| Functionality | 6 <p>Notion offers almost all of the functionality most companies will need. It Offers best-in-class inbuilt documentation, and added a lot of AI features in the past year that allows you to query your entire Notion workspace. It has also been rolling out many new features e.g. Notion calendar, forms, and Notion mail (coming soon).</p><p>That said, it’s still missing some features larger teams with many active projects might require, like advanced analytics, robust workflow automation, and time tracking. There’s room for improvement, but it’s evolving fast.</p> | 6 <p>Paymo focuses on delivering the core set of functionality required for managing client work. It offers excellent time tracking, invoicing and accounting functionality. However, the focus on client projects mean Paymo lacks some common project management functionality, such as inbuilt documentation, building automated workflows, adding custom fields or any meaningful analytics (besides time reports).</p> |
| Ease of Use | 6 <p>For those new to Notion, its blank canvas, endless customization options, and sheer number of templates can feel a bit overwhelming at first. Setting up a project management system from scratch might take a few days to figure out—but once you get past that initial learning curve, Notion becomes incredibly intuitive and user-friendly.</p><p>Creating new projects, documents, and tasks is lightning-fast, and there are quick keyboard shortcuts for almost everything, from adding new blocks to navigating between pages. Once you’re up to speed, Notion feels like second nature.</p> | 7 <p>Due to its limited functionality, Paymo is rather easy to navigate. Key workflows such as tracking time, creating new tasks and projects are straightforward and intuitive. However, there are some UX quirks. For example, you can only manage task dependencies in the portfolio view, and there are unfamiliar terms here and there e.g. an unexplained "booking" tab that's by default in every tab.</p> |
| Look and feel | 7 <p>Out of the box - Notion has a clean, modern, uncluttered interface. But you have the power to completely customise the look and feel of Notion to make it look visually stunning.</p><p>The main drawback is that Notion suffers from slow load times, especially as your workspace grows. Pages can take 3–4 seconds to load, especially if you have a lot of data and files stored in Notion. It’s something to keep in mind if you plan on using Notion as your all-in-one company operating system, or as your usage scales.</p> | 6 <p>Although not visually stunning, Paymo's interface is uncluttered and functional. However, we have noticed that Paymo's pages load slowly at times (3+ seconds).</p> |
| Customisability | 9 <p>Notion gives you endless customization options to shape it exactly how you want.</p><p>You can mix and match blocks—pages, databases, calendars, and project views—and even connect them with third-party tools to create a setup that fits your workflow, system, or use case perfectly. You’re in control of everything: how tasks and projects are organized, the structure of your internal docs and wikis, the platform’s overall look and feel, and even the layout of individual pages.</p><p>That said, Notion isn’t without its limits. It falls short on advanced reporting features and can’t handle workflows that require complex automation, like branching or conditional logic.</p> | 3 <p>While Paymo allows for some customisation e.g. switching between project views, applying filters to customise project views - its focus on client projects limits further customisability. Every project must be structured around clients and time budget. Also, you're unable to add any custom fields or tags, or create custom reports.</p> |
| Ease of Setup | 7 <p>Notion offers a self-serve free trial and lets you purchase without needing to talk to sales. Getting started and setting up a few tasks and subtasks should take 20-30 minutes, helped by very extensive library of templates. A full setup shouldn’t take more than a day or two, even for more complex use cases.</p> | 6 <p>Offers a self-serve free trial and allows purchase without needing to talk to sales. Getting started and setting up a few tasks and subtasks should take 20-30 minutes, but it lacks a rich library of templates. Full setup should take less than a day.</p> |
| Customer Support | 5 <p>Notion's support team can only be contacted via email, and this option is very hidden away on their site. From our experience, responses take about a full business day—not the fastest—but the agents are friendly and genuinely helpful. On the bright side, Notion’s help center is top-notch, with detailed, high-quality documentation that can often solve your questions without needing to wait for support.</p> | 9 <p>Paymo offers in-app live chat with their C-suite members. The Paymo team almost always responds within minutes, and helpful and patient. You can also tell that the team is open and responsive to customer feedback. You can also easily access Paymo's help centre within the live chat widget, which is a plus.</p> |
| Integratability | 6 <p>Notion offers 110 integrations with a decent range of third-party tools, covering areas like automation, analytics, and collaboration. However, it’s missing some key integrations in commonly needed categories—there’s no native support for customer support tools, calendars, or email platforms.</p><p>That said, Notion does provide an API, so you can build custom integrations if you have specific needs.</p> | 3 <p>Paymo only has 14 pre-built integrations. While this list includes Google Calendar, Zapier and Slack, it's missing a lot of common integrations with tools from categories like customer support, sales, analytics etc. However, it does offer an API for custom integrations.</p> |
| Ease of Migration | 8 <p>Notion makes exporting easy with a self-serve option—there’s an export button on every page, so you can quickly grab what you need. For more advanced needs, you can also export data using their API.</p> | 4 <p>It seems like you're only able to export invoices and your list of projects + clients via self-serve. There doesn't seem to be any easy way to export your tasks & task content. However, this may be doable via Paymo's API.</p> |
