Notion is one of the most loved productivity apps ever made. It's also one of the most abandoned. Users set it up, get overwhelmed, and quietly go back to something simpler. This churn pattern is well-documented — and the reviews explain exactly why it happens.
We analysed thousands of App Store and Google Play reviews. Here's what we found.
What Notion Users Genuinely Love
The flexibility is unmatched. The ability to build exactly the system you want — whether that's a personal CRM, a project tracker, a recipe database, or a second brain — is what makes Notion's power users evangelical. They don't just use Notion; they evangelise it.
Templates are a major onboarding accelerant. Users who find the right template for their use case describe the app as transformative. The community template ecosystem has built a flywheel that keeps users engaged and attracts new ones.
The visual design stands out relative to competitors. Notion looks good in a way that Evernote and Google Keep never did. Users describe it as the first notes app they actually enjoy opening.
The all-in-one proposition resonates strongly. Replacing multiple apps — notes, tasks, wikis, project management — with one tool reduces cognitive overhead for users who successfully make the transition.
The 6 Things That Keep Frustrating People
1. Performance on mobile is consistently poor. This is the single most common complaint in the reviews. Slow load times, laggy editing, and the app regularly crashing on older devices are mentioned constantly. For an app that's supposed to replace your notes app, poor mobile performance is a dealbreaker.
2. The learning curve is brutal for new users. Notion's flexibility is also its biggest liability. New users describe feeling overwhelmed, building systems that collapse under their own complexity, and eventually abandoning the app entirely. The onboarding doesn't adequately bridge the gap between "blank page" and "functional system."
3. Offline mode is unreliable. This complaint appears across both platforms. Users who need to work without internet — on planes, in areas with poor signal — report that Notion's offline functionality is inconsistent and untrustworthy.
4. The block-based editor creates friction for simple writing. Users who want to write long-form content describe fighting the editor. The block system that makes databases powerful makes prose awkward. Competitors like Obsidian and Bear handle long-form writing significantly better.
5. Pricing confusion for teams. The free tier is generous for individuals, but the jump to paid for teams is steep and confusing. Small teams who want to collaborate hit the wall in ways that aren't clearly communicated upfront.
6. Search is disappointingly bad. For an app built around storing knowledge, search quality is a recurring complaint. Users describe not being able to find their own notes reliably, which fundamentally undermines the "second brain" proposition.
Why Users Churn
The churners aren't users who found a better product — they're users who found that Notion required too much upfront investment to maintain value. The reviews from churners consistently describe the same arc: enthusiasm, heavy setup, growing complexity, eventual collapse, relief at going back to something simpler.
This is a product design problem, not a features problem. Notion has more features than most users will ever need. What it lacks is scaffolding — the guardrails that help users build sustainable systems rather than elaborate ones.
What Users Are Asking For
Better mobile performance is the overwhelming #1 request — more of a demand, actually. Users are willing to accept other compromises but not this one.
Smarter templates that configure themselves based on use case. Users want to answer a few questions and get a pre-built system that matches how they actually work.
A proper offline mode. Not "offline mode with caveats" — a mode that actually works.
Better writing experience. A focused writing mode that removes the block structure and feels more like a traditional editor.
The Opportunity
Notion has created a new category — the all-in-one workspace — but its user experience doesn't yet match its ambition. The opportunity isn't to replicate Notion's feature set. It's to pick a lane — personal knowledge management, or team collaboration, or long-form writing — and be demonstrably better at that specific thing.
The users who churn from Notion aren't going back to Evernote. They're looking for something new. They just haven't found it yet.
See the complete data behind this analysis: View the Notion report →