Notion

Notion stores workspace data in United States data centers by default. Its own documentation states data "will continue to reside in the United States" unless an Enterprise customer proactively arranges data residency migration to one of four available regions (Oregon, Frankfurt, Tokyo, or Seoul). Every other plan remains on US infrastructure and is subject to US law.

Notion encrypts customer data at rest with AES-256 and in transit with TLS, standard transit-and-rest encryption rather than end-to-end encryption. Notion retains the decryption keys and can access workspace content for troubleshooting, moderation, or legal requests. No E2EE option exists on any plan.

Notion's CCPA disclosures state that identifiers (cookies, device IDs, IP addresses), internet and network activity, general geolocation, and inferences from that data are disclosed to third-party advertising partners in a way the CCPA classifies as a "sale" or "share" for targeted advertising, with an opt-out via a "Do Not Sell or Share My Info" link. This is individually linkable behavioral data given to ad partners, not aggregate or anonymized analytics, though workspace note content is excluded.

By default, Notion and its AI subprocessors, including OpenAI and Anthropic, do not use customer data to train models, a restriction enforced through contractual agreements. Enterprise workspaces have zero data retention with LLM providers; other plans allow providers to retain data for 30 days or less before deletion. This is a genuine no-training default, not an opt-out users must find and enable.

Notion is fully closed source. No client, server, or backend component is published under an open license or public repository, and Notion's Terms of Service prohibit reverse engineering or decompiling its software.

Notion undergoes annual SOC 2 Type II audits performed by an independent, AICPA-certified third party and holds ISO 27001, ISO 27701, ISO 27017, and ISO 27018 certifications, as well as HIPAA compliance and the German BSI C5 standard, all of which are current and documented through its public Trust Center. These audits have not caught everything: a researcher reported in April 2026 that an unauthenticated API endpoint had exposed the names, email addresses, and profile images of public-page contributors since at least 2022, an issue Notion had not fixed as of that report, despite it having been flagged to HackerOne years earlier.

As closed-source, proprietary software, Notion has no published open-source-style governance model, contribution process, or code of conduct. Its Ambassador program recruits community volunteers to provide support and advocacy, but it is a Notion-controlled community structure rather than shared governance.

Notion's pricing page defaults to "Pay yearly" billing, listing Plus at $10 and Business at $20 per member per month; switching to monthly billing raises these tiers to $12 and $24. Annual billing is the default discounted structure: a standard annual subscription model rather than monthly-first.

Notion's free plan supports unlimited individual pages and blocks but caps file uploads at 5MB, keeps only 7 days of page history, allows up to 10 guests, and restricts multi-member workspaces on pages and blocks. Notion AI is available only as a limited trial. It's a usable but capped tier, not a fully functional free product.

Notion's plan pages clearly list what each tier includes, and downgrading to the free plan through billing settings is straightforward with no retention prompts on the web. However, subscriptions purchased through Apple's or Google's app stores must be canceled through those platforms, not directly in Notion. Notion's policy states subscriptions are non-refundable outside regions with mandatory cooling-off rules, adding friction a fully transparent flow would avoid.

Third-party pricing trackers document real country-by-country variation in Notion's subscription pricing, notably lower in Turkey than in Nordic countries, consistent with informal purchasing-power-based localization. Notion's pricing page shows currency selection by country, but the company does not publish a documented purchasing power parity policy explaining how prices are set.

A full-workspace export produces open Markdown, CSV, and HTML files, available on every plan including Free, though Notion's documentation warns large exports can take up to 30 hours. The export drops database views, filters, sorts, rollups, formulas, comments, and page history. Relations between database rows are flattened into internal page-ID references rather than preserved as live links, so a database-heavy workspace loses real structure, not just formatting.

Notion offers no self-hosting option. It operates exclusively as a centralized SaaS product on AWS and Cloudflare infrastructure that Notion itself controls.

Notion shipped offline mode in August 2025 for desktop and mobile apps after years of requests, making it one of its most-requested features. Pages must be manually or automatically marked "Available offline" before working offline. Desktop caches pages for up to 72 hours, mobile for 24 hours. Child pages don't auto-download with their parent. Database offline support is capped at 50 rows, and the web app has no offline mode. It's real but partial offline support built around syncing, not offline-first operation.

Notion ships official apps for Web, Windows, macOS, iOS, and Android. There is no official Linux, BSD, or F-Droid build. Linux users depend on unofficial community wrappers around the web app, such as Notion Electron, rather than anything Notion maintains.

Notion has no dedicated public accessibility statement or VPAT. An independent 2024 WCAG assessment found real gaps: insufficient alt text, text-contrast ratios that had degraded compared to earlier versions, and keyboard-navigation traps where elements only become reachable after a mouse hover. Some assistive technology support does exist, and outside reviewers have found VoiceOver and keyboard shortcut use workable, but without documentation or a stated commitment to support it.

Notion Labs Inc. is a privately held, venture-capital-backed company with no Big Tech parent. Its investors include Sequoia Capital, Index Ventures, Coatue Management, Base10 Partners, and First Round Capital, joined in a January 2026 share purchase by Singapore's sovereign wealth fund GIC.

Notion has not been acquired and has not experienced any change of control in the past three years; its last primary funding round closed in October 2021. In January 2026, Singapore's GIC joined existing investors Sequoia Capital and Index Ventures in a $270 million tender offer to purchase shares directly from current and former employees at an $11 billion valuation. It was a liquidity event for staff and existing investors rather than a change in who controls the company, but it did bring in a new, named institutional shareholder, a minor change rather than no change at all.

Notion publishes a public Content & Use Policy prohibiting harassment, hateful content, child exploitation, phishing, and malware, which explicitly extends to AI-generated content, and documents layered AI safety measures including prompt-injection defenses and moderation on both AI inputs and outputs. It has no single, dedicated public ethics or social-responsibility policy covering advertising and data practices together, and its 2024 acquisition of Skiff, an end-to-end-encrypted email and storage startup, sits awkwardly next to any ethical framing: Notion shut Skiff down entirely rather than keeping its encrypted product running, after an initial announcement that downplayed the shutdown to users who had trusted Skiff specifically because it wasn't a company like Notion.

No sustainability report, emissions data, or climate commitment was found for Notion Labs. Independent emissions tracker DitchCarbon lists no publicly reported figures or reduction targets for the company.

Notion Labs was founded in 2013 and publicly released Notion 1.0 in 2016, followed by the Notion 2.0 relaunch in March 2018, which established its current product direction. The company has been in continuous, active development for over a decade.

Notion maintains a large, active user base, an official Ambassador program, a sprawling public template marketplace, and a steady cadence of feature releases (offline mode, expanded AI features, Notion Mail, Notion Calendar) through 2025 and 2026, with annual recurring revenue reported above $600 million by the end of 2025.