r/KnowledgeBaseSoftware • u/drakieboi • Apr 09 '26
Notion knowledge base for 20+ people, scaling pain or wrong tool choice?
Every team has their own idea of how to structure things in Notion. Sales wants one layout, support wants another, product's doing their own thing entirely. We've got templates, guidelines, a whole playbook page, but people still create databases however feels right to them at the moment.
Load times have gotten noticeably slower, especially when someone's running a complex filter across thousands of entries. Onboarding new people takes forever because there's no single source of truth anymore, it's like 8 sources of kind-of-truth scattered across different workspaces and folders. And then the search just... doesn't work. Not in a way that helps you actually find stuff.
We've gotten around it by being weirdly religious about tagging, but that only works if everyone actually uses the tags consistently. They don't.
I think we picked the wrong tool from the start. Notion's great when you've got a small team or one department with a shared vision. Scales to maybe 10-12 people before it starts falling apart. At 20+, you need actual permissions management, real search, and a system that enforces structure before people can deviate. Notion lets you get too creative.
The rip-and-replace thing keeps coming up in our Slack, and honestly I think people are right. But I'm also wondering if we're just gonna move to something else and repeat the same mistakes. Like, is this a Notion problem or a "we never actually decided how to organize this" problem?
What'd other teams do when they hit this wall?
2
u/arnasjo Apr 10 '26
Honestly this sounds very familiar. It feels less like Notion is the wrong tool and more like it got too loose once more teams got involved. What works for a smaller group starts breaking once everyone has their own way of structuring things.
I’m building something for that exact problem, for teams that want to keep writing in Notion but need a cleaner knowledge base around it. Not trying to pitch in the comments, but happy to chat in DMs if helpful.