Notion Kanban Board: Key Features, Pros, Cons & Alternatives

Choosing the best kanban software for your organization can be challenging due to the variety of options available, which offer different feature sets and price plans.

One basic, simple-to-use kanban software that can help your team get started with the kanban methodology is Notion. That’s why we’ve reviewed Notion’s kanban tool to help you better understand its key features, pros and cons.

Does Notion Have a Kanban Board?

Yes, Notion has two main project management views, a kanban board and a timeline, which can help you manage your team’s work. However, while Notion sells these as project management solutions, they can only help with task management, as they lack many of the features needed to manage your projects.

If you need robust project management software, you can try ProjectManager instead. ProjectManager’s kanban boards offer advanced features such as resource management, cost tracking or schedule management capabilities. On top of that, ProjectManager offers many project management tools that Notion doesn’t have such as Gantt charts, timesheets, real-time dashboards and workload management charts, among others.

ProjectManager offers kanban boards with advanced project management features. Learn more

Let’s take a closer look at a Notion Kanban board to better explain what it can and can’t do.

Key Features and Pros of a Notion Kanban Board

Notion kanban boards are a good alternative for users just getting started with kanban boards, as they’re a basic task management tool that can help you assign tasks to your team members, map your team’s workflow stages, track progress, among other things you’d expect from a kanban software. Here are some of its main features.

Track the percentage of completion of tasks
Allows you to track one type of task dependency, whenever a task can’t start until another is completed
Define a priority level for your team’s tasks and identify subtasks
Tag tasks to categorize and filter them, which makes it easier to organize them in your kanban boards
Visualize your tasks in kanban cards or using the timeline view, which has the same details as the kanban board, but shows tasks as bars on a visual calendar that’s similar to a Gantt chart

Hopefully, this quick overview of the key features of a Notion kanban board will help you better understand what this tool can do for you. Unfortunately, there are also some major disadvantages of using one for managing your team’s work.

Cons of a Notion Kanban Board

The main disadvantage of Notion kanban boards is that they have basic features that only give you an overview of your tasks and projects but lack many of the planning, scheduling and tracking features you need in project management. Here are some of the main drawbacks of using Notion kanban boards.

There are no resource or cost management features. For example, you can assign tasks to your team members, but you can’t track their work hours or labor costs
Notion kanban boards only track one of four task dependencies that are used in project management, which is a big drawback considering that task dependencies are critical for making a realistic project schedule
You won’t be able to compare estimated due dates with the actual completion dates of tasks
Notion doesn’t offer any other project management tools besides kanban boards and timelines, which is a disadvantage when compared with kanban software equipped with tools like Gantt charts, project calendars, dashboards and more
There are no workflow automation or recurrent task settings to help you streamline the task management process and save time

There’s no better way to learn more about Notion kanban boards than by looking at some images. Here’s a Notion kanban board example so you can see the task and project details you can track.

Notion Kanban Board Example

This Notion kanban board screenshot shows the default kanban columns “not started,” “in progress” and “done”on the left which represent the stages of completion of tasks. On the right is a kanban card that shows the details of each task such as a description, priority level, subtasks, due dates and more.

However, as previously mentioned, this kanban board tool has drawbacks compared to more advanced kanban software tools such as ProjectManager. ProjectManager’s kanban boards allow you to track these and many other details about your project tasks.

ProjectManager Has a Better Kanban Board Than Notion

ProjectManager is award-winning project management software that offers advanced planning, scheduling, tracking and reporting features to help you manage projects across industries.

Let’s review some of the reasons why ProjectManager’s kanban board view is better than Notion’s.

Track Project Costs

ProjectManager’s kanban boards do more than track the completion of tasks. You can assign tasks to your team members, log their work hours and track the costs of each task. ProjectManager also offers other cost tracking tools that sync automatically with kanban boards such as real-time dashboards which show the total cost of your projects and timesheets which help you with payroll processing.

One of the key features of ProjectManager’s kanban board is that you can also compare your cost estimates for each task against the actual costs of those tasks, which you can enter as your team completes them. This information is then used on ProjectManager’s views to show whether your project is over or under budget.

Monitor Resource Utilization

ProjectManager’s kanban board syncs with other tools that allow you to monitor your resource availability and utilization throughout your projects. Define the availability of your team members, assign tasks to them, estimate the hours that will take to complete the task and then visualize the workload of each of your team members using online timesheets, dashboards and workload management charts.

Dashboards give you a high-level view of your resource utilization, while workload charts allow you to zoom into the workload of your employees and identify who’s over or underallocated.

Kanban Workflow Automation

With ProjectManager’s kanban board, you can set up workflow automation rules that enable the kanban board to move cards automatically from one column to another or make other changes automatically when certain conditions are met. ProjectManager’s kanban boards allow you to set up a variety of kanban workflow automation rules.

For example, you can create a workflow automation rule that moves kanban cards to a certain column when a tag is added or assigns tasks to a team member when they have a particular priority level. In addition, you can use the recurring task feature to set up the kanban board to automatically create new tasks for those recurring activities that happen every day, week, month or year so you don’t have to. You can also define how many tasks you’d like to be created.

These kanban workflow automation settings help you save time and make it easy for your team members to use kanban boards, even those new to kanban software as they don’t need to take as many actions.

How to Edit a Notion Kanban Board With ProjectManager in 3 Simple Steps

Luckily, a Notion kanban board can be exported as a CSV file and then edited using ProjectManager to plan, schedule and track projects using its kanban view and a variety of tools such as Gantt charts, real-time dashboards, project calendars and much more. Just follow these simple steps.

1. Create a New Project and Select the CSV File You Want to Import

Start a free 30-day trial of ProjectManager, and then click “New” on the bottom left of your screen, and then select “Project.”

A window will open, now choose a title for your project, select who you’d like to share the project with and click “Import File.” You can import Microsoft Project files.

2. Select the Data from the CSV File to Import Into Your Kanban Board

Now follow the steps to choose the data from your Notion kanban board that you’d like to show in ProjectManager’s kanban board or any of its project management tools. To do so, simply match the columns from the Notion kanban board CSV file with their corresponding categories from the menu of task management variables you can track with ProjectManager.

3. Your Notion Kanban Board Is Ready to Edit in ProjectManager

Once you’ve chosen the project data you’d like to display in ProjectManager and the “Success” pop-up appears, it’s time to get all the benefits of using ProjectManager’s kanban boards.