Here's a scene that plays out in thousands of teams every day: someone posts a project update in Slack. It sparks a fifteen-message thread. Halfway through, someone says "wait, is this captured in the Notion doc?" Nobody's sure. Someone copies the key points into Notion. A week later, the Notion page is outdated and nobody remembers which Slack thread had the actual decision.
If this sounds familiar, you're not alone. The Slack-and-Notion combo has become the default stack for modern teams, and for good reason. Both are excellent at what they do. But they were never designed to work together, and the seams show up in ways that quietly eat your team's time.
What Slack actually does well
Slack deserves its reputation. It changed how teams communicate, and a lot of what it does, it does better than anyone.
The real-time messaging is fast and fluid. Quick questions get quick answers. Channels keep things roughly organized, and threads prevent side conversations from hijacking the main flow. Huddles -- Slack's lightweight voice calls -- are a standout. Need to talk something through without the ceremony of scheduling a meeting? Just start a huddle. Screen sharing, audio, video clips, all without leaving the app.
Then there's the integration ecosystem. GitHub pushes, Jira ticket updates, deploy alerts, calendar reminders -- your other tools pipe their notifications into Slack, so it becomes the place where you hear about things happening across your stack. And when you need to dig up something someone said three weeks ago, search usually gets you there.
Where Slack falls short is anything that needs to last. Messages scroll away. Information gets buried in channels you forgot existed. Pinned messages are a band-aid. Slack is a river, not a lake -- great for flow, terrible for storage.
What Notion actually does well
Notion solved a different problem and solved it well.
The block-based editor is powerful enough for complex page layouts but stays approachable for people who aren't developers. A Notion page can be meeting notes, a product spec, a knowledge base, or a personal dashboard. The same tool, different shapes.
Notion's databases are where it really pulls ahead. Tables, boards, timelines, calendars, galleries -- all different views of the same data. You can track projects, manage a content calendar, run a lightweight CRM, and maintain an internal wiki, all without leaving Notion. And the template system means you can standardize things like sprint planning or new hire onboarding without being overly rigid about it.
Unlike Google Docs scattered across shared drives nobody can navigate, Notion puts your team's knowledge in one structured workspace. New hires can browse the wiki. PMs can find the spec. Engineers can check the decision log. It's a genuine single source of truth, which is rare.
Where Notion falls short is real-time communication. It added comments and something it calls "discussions," but they feel bolted on. Nobody uses Notion to have a conversation. You can mention someone in a comment, but by the time they see it, the moment has usually passed.
The gap between them
So most teams use both. Slack for talking, Notion for documenting. Sounds clean. In practice, it's messier than you'd expect.
Decisions happen in Slack but are supposed to live in Notion. Someone has to manually copy decisions from chat threads into documents. This either happens inconsistently (so the docs are unreliable) or doesn't happen at all (so the docs are fiction). We've all seen that Notion page from six months ago that everyone references but nobody has updated since the third week of the project.
Tasks fall through the cracks too. "Can you handle this?" gets said in Slack. If nobody turns that into an actual task somewhere, it's just a message that scrolls off-screen. Notion has databases you can use for tracking work, but they're disconnected from where the conversation happened.
And context is always somewhere else. Reading a Notion doc and want to understand the discussion that led to a particular decision? Go dig through Slack. Reading a Slack thread and need the formal spec? Go find it in Notion. You're constantly switching tabs, searching two different tools, and mentally reconstructing context that should already be connected.
This is especially painful for new team members. They can read the Notion wiki, but the real context -- the why behind decisions, the debates, the tribal knowledge -- lives in Slack channels they weren't part of. Notion gives them the what. Slack had the why, but it's buried under months of messages they'll never scroll through.
Then there's the bill. Slack Pro runs $8.75 per person per month. Notion Plus, which is the tier most teams actually need, is $12 per person per month. For a 20-person team, that's about $415 per month, roughly $5,000 per year, for two tools that don't really talk to each other.
Why most alternatives miss the point
The obvious response is "why not just pick one?" A few tools have tried.
Some project management tools bolted on chat features. They feel like afterthoughts -- clunky, slow, and nobody actually wants to hang out in them. Some chat tools added document features. You get basic notes inside a messaging app, but nothing close to Notion's depth for structured knowledge.
The problem is straightforward: building great real-time communication and building great structured documents are two genuinely hard problems. Most tools solve one and treat the other as a checkbox.
What a combined tool actually looks like
We've been thinking about this since we started building Trilo, and the answer isn't just "Slack + Notion in one app." It's rethinking how conversations, documents, and tasks connect to each other when they share the same underlying system.
In practice, that means a chat thread about your Q2 strategy can evolve into a structured page without copy-pasting. The discussion and the document stay connected, so anyone can trace a decision back to the conversation that produced it. When someone mentions "we should redesign the onboarding flow," that becomes a task without leaving the conversation, and the task links back to the original discussion.
It also means one search instead of three. If your team discussed it, documented it, or tracked it, you find it in one place.
And there's an AI angle here that matters. When an AI assistant only has access to your docs, it can't reference your conversations. When it only sees your chat history, it doesn't know your documented processes. A workspace where everything lives together gives AI the full picture, so it can actually connect the dots between what was discussed, what was decided, and what was documented.
How they compare
Here's a straightforward look at how the three approaches differ across the things teams actually care about:
| Slack | Notion | Trilo | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Real-time chat | Excellent (channels, threads, huddles) | Basic (comments only) | Built-in (channels, threads, DMs) |
| Documents and wikis | None (pinned messages at best) | Excellent (blocks, databases, templates) | Rich pages with real-time collaboration |
| Task management | None (need third-party tools) | Good (database views, boards) | Native boards, lists, timelines |
| AI assistance | Slack AI (search, summaries) | Notion AI (writing, Q&A) | AI coworker with full workspace context |
| Connected context | No (siloed from docs and tasks) | Partial (docs + tasks, no chat) | Yes (chat + docs + tasks in one system) |
| Pricing (per user/mo) | $8.75 (Pro) | $12 (Plus) | $12 (Pro, includes AI) |
| Combined cost | $20.75+/user/mo for both | (same) | $12/user/mo total |
So should you switch?
It depends on where you are, honestly.
If your team is deep in the Slack + Notion ecosystem and things are working well enough, switching has a real cost. You've built workflows, written docs, trained your team. Pretending migration is painless would be dishonest.
But if you're feeling the symptoms -- decisions lost between tools, context scattered across apps, new hires struggling to piece things together, a monthly bill that keeps climbing for tools that overlap but don't integrate -- it's worth asking whether a combined approach would serve you better.
The question isn't really "Slack or Notion?" because the answer for most teams is both. The real question is whether keeping them separate is worth the cost. Not just the money, but the lost context, the manual copy-pasting, and the constant low-grade friction of working across tools that don't know about each other.
Sometimes the best answer is neither. Sometimes it's one tool that was designed to handle all of it together.
Trilo brings chat, docs, tasks, and AI coworkers into one workspace, so your team's context stays connected instead of scattered across apps. Give it a try or see how AI coworkers fit into your workflow.
