Notion Exploded in Popularity Last Year

Ariel Ariel
2/3/23

This is a single insight from This Week in Apps - Collaboration and Competition. Check out the full article for more insights.


Have you switched to Notion? I have.

When it comes to team collaboration, there are a whole bunch of options, but I'd only call a handful "true" competitors. Google Docs is of course the leader of the group.

Over the last few years, Notion joined the group and is quickly growing. Its fairly unbounded design makes it useful for lots of different purposes, from keeping video scripts organized to running an entire company.

Notion app downloads

Notion started 2020 with fewer downloads than one of the first apps to go into the App Store, back when real-time collaboration wasn't a real thing. That app is Evernote, and I selected it partially for the nostalgia but also because it was, in my opinion, what kicked off the market Notion is now trying to take over.

And if they had paid attention to the trends, Evernote could have been the collaboration hub...

But this insight is about Notion, which saw massive growth in 2022.

When I say massive I mean monthly downloads peaked at 1.7M in August! That was, by far, Notion's best month of downloads. While downloads returned to "normal" shortly after, the app still saw its best "normal" downloads continue to rise.

Notion ended 2022 with 11.6M new downloads, according to our estimates. That's 30% higher than the downloads in 2021 and a whopping 157% higher than downloads in 2020.

As an early user, I can say the downloads are well-deserved. When I first tried Notion, back when v1 was in beta a whole bunch of years ago, it wasn't a great product and felt like it was built specifically for developers and not for the mainstream. That's no longer the case. At all.

As an active user now, I hope this growth will lead to even more evolution.

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All figures included in this report are estimated. Unless specified otherwise, estimated revenue is always net, meaning it's the amount the developer earned after Apple and Google took their fee.

Tagged: #collaboration

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