What do you like best about Notion?
As someone who practically lives in Notion, the recent stuff has been less about minor tweaks and more about genuine game-changers. I feel like they finally hit the accelerator on making it a true all-in-one workspace, especially with how they're handling AI.
Here are the new things that I'm personally loving:
The Agent: It's Not Just AI Chat, It's an AI Teammate
The biggest shift is the move from "Notion AI" being a fancy text generator to what they call a Notion Agent. Seriously, it's like hiring a power-user intern for your workspace.
Deep Context is Key: It doesn't just read the page you're on. Now, I can ask it, "Summarize the last two meetings I had with the design team and pull out all the action items assigned to me," and it'll search my calendar, meeting notes database, and even Slack messages (if connected) to give me a concise answer with citations. No more copy-pasting info just to prompt an AI.
Database Automation: My project tracker is finally a dream. I can tell the Agent to look at my raw customer feedback notes, automatically tag them with properties like 'Feature Request,' 'Bug Report,' and 'Priority: Medium,' and summarize the sentiment—all without me touching a single cell.
Notion Calendar is a Real Calendar Now
I used to keep my calendar separate because the integration was clunky. Not anymore.
The Meetings Tab: This new tab in the sidebar is genius. It syncs with my calendar and auto-creates a structured note for every meeting. No more scrambling to make a new page five minutes before a call. I just type /meet on any page, hit start, and the notes are perfectly filed away.
Calendar Searchable by Agent: I mentioned this above, but it's worth its own bullet point. I can ask the Agent, "When did I last meet with Sarah and what did we discuss about the budget?" The fact that it can search my calendar and past meeting notes together is a huge time-saver.
New Database Views
The database is the heart of Notion, and they keep making it more versatile.
Map View and Place Property: I'm a travel fanatic, and this is a gift. I can now add a Place property to my itinerary database, and it instantly shows all the locations on an actual map view. This is amazing for trip planning, or for a business tracking office locations or client sites.
Conditional Coloring with Formulas: This is a power-user feature, but I love it. I can now use formulas to set the background color of a row. For instance, my tasks turn bright red if the due date is today and the status isn't 'In Progress,' making those urgent items impossible to miss.
Basically, Notion used to be an incredible toolkit, but you had to build everything yourself. Now, the new AI and integration features feel like they are building things for you, which shifts the focus back to doing the work, not just setting up the workspace. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
What do you dislike about Notion?
Where Notion Needs a Serious Upgrade
Honestly, for how much I use and love Notion, the complaints boil down to three things. They've fixed a lot of the initial "steep learning curve" stuff with good templates and the AI Agent, but now the issues are more about core performance and missing power features.
1. Performance & The Mobile App (The Lag is Real)
This is the number one complaint. When your workspace gets big—hundreds of pages and complex databases—it starts to feel sluggish.
The Wait: Page load times, especially for complex dashboards with lots of linked databases, can still be painfully slow. It feels like the entire web-app structure is struggling to keep up with the complexity it allows.
Mobile is a Chore: The mobile app, despite improvements, still feels like a slow web-wrapper. Trying to quickly check a to-do list or jot a note on the go often involves a noticeable load time, which defeats the purpose of an "on-the-spot" capture tool.
2. Automation & Database Logic Gaps
They've come so far with the new Formulas and Automations, but there are still glaring holes that make workarounds necessary for power users.
Conditional Relations: I still can't build a simple automation like: "When I complete a task, automatically link it to the 'Weekly Review' page that has the most recent date." The automation logic isn't smart enough to handle conditional linking or complex filtering like Formulas can.
True Recurring Tasks: It's 2025 and setting up a simple recurring task (e.g., "Pay Rent on the 1st of every month") still requires a custom database template, an automation, and a lot of steps. It should be a native checkbox option.
3. Export & Data Ownership
Notion is a great digital brain, but what if you need the data outside of it?
PDF/Print Formatting: Exporting a page to a PDF for printing or sharing often breaks the layout. Complex columns, tables, and images get scrambled. There's no good way to add page breaks or control the formatting.
Proprietary Data: If you ever wanted to leave Notion (god forbid), getting your data out is clunky. You get a mass of HTML, CSV, and markdown files that require a lot of manual cleanup to import into a competitor. It's not a truly open standard like pure markdown would be, which always leaves me with a slight data-lock-in anxiety.
The short version: Notion is amazing at giving you a powerful, flexible canvas. Now, they need to focus on making that canvas load instantly and adding the finishing touches to its automations so you can stop being a workspace architect and just be a productive user. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
