailed as we could expect. For example, it added a bullet point under the section Case Studies with a simple “Analysis of specific artworks and their political impact.” That was about it – no examples or more detailed suggestions.

Our experience with the Brainstorm ideas AI feature was more rewarding, however. We asked the tool to come up with thesis statement ideas on the same topic, and there were some interesting suggestions on the list:

Now, as for the summarizing feature, it was a bit clunky. Notion AI would work only with pages in our case. We decided to import a long Wikipedia article there to test the feature. The summary was overall comprehensive enough:

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Notion AI’s Overall User Experience

If you’re not familiar with Notion, the somewhat steep learning curve can be frustrating. According to reviews online, it’s one of the main points of friction for users, in fact. The reason behind these difficulties is simple, though: there are just so many features you can take advantage of.

That said, experienced Notion users will probably find Notion AI easy to use—although it is a bit limited in functionality, as we discovered during the testing for our Notion AI review.

You have to select the exact feature from the menu before writing your prompt, for example. Compared to the experience of Claude or ChatGPT, where you can just type in your prompt immediately, it sure seems clunky. If you want to switch to a different feature (e.g., from Drafting to Summarizing), you have to click the New chat button in the top right corner, which was cumbersome, too.

Notion vs Plagiarism & AI Checks

To see how Notion AI output fares against plagiarism detectors, we ran a scan on our short essay. Unsurprisingly, there was no plagiarism detected. All generative AI writing tools excel at producing unique text, after all.

But, of course, plagiarism checks aren’t a main source of concern if you use Notion AI for academic help. So, we also ran an AI scan on the sample using GPTZero. Here are the results:

Of course, the text was flagged as AI-generated, which isn’t a surprise, either. Keep this in mind if you ever turn to a tool because you don’t have time to write something yourself. If you don’t rewrite or edit the text, AI involvement will be easy to spot with a single scan,  no matter the tool you choose.

Notion Pros and Cons at a Glance

Overall, Notion AI is by no means a remarkable tool, especially when you consider it apart from the rest of Notion’s task management and note-taking features. That said, while Notion’s AI-generated text falls short of expectations, you might find its brainstorming and summarizing features more helpful than drafting.

Here are Notion AI’s key pros and cons based on our research and experience with the tool:

Pros:

✅ You can edit the AI-generated output right in Notion ✅ Brainstorm ideas and Summarize features are quite helpful ✅ The tool has powerful task management and note-taking features available for free ✅ You can get the Plus plan for free if you’re a student

Cons:

❌ Outline drafting leaves much to be desired; the outline was hardly useful ❌ The generated essay had no references to specific works and hallucinated some quotes ❌ The learning curve can be steep for new Notion users ❌ AI features are somewhat limited compared to multi-purpose chatbots like ChatGPT ❌ Some users complain about refund refusals and surprise charges