Notion Reviews 

I'm a paying Plus plan subscriber and was told I've "run out of free AI responses" after asking just 2 questions. Turns out paying customers on Plus get the same 20 lifetime AI responses as free users.
This was not disclosed when I subscribed. The pricing page buries this limitation. To get actual AI access, you have to upgrade to Business at $20/month - double what I'm already paying.
I cancelled immediately. When I see the reviews here about billing issues, surprise charges, and unresponsive support, it's clear this is a pattern, not an accident.
They changed their pricing model in May 2025 to force users onto expensive plans. Previously you could add AI to any plan for $8/month. Now it's bundled only into Business tier, and existing Plus customers are left with a useless 20-response "trial."
Switched to other tools. Don't give them your money.

Notion is a great productivity tool, but their billing practices are deeply questionable and completely lack accountability.

I upgraded to “Plus & AI” inside the Notion iPad app and was charged 20 CHF. Despite this, my workspace still showed the Free plan and I was locked out of the features I paid for. When I contacted support, I was told that because the purchase went through Apple, Notion “cannot see it” and that I would need to subscribe again.

In other words: I paid through their own app, yet they claim the payment is invisible to them — and the proposed solution is to pay again.

There was no warning at purchase time that Notion would not be able to track or reconcile in-app subscriptions, and no clear process to resolve the issue internally. This puts all the burden and risk on the customer.

It’s unacceptable to charge users without being able to associate the payment to their own product. Until this is fixed, I cannot recommend trusting Notion with any paid features.

We've been using Notion for a few months now, and overall it's been positive. I have used Confluence and other systems in the past, so compared to that I find Notion to be much simpler and user friendly.
One thing that is a pain point is for users (like myself) who are less comfortable using keyboard shortcuts. Sometimes the UX is almost *too easy* in the sense that I often add, delete, or move things that I didn't intend to, by clicking in the "wrong" place etc.

Similarly, formatting isn't as standard as other platforms, or even document tools like Word or Docs. I have been unable to make visual changes (centering font, color fill in charts, eyedropper for colors) in ways that have become standard and expected across the industry. Not a deal breaker, just worth noting.

So, if your team is less computer-savvy, this is likely not the right tool for you.

That being said, helpful features like AI catching spelling or capitalization inconsistencies, super quick content architecture, and other helpful features have been delightful.

Absolutely terrible and shit
As a developer I used notion to try out new capabilities to ease procedures for certain aspects of a clients company.

The site is crap, its buggy, it is complicated, you can get lost for hours to realise its a complete waste of time and effort. My client was not impressed and it wasted a lot of time.

I was billed £163 as a result to use business for a month, I tried to cancel and was told that I was not entitled to a refund because I did not cancel beforehand even though I did not pay for the subscription or use it at all.

Customer service are ugly as well, for a company that does very well squabbling over £163 I honestly think that they as a company should fail and that no one should bother trying to get used to notions buggy and horrible interface that makes normal tasks confusing and terrible. Everything you want to do is better done in an excel spreadsheet or on an AI platform builder like Manus.im

Do not waste your time learning how to use notion, trust me, its shit.

I use Notion everyday for managing my projects, keeping track of ideas, and writing first drafts of content. The AI features are a bit oversold IMHO, but the core functionality is very useful and intuitive.

We like using Notion for our company docs. Its easy to use and they've been adding some great features recently but their per seat pricing is getting expensive. Especially for the AI features.

This company has a clear strategy of reaping as much money out of promised AI features as they can before the market catches up and customers flee to more customer-centric options. They display zero interest in helping any customer with a problem and will delay or refuse refunds for poor or non-existent features.

I recently upgraded to the Business plan to trial their AI only to find that I'm presented with a blank screen. After 4 exchanges with customer support (after "escalation") it became clear they hadn't actually looked into any of the issues I reported and were simply attempting to fob me off with unproductive, fake troubleshooting steps.

It's a shame, because the app is decent. They should sell it to a company that actually cares about their customers instead of just trying to rip them off.

Great software. Totally unsatisfactory customer support for paid customers. Notion's AI pointed me to a feature that turned out to be nonexistent. So I reached out to the Notion team for advice on how to solve a very simple issue, given that there was no explanation in the support documentation and the AI hallucinated. It took a couple days for a specialist to get back to me. The answer was essentially: I can't give you a workaround, but you can pay for a specialist or ask the Notion community. Awful. I get better customer support from virtually every other SaaS company.

H.. moly, they just keep f you over, now AI has moved from my current plan to the business plan and all of a sudden all users should pay extra for it. those people.. Im furious. As a business developer looking for integrated innovative tools, i will ditch this software asap. dont try to milk your customers dry for the sake of it.

Unable to cancel subscription! The only way to stop AI payments is to block your credit card.

Notion is good tool but a very scammy company. They've price increased in the last year, which is fine, and this year with them wanting to push Notion AI have decided to move a bunch of features namely all the integrations from their Plus plan to the Business plan essentially asking you to pay double the price to keep the features you had. This would have been slightly less scammy if they'd allowed annual plan users like us who are prepaid until March 2026 to keep the features we were sold in March 2025 until the next renewal. But no, Notion was happy to take nearly $4000 from us and then pull the features from under us a month later. A company that is willing to treat customers like that should not be getting any business and especially not trusted with anyones critical data for anything

one of the best online organizers with many cool features, would be great if AI assistance stayed free to use like it was in beta

I strongly advise against switching to the Plus plan. If you upgrade from the Free plan and miss a prepaid invoice, they won’t just downgrade you back — instead, they’ll issue another invoice and lock you out of all your data and workspaces, including content created during your time on the Free plan.

Considering this risk — along with the underwhelming AI features — the Plus plan simply isn’t worth it. There are better, more user-friendly alternatives out there.

Forces AI down your throat.
i DONT WANT an AI to pop up at the press of a spacebar, and YOU CANT TURN IT OFF easily unless you are a paying customer! ridicolous!

SLOW SLOW and SLOWER... UNUSABLE
When Notion started it was great. But think they are victim of their own success... Notion has become unusable because it is so damn SLOW. Pages take ages to load and when you paste images for example... sometime it simply does't work or respond... So I asked to Notion AI "Why is Notion so slow" ... The AI didn't respond either...useless

I’m very disappointed with Notion’s refund policy. I accidentally added a member to my annual subscription and contacted support, but they refused a refund because I didn’t reach out within 3 days.

What’s frustrating is their policy allows 30 days to request refunds for annual subscriptions, yet this doesn’t apply to accidental member additions. This inconsistency is unfair, especially for an honest mistake. I find their approach rigid and lacking understanding toward users. Greater flexibility could have avoided this poor experience.

Additionally, they could have been more transparent at the time of renewal about the cost of using their AI features, which were free during the first year.

Due to these issues, I will not be renewing my subscription after my current annual period ends.

I find Notion really useful for taking down notes, and creating useful databases. It also helps me to be organized as well - I use it to make lists of what I need to do.

Best of all, you can create as many pages as you need - for free, with all the features you need. I recommend this app to everyone, especially those who need to take notes or plan. It also has AI, which can be really useful too if you need it to help you while you use the app.

Whilst we originally had very high hopes for this product, and used it well professionally and personally for nearly two years, it has declined rapidly into a platform that force-feeds you the usage of a really lacklustre AI, that then offer a free platform that's seemingly purposely built to bait you into paying by unexpectedly locking all of your data in read-only until you do.

The AI features have been added to more and more parts of the UI over time, to the point where it was put in where other UI elements used to be, resulting in frequent accidental clicks due to muscle memory. This then immediately starts the AI engaging with you, which a) means your data is now shared with it, and b) you're dragged off what you were doing, for a most likely incorrect answer. They also removed the option to disable the AI from the free and even paid plans, for some odd reason, and now you have to jump through hoops with their support platform.

As for the free plan. It is free for collaborative use as long as you use less than 1000 'blocks', however, as of recently;
They removed the ability to tell how many blocks are used - seemingly to bait people into using them and ending up in this stalemate position.

They allow people to delete items to free up blocks, but only until they hit this (newly invisible) quota, then they lock their data read-only until you pay.

They give no credit to any user in this situation also having paid workspaces and wanting to keep different sets of data separated. Eg we pay hundreds per year for my wife and I to have one workspace with unlimited, but we use that for our professional projects, so used a free one for our house activities like tasks and shopping lists. Same users, just a different workspace.

They implemented an auto-delete feature for trashed items where the UI says old items will be deleted, but items trashed before that date actually don't get deleted.

They don't have a 'empty trash' button, so users have to painstakingly manually remove things one by one if they want any hope of staying on the 'Free' tier at all.

The UI shows the trash as empty once you remove enough items, another baiting tactic, so you may think that you've cleared the trash and freed up blocks (since now you cannot check), however, if you close and re-open Notion you'll find the trash is full again!

They seemingly remove the warning about approaching the block limit, likely related to not showing it any more, so people don't know when to start paying more attention.

Be warned!

I was willing to spend $10 for a monthly subscription to their inferior AI for the sake of having it within Notion instead of continually going back and forth between Notion and ChatGPT.
Unfortunately, their subscription pop-ip is super unclear and I accidentally purchased an annual subscription thinking I was being offered a discount on the monthly rate. You actually have to do the math to see that the monthly rate in the box that looks as though its just a discounted monthly rate matches the box with the annual rate when multiplied by 12. There's no other indicator that, by clicking, you're agreeing to pay $96 instead of $8. And no purchase confirmation screen - one errant mouse click and I was out $96 that I can't afford right now.

On their website, Notion says that they have a 72-hour refund policy on accidental purchases in general and 30 days on purchases of any annual plan. But that requires the company to actually respond to customer service emails (which is the only way to reach them).

I emailed them immediately, and it took a day for me to receive a boiler plate response (with an incorrect assessment of my situation saying that I wanted to downgrade from an annual to a monthly plan - I was so ticked at the confusing interface and lack of any systematized way of requesting a refund that I just wanted a refund), and also saying that my request was being escalated to their finance team, but that the finance team had a "ticket backlog" so I might not hear back for a day or so. (I can guess why there's a ticket backlog with how confusing the purchase process is).

It's now been a full work week, and despite multiple follow ups there's been no response from this finance team. Yes, it's only been a week, but 1) $96 is a lot of money for some of us to be out for any amount of time when we didn't budget for it, 2) It's ridiculous that the matter of a simple refund needs to be "escalated" to a finance team at all - especially when they expound upon their "no hassle" refund policy on their own website. If they were actually trying to make it no hassle, they'd empower their customer service reps to issue refunds for anything that clearly falls within their stated policies. There's nothing to review here! I requested a refund within minutes of purchase, and their policy says I'll be issued a refund if requested within 30 days!, and 3) It's a joke that a cutting edge tech company who boasts about their AI capabilities requires human review for this at all! There should be a button on the billing page directly next to the charge where customer's can file a refund request. The data verification (which basically amounts to "is the purchase date within 30 days of the refund request? Y/N") should be instantaneous.

One last thing. If you've got multiple work spaces on a single account, you should be aware that even if you did intend to pay $96 for their cruddy AI, it will only work within the workspace you're in when you purchase it. There's absolutely no disclaimer to this effect, and this is different from any other app I've used where you can partition your use cases (here it's work vs personal). I purchased this within my personal work space, which I hardly use, but would have to pay another $96 if I wanted to use it in my professional workspace. I'm now realizing that this is a larger infrastructure problem where it's impossible to tell which settings are applied to you're account, and which ones are specific to individual workspaces.

I've already had mounting privacy concerns about using Notion (who's business model is basically to give away the main product and generate revenue from selling your private data), and this lack of concern for customers just tipped me over to deleting the app. I'm glad I never built it out as much as I wanted to.

Buyer beware!

Be careful with Notion and its cancellation policy.

- if you bought a useless AI module and after some time you want to cancel it, you will be refused and the money will not be returned and will not be credited for another product;
- if you cancel a certain number of users in an annual subscription, you receive credits for the next year. Any requests for a refund will not work;
- the support service is misleading, first confirms the possibility of changing the issued invoice, and after a week of deliberation says that it is impossible to change the invoice. If you have your own business, then you understand perfectly well that any invoice can be changed, refunded, and so on;
- if you want to try Notion, never choose an annual plan, only a monthly one, otherwise, you will not be able to change anything, and you will be charged the maximum amount of money;