Where does Notion fit into your company’s tool ecosystem?

Notion is great for async communication. But it can also be the connective layer between all your tools, using embeds and link previews to unite teams around central information.

Guide
In this guide
  • Notion and Slack — two ways to communicate
  • How tools come together in Notion
  • Embed complementary tools
  • Integrate collaborative tools
  • Notion complements and enhances other tools
  • Consolidation opportunities with Notion

Notion serves as the connective tissue between people and projects — synthesizing all content and context into a single, reliable source of truth.

But what happens when you need a different tool for the job? Notion complements and enhances it.

We recognize that modern organizations rely on a complex ecosystem of tools (88 different tools on average!) that overlap in some way, shape, or form with Notion. These tools help teams communicate, document, and track work. Ultimately, these tools help us all work better together — one of Notion’s strengths.

Notion enhances, rather than replaces, your tool ecosystem. As long as you set clear internal guidelines for where work should happen and leave room for overlap, Notion can help you:

  • Stay focused when toggling between many different tools.

  • Reduce context switching by integrating everything you need in one place.

Notion and Slack — two ways to communicate

Since Slack and Notion serve two different channels of communication — Notion for asynchronous collaboration and Slack for real-time discussions — both tools augment one other.

Notion — async collaboration

  • Single source of truth that is easy to reference and revisit.

  • Document ideas, action items, and plans.

  • Long-form writing that cultivates clear thinking and well thought-out ideas.

Slack — real-time discussion

  • Instant accessibility to the broader team.

  • Ask questions, discuss, and make decisions in real-time.

  • Quicker, stream-of-consciousness writing for spontaneous ideation.

These different communication channels complement each other and build synergy

Swirling conversations about work can be difficult to keep track of, especially when that information lives in different tools.

Using link previews, you can paste a Slack message right into a Notion page — so you have direct access to information (minus the noise) while still in focus mode. For example, when your content team is writing a new blog post, they can gain access to relevant Slack messages about that post without being distracted by the other messages flying around your channels.

How tools come together in Notion

While Notion and Slack are two different tools that complement each other, you can also bring those tools inside Notion for better collaboration. Instead of needing to jump between tools and waste time context-switching, here’s how you can bring information into Notion.

Embed complementary tools

Easily embed tools that help enrich Notion pages, so you can tell a complete story. You can embed virtually any online content within Notion pages — from video and audio players to Figma and Invision mockups, to entire Google documents and spreadsheets. This includes streaming multimedia, PDFs, forms, and interactive maps.

Designers can embed Figma files into Notion for the marketing team’s feedback. HR can embed Google Maps into a new hire’s welcome page in Notion. Product teams can even embed Typeforms to survey users in Notion. This centralizes information and reduces the need to constantly switch tools and tabs when collaborating cross-functionally.

Integrate collaborative tools

Using our API, link previews help turn Notion into the central organizing hub of your tool ecosystem. They embed real-time, synced visualizations of external tools — without having to leave Notion.

All you have to do is paste a link from Jira, Slack, Asana, Trello, or GitHub, and a preview is generated with real-time information fetched directly from the link. Link previews gather information from other tools so you can collaborate with cross-functional teams and make quick decisions inside one Notion workspace. This means you can access Jira, GitHub, and Slack from Notion to gain back time lost context switching.

For example, we know that many engineering teams use tools like Jira and Asana to manage their product roadmap, track bugs, see their backlog, create reports, and more.

But other teams outside engineering often don’t have insight into these statuses. Instead, they’re left to send Slack messages or emails, asking engineers if the work is complete. If you’re using a page in Notion to track the status of bug fixes and product updates for a project, ask your engineering team to post Jira link previews inside the page so other teams know exactly when issues are fixed.

This makes information more accessible to all, helping align teams without meetings, pings, or rooting around.

This allows teams to:

  • Build faster knowing the status of product features — when all information lives in Notion, that saves your team time from searching for information or statuses (so they can spend time building).

  • Build a granular project management system — unite all aspects of your project into a single project management system, so you’re not chasing around disparate pieces of valuable information.

  • Align with external collaborators — link previews gives external collaborators all the information they need to execute. Everyone is aligned on statuses and action items without needing to manage more access controls.

Notion complements and enhances other tools

Understanding how Notion fits into your toolstack helps you get the most out of it.

Notion is great for async communication (and has been referred to as “the other half of Slack”) because of how you can organize and easily access information in documents. But Notion also pulls together all your other tools too — and when information lives in one place, it saves your team time searching for what they need to execute.

Consolidation opportunities with Notion

If you use tools for any of the following use-cases, you can consider consolidating them in Notion for a more connected workspace experience.

  • Docs

    • Meeting Notes

    • Documentation

    • Project Plans

    • Pitches and Proposals

    • Writing and Brainstorming

  • Wiki

    • Knowledge Base

    • Team Homepage

    • Company Intranet

    • Internal Comms / Updates

  • Projects

    • Issue tracking

    • Roadmaps & Calendars

    • General project management

    • Planning + Goals

  • Calendar

    • Scheduling

    • Time Management

    • Meetings

  • Other specialized tools supported by Notion

    • OKR Planning

    • Content Management

    • Meetings & transcriptions

    • CRM

    • New Hire Onboarding / LMS

    • Brand Guidelines, Systems, Assets

    • Org charts & Employee directory

    • Translations AI

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