A good office suite isn’t only a set of quality tools. These workspaces are interconnected multimedia powerhouses.Google Workspacewas a pioneer in bringing that interconnectivity aspect to the office world. Still, a young competitor with a novel approach to office documents became one ofthe best note-taking apps: Notion.
Notion is a note-taking tool. Calling it just that doesn’t come close to Notion’s strengths. The platform is powerful, from the ability to interlink between documents to the flexibility provided by the empty canvases. Canvases can be turned into anything, from a simple to-do list or notepad over a calendar planning tool all the way to a full-blown database. Entire companies are run solely on Notion.
Google sees the potential and the threat that Notion poses. Over the past months and years, the company started building out its office suite to offer similar features, allowing for quick in-line commands, strong interlinking options between documents, anda new pageless format for Google Docsthat’s more flexible than the page-based design of the past. Enter the Notion-ification of Google Workspace.
Google’s smart canvas cherry-picks what makes Notion special
Google documents used to be siloed off from each other and only good at one thing at a time. If you created a Google Docs document, you could add a link to a Sheets spreadsheet or a Slides presentation at best. Google laid out a plan to create a smart canvas at Google I/O 2021. During 2022 and this year, the company has been adding more features in this area.
First and foremost, Google has added a slew of smart canvas features, which is an umbrella term it uses to describe new capabilities across its office apps that make them more intertwined. The company uses its apps' @-mentions capabilities to add new and powerful options, like quick access to building block templates, tagging co-workers, and adding rich links to other Google Workspace documents. This @ menu is straight from Notion, which uses a / menu to achieve much of the same. Google stopped short of adding advanced formatting options to this menu. You can also use a keyboard shortcut to use natural language for adding formatting in Workspace documents. The workflow is close to Notion.
Google’s AI features offer more but at a higher price
AI is a hot topic. Almost every service under the sun includes AI features. Google offers an array of AI features in Workspace under a Duet AI to organizations and a limited number of personal users. It has a Help me write option, where you enter prompts to ask the AI to write a new text for you or to make refinements and edits to text that exists in the document. It also offers smart summaries, a feature that’s already widely rolled out.
You get more than just text generation from Google. The company offers image generation abilities in Slides and Meet (for your backdrop) and organization features in Sheets. Within an organization, the AI can access different documents, allowing you to ask it to create new work based on existing information, with Google giving quarterly earnings as an example.
Meanwhile, Notion’s AI is a bit limited, whereas Google’s Help me write and Notion’s ChatGPT-based solution are similar. Notion’s tool also lets you summarize content, ask for content suggestions, help you get a first draft ready, and do grammar, style, and spelling corrections. It also provides translations. Notion offersseveral examplesof how you can use these capabilities to improve your workflow, and Notion takes the crown here on discoverability and ease of use.
Notion’s AI prompts can be accessed by starting a paragraph with a space and are intuitive to work with
The advantage of Notion’s solution is that it is less expensive than Google’s enterprise solution. Notion AI is an add-on that costs $10 per month per person, with discounts available for longer payment periods. Meanwhile, Google charges $30 per month per user in addition to its base fee. Google doesn’t have a subscription for regular end users yet. While Google may offer more, many people may be happy with using only the text features provided by Notion. Notion’s solution is also more widely available for end users.
Google’s mobile apps still have a way to go
Google still has a lot of work to do to bring its mobile apps up to par. While Notion’s feature set is nearly complete on mobile, Google’s apps lack smart canvas. Here, you’ll return to the old ways, with no easy way to reach the new advanced features. Serious people get their work done on their computers rather than their phones. Still, there are instances when you’re out and about and want to change or add something to a document. In those cases, you’re left without the full feature set on mobile.
Notion offers most of the vital features in its app, but it opted for a different approach than the desktop. Rather than having you type a backslash and then dig through a menu that sits on top of your keyboard, a plus button above your digital keyboard has the same entries you’ll find on the web app. It doesn’t have autocomplete or search, which makes it difficult to dig through, and less advanced options like formatting are more cumbersome to access than on Google Docs and other Workspace apps.
Templates require a lot more work on Google Workspace
Another strength Notion can rely on is a thriving ecosystem of ready-made templates created by Notion and its community. While thousands of templates are available for Docs and other Google Workspace products, they are harder to discover and incorporate into projects than Notion.
When you create a new document in Google Docs, you jump right into Google’s template gallery, but by default, it only includes a handful of options. Notion’s gallery is bigger and easier to sift through. You get a sidebar full of templates and can use a search bar to dig into specific areas if you have something in mind.
In that same vein, it’s easier to navigate Notion than Google Workspace when you have several documents to deal with. A single Notion instance puts all the documents you need at your fingertips, searchable with aCMD+KorCTRL+Kkeyboard shortcut. For Workspace, you’ll turn to your Google Drive to get all your documents. Even if you can interlink with other documents with smart chips, manually switching between documents and canvases introduces more friction.
Google Workspace is built like an old file-based computer system, while Notion is organized like a flexible knowledge base or search engine. you’re able to create intricate nested structures, but this isn’t pushed onto you like it is in Google Drive, which can look messy and harder to dig through a lot faster than Notion.
Google Workspace may just be getting good enough
Google Workspace is becoming more similar to Notion, picking and choosing from Notion’s best features without getting to that same level of convenience. The question is if Google needs to get there all the way. It’s the leading cloud office platform with a big existing customer base. Companies are likely slow to migrate to alternatives. When Google builds in key features from competitors, decision-makers have less incentive to undertake the transition to a different platform.
It’s the same for individual users. Many likely have their data in their Google account, and while enthusiasts are eager to test new ways to do things, this isn’t true for most people.
In that sense, we can only wish for both Google and Notion to keep innovating. Competition is good, and if done right, we will get new and innovative features across the board, no matter which tools we use.
