A powerful new trend that's changing the way SaaS companies think of their products
It all (probably) started with Notion, but companies are catching up
I love Notion. It’s a fantastic tool that has changed the way people create documents and share information for collaborative purposes. Notion built their tool around one functionality that doesn’t seem powerful at first but if you know how to use it, there are almost unlimited possibilities. This functionality is customizable databases, and here’s why it’s here to stay.
Notion riding on the wave of collaboration & transparency
Creating documentation and collaborative spaces became much simpler with Notion. It turned each page into a flexible workspace, where each row serves as a “block” that can hold components like images, simple tables, or databases. Notion also allows users to arrange each row into columns if they want to. This whole customization became a clear benefit to a lot of companies with diverse operations and needs.
Databases unlocked the customization to a new level and replaced static tables in many cases. Instead of a single table with information to be copy-pasted everywhere, users can create a database, add custom fields with additional details, store it, and reuse it across different pages.
In this way, Notion created a centralized source of information and applied it to unlimited use cases—from ticketing systems and task management to a people directory. The databases could be displayed in tables, lists, boards, or timelines formats which enhanced customization even more. This created a strong foundation for a truly dynamic workspace designed for seamless collaboration and transparency.
Notion rise
Notion saw a major boom in 2022/2023 as more people began selling Notion templates. Stories of people making $100,000/month selling templates became a reality and everyone wanted in.
The hype was real, with people eager to earn additional income and the creator economy was on the rise. Marketplaces experienced a surge and selling products became instantly accessible after ChatGPT’s release in November 2022. Suddenly, anyone could start selling without prior knowledge of marketing or sales.
From that point on, everyone—from students to startup employees—knew about Notion and began to use it daily. I noticed companies leveraging Notion’s intuitive design and UX and some even adopting its block-based page structure. You can see the similar approaches for example in Tally.so, coda.io, or Fibery.
Maybe I’m giving too much credit to Notion here, so take that with a grain of salt, but I started seeing more and more customizable views in product/project management tools. Examples like Linear or ClickUp follow this trend. Even with minimal experience in these tools, I intuitively knew what to do because of Notion’s influence. The way projects are viewed, information is filtered/sorted, or fields are displayed, felt familiar. In the screenshot below you can’t almost tell a difference between Notion and ClickUp.
Atlassian’s Confluence or Jira Product Discovery are working to catch up with the way Notion innovates, especially around databases. They’ve added customizable databases beyond standard tables and continue to add features inspired by Notion, such as views, formulas, fields, and more. These databases can be similarly used across Confluence documents but many features are still missing.
It’s hard for me to use these tools now without comparing them to Notion. I have high expectations of the tools and I believe I’m not the only one. People are used to Notion’s way of working and prefer to stick with it. Otherwise, this functionality wouldn’t be so widely adopted by many companies.
Where to go from here?
More companies focused on documentation will adopt the database-driven approach. This shift won’t be limited to project management software but also to broader collaboration platforms. Think about it. Notion is successful in the customization, transparency, and reusability of information within and beyond the app. Once you’ve organized information, you want to reuse it. If you solved a process problem with the template, you don’t need to solve it again. That’s why selling Notion templates was so easy. And that’s why templates in general got spread throughout tools.
Look at Miro as an example. You put a lot of effort into adding information to a board and use it a few times with the team before it eventually gets lost. I love the tool, but honestly, this feels static. That’s one of the reasons why I prefer Notion but that’s about to change.
Miro is preparing to launch The Innovation Workspace. Their new database approach is set to push them to another level. It removes many disadvantages they had in comparison to Notion. This will give them an even greater head start in the visual collaboration landscape and position them to compete directly in the project management space. Such a smart move by Miro.
This shift will be inevitable in other tools in the collaboration landscape if they want to stay competitive and embrace new ways of working. I believe it could also impact other prototyping or wireframing tools like Figma. The future is simply dynamic and reusable. Similar usability patterns and functionalities will spread across platforms and industries. When combined with AI, automation, and integration capabilities, this could create a seamless, highly efficient ecosystem. It’ll be exciting to see where this evolution leads.