Notion Review 2025: Building a Second Brain (Or Trying To)

Everyone Is Building a "Second Brain" Now

Somewhere around 2020 or 2021, the phrase "second brain" entered the productivity conversation and never left. The idea, popularized by Tiago Forte and others, is that you should build an external system to capture, organize, and retrieve everything you learn and think about. Your biological brain is for having ideas. Your second brain is for storing them so they are actually findable later.

And Notion has become, for a lot of people, the default tool for this. Not because it was designed specifically for the "building a second brain" methodology -- it was not -- but because it is flexible enough to be shaped into almost anything. A journal. A project tracker. A recipe database. A CRM. A habit tracker. A wiki. A reading list. All in one app, with a clean interface and that particular Notion aesthetic that makes everything look like it belongs in a Scandinavian design magazine.

I have been using Notion on and off for about three years now. I have set it up from scratch at least four times, because every few months I decide my system is not working and I need to rebuild it. Which, if I'm being honest, might say more about me than about Notion. But it also says something about the tool itself -- it gives you so much freedom that the temptation to keep reorganizing is constant. There is always a better template, a smarter database structure, a more elegant way to connect things.

So this is not going to be a review where I walk through features in a list and tell you the rating at the end. I want to explore how Notion actually fits into different parts of life, because that is the honest way to evaluate it. Sometimes it fits perfectly. Sometimes it does not fit at all. And sometimes I'm not sure.

Notion for Work: Where It Shines Brightest

If I had to pick one area where Notion earns its reputation, it is team workspaces. The combination of pages, databases, and real-time collaboration makes it genuinely excellent for building internal wikis, documenting processes, and managing projects at a small-to-medium scale.

I used Notion as the primary workspace for a team of about twelve people on a content project. We had a database of articles in various states -- draft, review, published -- viewable as a kanban board or a table or a calendar depending on what you needed to see. Each article page had a template with sections for the brief, draft, reviewer notes, and publication checklist. It worked. People understood it. When someone new joined, we could share the workspace and they could figure things out without much hand-holding.

The wiki features have gotten genuinely useful too. You can mark pages as "verified" to indicate they are the official version, assign page owners, and see which documentation is stale. For a team that produces a lot of internal docs -- engineering teams, product teams, anyone with processes they need to write down -- this is valuable. It competes directly with Confluence, and honestly? Notion is nicer to use. Confluence feels like it was designed by committee in 2008 and has been incrementally patched since. Notion feels like it was designed by someone who actually writes documents.

The tricky part is scale. For twelve people, Notion was great. I have heard from friends at companies with 200+ people that Notion starts to buckle -- search gets slow, the page hierarchy becomes unwieldy, and you need dedicated people just to maintain the workspace structure. At that scale, you might be better off with a dedicated wiki tool. But for teams under 50? Notion is hard to beat.

Notion for Personal Life: Where It Gets Complicated

Here is where I start going back and forth. Notion can absolutely be used as a personal productivity system. People build reading lists, habit trackers, budget spreadsheets, meal planners, travel itineraries, journaling systems -- the template gallery has thousands of these, and some of them are genuinely well-designed.

But there is an interesting question about whether the flexibility that makes Notion great for teams is actually a drawback for personal use. When you use Notion for yourself, you are the architect, the builder, and the user. You design the system, you populate it, and you maintain it. And if you are anything like me, you spend more time designing the system than actually using it. I have rebuilt my personal Notion setup multiple times. Each time, it starts beautiful and organized. Within two months, it is a graveyard of half-finished databases and abandoned dashboards.

I'm not entirely sure this is Notion's fault. Maybe I just lack discipline. But I have noticed that tools with more constraints -- Apple Notes, for instance, or even a physical notebook -- sometimes serve me better for personal stuff precisely because they do not let me over-engineer things. You open Apple Notes and you write. There is nothing to organize, no databases to configure, no templates to choose from. It is just a blank page. And sometimes that is enough.

That said, I know people who have maintained the same Notion personal setup for years and swear by it. My friend has a system where every book she reads gets a page with notes, quotes, and a rating, all linked to a "topics" database. She has been doing it for three years and the graph of connections between ideas is genuinely fascinating. So it depends. It depends on whether you are the kind of person who finds joy in maintaining systems, or the kind who finds it exhausting.

The Blocks System: Elegant Until It Is Not

Everything in Notion is a "block." A paragraph is a block. A heading is a block. An image, a toggle, a callout, a code snippet, an embedded database -- all blocks. You can drag them around, nest them, convert between types, and arrange them in columns. It is an elegant abstraction that makes Notion feel genuinely modular.

For documents and wikis, this works beautifully. You can build pages that mix text, tables, embedded content, and interactive elements in ways that no traditional document editor allows. I have built project briefs in Notion that include a summary section, a linked database of tasks, an embedded Figma file, and a section of toggle-hidden reference material, all on one page. Try doing that in Google Docs.

But there is a ceiling. The block system means everything loads one block at a time, and pages with a lot of content can feel sluggish. Open a page with three embedded database views and a dozen toggles and you will see the pieces loading in sequence -- a flicker, a reflow, another flicker. It is not slow exactly, but it is not instant either. And for a tool that you open dozens of times a day, those micro-delays accumulate into a feeling of heaviness.

The mobile app makes this worse. On desktop, Notion is snappy enough. On my phone, opening a page with any complexity takes a couple of seconds, and editing is awkward because the block-dragging interface does not translate well to a touchscreen. I have largely given up using Notion on mobile for anything beyond quick reads. If I need to capture a quick thought on my phone, I use Apple Notes and move it to Notion later. Which kind of defeats the "one tool for everything" promise.

Databases: Notion's Secret Weapon

If you have not used Notion's databases, you might not understand what the fuss is about. And honestly, calling them "databases" undersells them a bit while also overselling them. They are not databases in the PostgreSQL sense. They are more like really, really smart spreadsheets that can present the same data as a table, a kanban board, a timeline, a calendar, or a gallery.

The power is in the properties and relations. Each item in a database can have properties like text, numbers, dates, select dropdowns, multi-select tags, checkboxes, URLs, people assignments, and formulas. And you can create relations between databases -- a "Projects" database links to a "Tasks" database which links to a "People" database. It is a relational data model, just with a friendly UI instead of SQL queries.

For project management at a small scale, this is genuinely great. I ran a content calendar as a Notion database for about a year. Each piece of content had properties for status, author, publish date, category, and SEO keywords. I could view it as a calendar to see what was publishing when, as a kanban board to see what was in progress, or as a table to sort and filter. All the same data, just presented differently. It worked well enough that I did not feel the need for a dedicated project management tool.

Where it falls short is when you need things like time tracking, workload management, dependencies between tasks, or automated notifications. Notion has basic automations now, but they do not compare to what ClickUp or Linear offer. If project management is your primary need and you have a team of more than ten, you will probably outgrow Notion's databases. They are great for lightweight project management. For heavy-duty stuff, they are a square peg in a round hole.

Notion AI: Useful But Not Transformative

Notion added AI features in 2023 and has been expanding them since. You can ask it to draft text, summarize long pages, translate content, extract action items from meeting notes, or explain technical concepts. It works inline -- select some text, ask the AI to do something with it, and it does.

Is it useful? Sometimes. I have used it to summarize long meeting notes into bullet points, and it does that well. I have used it to draft first versions of repetitive documents like project update emails, and it is fine for that. But I would not call it transformative. It is basically ChatGPT embedded in Notion, with the added context of whatever page you are on. If you already use an AI writing assistant, Notion AI will not blow your mind. If you do not, it is a nice convenience.

The pricing is where it gets tricky. Notion AI costs an extra $8 per member per month on the Plus plan, though it is included free on Business and Enterprise tiers. For an individual, that doubles the cost of the Plus plan. Whether that is worth it depends on how much you use AI assistance. For me, it was not -- I used it maybe twice a week and I could have gotten similar results by copying text into ChatGPT. For someone who writes heavily in Notion every day, the calculation might be different.

Is the Free Tier Enough?

This is a question I see come up constantly, and the answer is surprisingly nuanced. For a single person using Notion for personal notes and projects, the free tier is genuinely generous. You get unlimited pages and blocks, which is the core of the product. The limitations are on file upload size (5MB per file), page history (7 days), and guest collaborators (10).

For most personal use, those limits do not matter. You are not uploading large files to a note-taking app, and 7-day page history is fine if you are not making mission-critical edits. I used the free tier for about a year before upgrading, and I only upgraded because I started using Notion with a team and needed the collaboration features.

The Plus plan at $8 per user per month removes the file size limit, extends page history to 30 days, and adds unlimited guests and custom automations. The Business plan at $15 per user per month adds private teamspaces, SAML SSO, and 90-day page history. For teams, the per-user pricing adds up quickly. A team of 20 on the Business plan is paying $300 a month. That is not cheap, but it is also replacing what might have been separate subscriptions for a wiki, a project management tool, and a document collaboration platform.

My honest take: try the free tier first. Most individuals will not need to upgrade. If you are working with a team and the collaboration limits start to bite, the Plus plan is reasonable. The Business plan is only worth it if you specifically need SSO or private teamspaces.

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