Notion is getting slower, and nobody at Notion wants to say it

I want to say, up top, that I like Notion.

I liked it in 2019, when it felt like someone had finally made Google Docs that didn’t think you were a lawyer. I liked it in 2021, when the databases made sense and the templates were fun. I like it now, in 2026, even though I’ve watched it slow down for two years and nobody at the company will admit that’s what’s happening.

Every week, a coworker messages me to ask if Notion is down. It isn’t. It’s just a 2MB page with three embedded databases and a Loom embed and a little AI widget at the top and forty-seven comments, and it takes six seconds to load.

We have agreed, collectively, to not talk about this.

The thing Notion was

In 2019, Notion was a very fast, slightly weird, extremely flexible document. You typed /database and a table appeared. You dragged a file in and it embedded. You made a template and shared it with your team and the whole thing felt — this was the phrase at the time — magical.

It was magical because it had one job, and it did it well. You wrote things down, and the things knew how to relate to each other.

The central insight of Notion was that documents could also be databases. Not in a dry, Microsoft Access way, but in a way that felt like text. The design team’s meeting notes could contain a roadmap, which was also a Kanban board, which was also a timeline, which was also the same data, three different ways. That was, and still is, a great idea.

The thing Notion is becoming

Notion, in 2026, is the following things, all at once, in one window:

A document editor
A relational database
A wiki
A kanban board
A Gantt chart
An email client (in beta)
A calendar app
A forms tool
An AI chat bot
An AI writing assistant
An AI question-answerer
A meeting transcriber
A CRM
An OKR tracker
A habit tracker
An issue tracker
A homepage for your company

I’m not making any of these up. They’re all real features Notion has shipped in the last eighteen months. Most of them are fine. Many of them are very good. A few are great.

They are also, collectively, why it takes six seconds to open a page.

What happens when everything is a “surface”

Internally, Notion calls each of these a surface. Calendar is a surface. Mail is a surface. AI is a surface. Databases are a surface.

This is a smart way to talk about building software, because it lets you ship features fast. Each surface team can work semi-independently. Each surface gets its own onboarding, its own keyboard shortcuts, its own notifications.

It’s a miserable way to use software, because every surface adds a little tax. A little latency. A little memory. A little cognitive overhead when you open a page and have to figure out which surface you’re currently on.

Open any modern Notion page and count the interactive things on it. Count the bubbles, the sidebars, the slash-menu options, the AI buttons, the embedded calendars, the “try our new X” banners. Count them.

In 2019, there were about six. In 2026, I counted thirty-one on a page I use every day.

This is the Notion that someone, somewhere inside the company, approved. Each addition was reasonable. Each roadmap slide made sense. The cumulative effect is an app that has, against the wishes of its makers, become a dashboard for an application you didn’t install.

The performance problem they don’t mention

Here’s a boring technical fact: most of Notion’s slowness isn’t Notion’s fault. It’s the web’s fault.

The browser is an amazing environment for delivering software, but it is a terrible environment for the kind of software Notion is now. Every surface is a React app. Every React app has to initialize. Every database has to hydrate. Every block has to render. And if you have a page with eight databases and a calendar and an AI widget and a bunch of comments — a page Notion actively encourages you to build — you are asking a browser to do more work than any browser should be asked to do.

The company knows this. They have smart performance engineers. They have shipped improvements. The page I mentioned earlier was faster than it was a year ago. But the surface area keeps growing, and every surface is a new thing for the browser to deal with, and the math is the math.

I have a theory that the real reason Notion is building a desktop app, and has a team porting core parts to Rust, is that they have run out of things to optimize in the browser. I don’t know that for a fact. I am guessing.

What Notion should do

Two things. Both of them require the kind of courage that is hard for a company this large.

One: stop adding surfaces.

I know. I know. The entire theory of the company, the entire story you tell investors, the entire reason Notion is worth what it’s worth is that every productivity surface will be a Notion surface. Calendar. Email. CRM. Docs. It is a very expensive pivot to stop that story mid-sentence.

But. The reason people pay for Notion isn’t that they want an email client. It’s that they want a document that doubles as a database. You are richer, for now, than any company that just sold docs-that-are-databases. You have earned the right to say no.

Two: make the core ten times faster.

Not two times. Not twenty percent. Ten. Go back to the core — the document, the database, the slash menu, the templates — and treat it as if Notion were a new company. Ignore AI. Ignore calendar. Ignore the OKRs.

There is a version of Notion, I think, that starts instantly, renders any page in 100ms, and doesn’t show a spinner ever. It exists, somewhere in the design of the product. The current version is not that version.

What I’m actually doing

I still use Notion. My team uses it. The docs are there. The databases are there. The muscle memory is there.

But I notice, with a little guilt, that when I want to take a note for myself, I open something else. Something plain. Something that opens instantly and doesn’t ask me about AI. Something that feels, today, the way Notion felt in 2019.

I wish that wasn’t the case. I wish Notion were still the answer to that impulse. I think, if the company listens to its product rather than its investor deck, it can be again.

But for now, I have six tabs open. One of them is spinning. I can guess which one.

I’ve asked Notion if anyone on the performance team wants to come on the channel and talk through what they’re working on. If you’re a Notion person reading this and you’re game, drop us a line.

“Notion isn't getting slower because it's doing more. It's getting slower because nobody's allowed to say 'stop.'”