Notion is a connected workspace where a team writes docs, keeps its wiki, tracks projects and builds its own databases, all in the same place. It started in 2013 and is based in San Francisco. It passed 100 million users in 2024.
Plans run from Free and Plus to Business and Enterprise. Around the core workspace sit Notion Calendar, which syncs with Google, Outlook and iCloud calendars, and Forms for collecting answers straight into a database. Sites publishes pages to the web.
Agents
Notion 3.0, released in September 2025, brought Notion Agent, an AI that can work across a workspace’s pages and databases. Business and Enterprise customers can also build Custom Agents that run tasks on their own.
Security and integrations
Notion is audited annually for SOC 2 and ISO 27001, among others. Enterprise customers can keep their data in the EU, in Frankfurt or Ireland, through free data residency.
Its integrations gallery includes Slack and GitHub, and on Business and Enterprise, Jira issues can sync into a Notion database. Zapier connects it to thousands more.
The Notion API
Notion’s API reads and writes pages and databases, down to the blocks inside a page. A business’s own integration uses a token and sees only the pages it’s been shared with, while apps for other workspaces connect with OAuth. Personal access tokens arrived in May 2026.
Every request names an API version, so updates never change behavior unannounced. Since September 2025, databases hold one or more data sources, each queried with filters and sorts.
Rate limits depend on the plan: 600 requests a minute per connection on Business and Enterprise, and 180 on the others.
Webhooks and AI tools
Webhooks report changes to pages, databases, data sources and comments. They’re signed, and Notion tries a failed delivery up to eight times over about a day. On paid plans, database automations can also send a webhook without any code.
Notion runs a hosted MCP server for AI assistants, and its Agent APIs entered public beta in August 2026.
Keeping a Notion database and a sheet in step
A sync that only adds pages is simple. Keeping a database and a spreadsheet in step means changing pages that already exist, and the API updates a page by its ID. So the sync first queries the database for a page whose order number or email equals the incoming one, then updates it, or creates a page when nothing matches.
Each column also needs one side that owns it. If staff change a status in Notion while the sheet keeps writing its own value, the two take turns undoing each other. Webhooks carry Notion’s edits back out as they happen, which spares the rate limit that a timer checking several databases every few minutes would use up.
Running client work in Notion next to a CRM
When a deal is won in the CRM, the API can create the client’s project page from one of the database’s templates, with the template’s properties and content already in place. Storing the CRM’s record ID on that page gives every later update something exact to match on, where a company name might belong to two clients.
Emails and files into Notion
An email can become a page, with its text as the page content. Attachments travel separately: the API uploads files of up to 20 MB in a single request and larger ones in parts, then attaches them to a files property or a PDF block. On a Free workspace, each file is capped at 5 MiB.
When Notion holds the operations
Notion often grows from a wiki into the place a team tracks real work, and that’s when connecting it pays. A won deal can create the client’s project page from a template, orders or stock can stay in step with a sheet, and emails with their attachments can arrive as pages in the right database.
Once the business depends on that flow, it needs someone responsible for keeping it running. Notion can also replace several smaller tools, so a count of what’s already in the stack is a useful start, and if agents are next, the data underneath them matters more than the agent.