Notion vs Craft: Team workspace or nice docs (2026)

Notion is a workspace before it is an editor. Permissions, member roles, shared databases, comment threads, and templates that a whole team uses all assume more than one person. Plus is $10-12 per user per month and Business is $20-24, which is where the AI features landed after the standalone add-on was retired in May 2025.

Craft has a Team plan at $50 a month and a Family plan at $12, and collaboration is not what it is best at. It is a document tool that happens to sync. If your real problem is fifteen people needing the same tracker with different permissions, Craft will feel thin and Notion will feel like the obvious answer, because it is.

Notion's databases are the reason it won its category. One dataset becomes a table, a board, a calendar, or a gallery. Relations link rows, rollups summarise them, filtered views hide what you do not need today. Craft has nothing of comparable depth, and that is the single biggest functional gap between the two.

Craft's block model goes the other direction, toward how the page reads. Typography is considered, blocks nest into structure, and daily notes and tasks come along. Both apps have wikilinks and backlinks, and neither has a graph view. So the split is not knowledge features, it is whether your information wants to be queried or read.

Craft documents look designed without you doing design work. Sharing produces something you are happy to send to a client, and the native Swift apps on Apple platforms are among the nicest in the category. There is a native Windows app as well, which is unusual for an Apple-first developer.

Notion pages are functional and recognisably Notion. Sharing works and publishing works, and the typography has never been the point. It is also an Electron app on every platform, and it slows down as workspaces and databases grow, with search quality dropping on large workspaces and the mobile app lagging behind desktop.

Craft's free plan caps you at 1,500 blocks and 1 GB, which is the most common complaint about it, and repeated pricing and plan restructures have frustrated existing users. Blocks accumulate faster than people expect, so the ceiling arrives during your evaluation rather than after it.

Notion's free tier is genuinely usable for one person, with no meaningful block limit for solo work. The bill starts when you add collaborators, and then it is per seat per month indefinitely. So Notion is cheaper to start and more expensive to grow, while Craft asks for about $6.40 a month early and stays roughly there.

Both apps store proprietary formats. Notion pages are cloud blocks, and export gives you HTML, Markdown, CSV, or PDF, with Notion's own help pages warning that a large workspace export can take up to 30 hours. Offline is partial by Notion's own documentation: recently opened or explicitly marked pages, with nothing offline in the browser.

Craft is better on both counts. Documents are proprietary blocks too, and export to Markdown keeps structure well, with assets needing manual fixup afterwards. Local and offline editing are supported, so a dead connection does not decide which of your documents exist. Neither app leaves plain files on your disk, and Craft's exit takes minutes where Notion's takes hours.

Notion's free tier is generous for one person, then Plus is $10-12 per user per month and Business $20-24 with AI included. Craft is free up to 1,500 blocks and 1 GB, then about $6.40 a month for Plus, $12 for Family, and $50 for Team. For a solo user Craft Plus is roughly $77 a year against Notion free, and for a team of ten Notion Plus is $1,200 to $1,440 a year against Craft Team at $600. The number that actually bothers people is neither of those: it is Craft's history of plan restructures, which is why some users go looking for notes they hold themselves.