Notion AI Review:
based on real mystery shopping

Quick Overview

Notion’s AI-powered product is an intuitive text-generating service that optimizes the writing process and helps achieve excellent results.

Revolution a year ago, a habitual reality now – the power of AI is now in Notion. This company  has been around for almost a decade and has built the name around its organization and management tools. Notion has entered the education market as a collaborative document editor and sophisticated note-taking app. Now, this productivity software has joined the AI race and offers text generation features via OpenAI API. 

As always, A*Help decided to check all the buzz around Notion.AI. The founder, Ivan Zhao, before releasing the AI-powered version of their software in the interview for The Verge said that the main priority was to help and solve cold start writing problems of their users. 

Our team went down the rabbit hole to assess if this writing assistant was capable of creating a strong university-level essay. The key parameters of A*Help’s checklist are value for money, overall experience, and paper quality. As a rule of thumb, we conducted mystery shopping to grade this text generating ai tool. See How We Test AI Essay Writers for more details about our testing approach.

Notion Review: Verified Mystery Shopping

During the experiment, we will analyze if Notion’s AI writing tool can keep up with university requirements, show plausible results, and save time working on the assignment. Fast results should not equal sloppy work. Therefore, the A*Help team diligently checks whether this service can meet high university writing standards. 

The foundation of our mystery shopping is the real written task. We ask Notion.AI to generate an essay with the following instructions: a 550-word personal narrative with an emphasis on a feeling of gratitude in MLA format. We additionally run a generated task through a plagiarism check and send it for assessment to our partner and US college professor – Dr. Sybil Low. Not only does she kindly participate in our experiment, but she also provides her expertise.  

Mrs. Low decided to share her opinion on AI-powered tools in the context of the educational environment:

You can hear about AI from every corner of the world and people from all walks of life. Many seem to be disturbed and scared about AI taking over the world. However, I like to look critically at new inventions. Sure, the education industry faces yet another challenge. Like-minded people, like Justin Bruno, also stand for a scientific approach. In his recent article for Michigan Virtual  “How Will Artificial Intelligence Change Education?” he openly discusses what potential changes AI brings to the education field. Undoubtedly, there are many concerns but additionally, there are advantages, namely adaptability to the learning process.

We agree with our associate professor that critical thinking gives a broad-minded understanding of the current situation. Hence, we want to make students’ interactions with AI writing tools effective. Further, we will provide you with our in-depth evaluation of Notion.AI and details about this service.

Reviewing the value of Notion: Value for Money — 20/25

The A*Help is a guide of a hassle-free studying process. Whenever a brand-new tool or feature appears in the market, we do our best to check if a service or a platform is worth your time and money. 

AI text generators claim to make studying simpler. Conventionally, every student would need to pore over information from various sources, find references, write multiple drafts before submitting the final work, and eventually, run a written piece through grammar and plagiarism checkers. Notion.AI features are designed to streamline the process. 

As of now, Notion.AI has both free and paid plans. With a free plan, you will have a limited number of AI prompts (20). If this amount does not cover your needs, invest in a more upgraded version – Plus plan that will cost $10 monthly and $8 annually. 

The AI assistant is available on the web version as well as desktop and mobile apps. Students can start using Notion.AI only when they have an account in Notion. 

From this moment, you are ready to work on this platform. There, you can access AI chat and grammar check. These two built-in features simplify the process of writing and enhance contextual and linguistic peculiarities. However, Notion.AI does not offer a broad variety of tools, such as research assistant, reference finder, plagiarism checker, in-text, MLA and APA citations. Meaning, every learner needs to bring in work to organize the generated piece in accordance with the university requirements of the written task. 

Notion.AI easily generates the text you need. With additional characteristics, you can rewrite and paraphrase some parts of the text, and ask the AI assistant to summarize your writing. Moreover, if you are stuck with writing, Notion has a “brainstorm” function. 

Taking into account all the aspects, we would say that there is room for improvement for Notion.AI. Overall, it  provides decent help in its price range. Besides, you can access the writing assistant from different devices. The A*Help assessed Notion.AI on 20/25.

User experience with Notion: Overall Experience — 22/25

Students are always in a rush, so they opt for functionable and efficient applications. The AI writer by Notion is one of these among many. 

According to A*Help’s meticulous evaluation, our team can state that Notion.AI provided a practically perfect overall experience. The AI writing generator can stand the competition since it offers an intuitive user experience, smooth interaction, and a fast essay generation option. 

The registration process neither takes a lot of time nor effort. To sign into your account you would need to use solely an email address. Alternatively, you could connect via Google, Apple, or Facebook accounts. So far, these steps are trouble-free and feasible. Just like working with the platform, it will come naturally to you. Therefore, there is no support chat on the platform. However, if you do require some help, Notion has guides with detailed instructions.

When the technical part is left behind, you are ready to experiment on the platform yourself. Type “/” or press “space” and add the instructions in the prompt bar that will instantly pop up. The AI writing assistant will rely on this input while  generating an essay. Together with a prompt bar, a drop-down menu with suggestions appears. You can manually provide instructions for your written task or experiment and opt for working with the proposed suggestions. The writing assistant starts generating content as soon as you press “enter”. To produce our personal narrative, Notion needed around 1 to 3 minutes. The pleasant part of interaction with this platform is the absence of word count limits.

If the generated text does not match your requirements you can make it longer or shorter, also you can request fixing grammar and spelling mistakes, as well as changing the tone of narration or simplifying the language. 

If you are ready to try out a paid plan, you can pay for it with Visa, MasterCard, American Express, or Discover. Online wallets, namely ApplePay, GooglePay, and PayPal are not available. 

The overall experience of using Notion AI is easy and practical. All steps are intuitive and simple. Notion.AI shies away from the perfect score by a few marks. A*Help rated the service at 22/25.

Notion’s Paper Quality — 39.6/50

Should learners use the AI essay writing service, the quality of writing is what matters the most. Therefore, our team painstakingly assesses the final result. 

You will work directly in the Notion system. So to organize the written work according to the university outline, such as heading, titles, and double spacing,  you will have to do this yourself. Notion eases the technical work for you a bit by writing the text in paragraphs. Plus, the formatting of the text can be requested. The AI writing tool generates a personal narrative as a plain text. Nonetheless, Notion.AI cannot generate references which are a fundamental part of college-type essays.

The paper quality consists of how easily the text is generated with the necessary style, formatting, outline, and similarity to human-produced text. To receive an in-depth analysis of these parameters, we sent the personal narration to our partner college professor Dr.Sybil Low. 

Here is an assessment of the paper:

Score 87.6 out of 100 pts. Document formatting is very good, but there is room for improvement. Document formatting issues: vertical spacing; page header. |Observations:| {Integrity}: 100%. {Length}: Just a tiny bit short (98%)—try to write a bit more. {Mechanics:} 98% (spelling 100%, grammar 100%, punctuation 98%, word choice 92%). {Citation formatting:} ungraded. {Reasoning, logic:} 78% (efficiency 84%, acuity 92%, clarity 83%, objectivity 54%).

Together with a detailed evaluation Mr.Low generously provided her take on the AI-generated personal narration:

Content-wise the AI essay generator tries to emulate the human writing style by providing a real-life example that evokes the emotion of empathy. If a student is willing to use this sample as a pattern then it is a great starting point. But, of course, additional corrections must be added. For instance, more personification. I want to read students’ raw emotions and see individual reflections, be they ugly or beautiful. Hence, objectivity is 54% and reasoning of the narrative is 78%. Next, Notion.AI does not do a valid job with written-task formation, and citations. All in all, every student needs to put in effort when working with AI tools on their university assignments.

In general, Notion.AI proved that it can cope with the basic needs of students and provide help to those who cannot put their minds around how to start working with essays.

Paper score: 87.6/100

⭐ Parameter	✅ Personal Essay
Paper score	87.6/100
Creation time	1-3m
Number of words	525 words

Final words on Notion

Being inventive in homework completion is not a bad thing because it saves time and effort. On that account, the A*Help team checks if Notion.AI can bring value to students’ lives. This AI-powered service is simple and intuitive to use. Notion.AI optimizes the writing process and helps to receive fast and decent results.

Notion Specs

>Website experience

Aesthetic Interface	Yes
Easy-to-use platform	Yes
Simple Essay creation flow	Yes
Trying before registration	No
Full time to generate essay	1-3 m
Wordcount limits	None
>Support
Guides	Yes
Support chat/phone	No
>Services
AI chat	Yes
Research assistant	No
In-text citations	No
Reference finder	No
MLA and APA Citations	No
Grammar check	Yes
Plagcheck	No
>Free trial
Free trial/plan	Yes
Limits	Unlimited blocks for individuals Collaborative workspace Slack, GitHub, and more integrations 7 day page history Invite up to 10 guests
>Subscription & Limits
Monthly plan	Free, Plus – $10, Business – $18, Enterprise – $25
Annual plan	Free, Plus – $8, Business – $15, Enterprise – $20
>Text Creation Options
Generate	Yes
Rewrite	Yes
Rephrase	Yes
Summarize	Yes
>Text Formatting
Format	Plain text
Outline	None
Structure	Paragraph structure
References	None
Formatting	Can be done

FAQ

Notion Reviews

The A*Help team reviews in-demand services, addressing it as a mystery shopping experiment. But before that we gather users’ feedback from sites, like Reddit, Sitejabber, and Trustpilot. Then, we thoroughly evaluate those nifty platforms, so you can rely on our honest assessment before using them.

Is Notion a Scam?

The main purpose of our mystery shopping is to check the credibility of the chosen service. We gave the AI assistant a set of instructions to do a real assignment. Having received adequate results we can claim that Notion AI is not a scam.

Is Notion Legit?

If you have doubts whether Notion is legit or not – you should not. A*Help solely works with legitimate products that have numerous trusted users. We can verify that this online service is legit.

Is Notion Safe?

Having tried this AI essay writing tool ourselves we did not experience anything fishy. To start using Notion, you would need to create an account using just an email address. Reasonably said, it is a safe platform.

Is Notion Trustworthy?

The A*Help team requested Notion.AI to generate a university-level essay. We received satisfactory results and can confirm that this is a trustworthy AI writing generator.

Is Notion a Good Service?

Our team analyzes essential aspects to verify that Notion.AI is a reliable service. After a thorough A*Help assessment, the platform gained 78.6/100. Such a sufficient score indicates that Notion.AI provides good service.

Is Notion Free?

For our mystery shopping, we used a free version that comes with limited features. However, if you need more work to be done with the help of this AI essay generator, you can purchase paid plans.

Can Notion write my College Paper?

If you are looking for services or platforms that can aid you in your educational endeavors, you could use Notion.AI. Though, we do not recommend over-relying on AI to write your college papers but rather using it simply as a tool.

Does Notion have Anti-Plagiarism Features?

In the current version of Notion.AI, there was no built-in plagiarism checker. Overall, Notion, as an AI essay writing tool, is limited in features. However, there might be future updates.

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