NOTION

Should You Use Notion for Customer-Facing Docs — How?

The pros, the cons, and everything in-between. Plus a better alternative.

Notion has undoubtedly grown enormously in the past three years. With a 20x increase in users from 1 million in 2019 to 20 million in 2021, it has proven to be a valuable tool for any business.

And with this growth, we’ve already seen Notion fill a variety of business roles. For example: It’s being used for hiring, for landing pages, and even for personal blogs.

But there is another use case that Notion looks promising for: Public Product Documentation.

If you think about it, Notion would be the perfect candidate. The writing process can happen seamlessly in real-time through the cloud. Then, when you want to convey some technical information, Notion’s custom blocks offer all the additional functionality.

Here’s just some of the long-list of pros with this approach:

• ✅ Documentation can be written collaboratively
• ✅ Easy for all stakeholders to contribute to docs
• ✅ Ability to write in your team’s central workspace
• ✅ No git repo attachment needed
• ✅ Use Notion’s custom blocks (tables, embeds, dropdowns, code blocks)
• ✅ Everything is intuitive and drag-and-drop
• ✅ Use your company’s existing toolchain and internal knowledge base

But there are also some cons that you should be aware of:

• ❌ SEO Considerations
• ❌ Matching your Company Branding
• ❌ Cost ($8/User/Month)
• ❌ No edit/publish cycle

With lots of the pros looking attractive, how can we get all the benefits of Notion for documentation without the drawbacks?

The Solution

Use an add-on tool for Notion such as: Engine.so.

Engine.so lets you write in Notion, then publish those pages as a completely custom-branded knowledge base. It’s therefore possible to have all the pros of writing with Notion, plus all the pros of…