Setting up your first shared doc workspace
If you’re coming from Google Docs and are trying to migrate a small (but slightly chaotic) team to a more dedicated tool for collaboration, you’ve probably already opened like eleven tabs comparing Craft vs Notion. And honestly, I get it. Both *look* sleek. Both *say* they’re built for teams. But only once you try setting up permissions, shared folders, and real-time feedback spaces do you start realizing where one tool quietly saves the day — and where the other starts randomly squawking like a confused goose.
So here’s how it went when I tried onboarding my 6-person content team to both, twice.
In Craft, setting up a shared workspace is fast — you essentially click “New Space,” add members by email, and start organizing pages. Tags work like folders, but you still get folders too, which can be both refreshing or disturbingly confusing depending on whether you notice the nesting behavior. For some reason our intern managed to drag a folder into a block and no one could find it again until we viewed the document map 😅
With Notion, you create a Workspace and invite team members. Default roles are straightforward (Admin, Member, Guest), but the minute you start nesting databases, people get visibility into things you thought weren’t shared yet — because “Public within Workspace” doesn’t mean what you think it means. I literally had a CRM table in a sidebar view that everyone saw before I was ready. Whoops.
Also big heads-up: Notion doesn’t alert you when you accidentally share something. In Craft, you get prompted with a very loud modal almost every time you change share settings which… okay, it’s kind of annoying, but also saved me from going Full Public a couple times 😬
Leaving comments without breaking the layout
I don’t know who let unchecked comments become such a passive-aggressive battlefield in online docs, but I’ve seen Notion threads explode into mini novels with no one resolving anything. The worst part? Comments in Notion float off to the side of blocks but don’t get nested with content by default, so if someone deletes the paragraph, a comment can just… float. Ghost style.
Craft, on the other hand, pins comments in the actual text like Google Docs — click to highlight, comment pops out, and when you resolve it, it disappears neatly. No leftover clutter. I tested this with our weekly podcast notes and the editor accidentally resolved everyone’s comments at once — in Notion this got messy real quick because people had no idea what changed. In Craft, at least the system links resolved comments to the timestamped original message.
Also: replying in Craft isn’t threaded, which annoyed three editors at first until we realized it forced us to keep discussions tighter per block. Notion lets replies turn into mini debate ladders 😐
Who accidentally overwritten what and when
Notion technically has version history, but unless you’re on a Team or Enterprise plan, it’s limited and only shows snapshots — not always the granular who-did-what that you’d expect. One time our sales guy copy pasted a pricing page from an old roadmap doc and broke the formatting layout in a client-facing doc… and we only realized two days later. No clue who did it until I pulled up Slack screenshots lol.
Craft, surprisingly robust here — every document has a clear history tab, even without upgrading. Edits are timestamped with user names and you can roll back blocks individually. That saved me from a bunch of middle-of-the-night chaos after someone merged two lists that shouldn’t have been merged (IYKYK, the disappearing bullet point bug is real).
I will say this though: restoring previous versions in Craft doesn’t work well with linked pages. So if you have multiple references to another doc as a block embed, rolling back one version doesn’t always restore the original view in *other* locations. Took me a while to realize those weren’t true duplicates.
Using templates as real collaborative tools
Notion’s template game is bananas. There are literally hundreds of community-built things you can duplicate — everything from product microsites to daily mood boards. But here’s the catch I didn’t think about until my team tried to spin up a social content calendar — if the person creating the template didn’t think about collaborative use, you’re basically stuck retrofitting it with permissions, comments, and custom views.
We copied a Notion template with a tasks database and a kanban view, but when we added 5 collaborators, suddenly tags broke, and board columns didn’t update in real-time. Database filters also got weirdly personal — meaning people saw different statuses because filters were set to “Me” by default. Felt like everyone was in the same room but looking at different whiteboards. 😵💫
Craft, in contrast, doesn’t offer as many prebuilt templates, but building your own from scratch feels more like building a series of docs rather than a pseudo-app. So we made a 6-page editorial tracker with inline comments and checkboxes per milestone. Not glamorous, but weirdly effective. Since each page is independent (but linkable), it’s less likely someone will break a dashboard view by accident.
Bonus tip: Don’t forget to lock pages in Craft once your template is finalized. Otherwise people can — and will — highlight the placeholder text and say, “Oops, I thought this was a working doc.” 😂
Integrating with notifications that actually reach people
Notion kind of ghosted us here. I mean yes, there’s Slack integration, but unless you reauthenticate it every few months or someone manually toggles notification rules, people miss stuff. One time I tagged three teammates in a Notion doc comment, and none of them got notified. We found out *a week later* they had notifications off by default because they hadn’t clicked into Notion recently. Yep.
With Craft, notifications get sent via email *and* push if you have the app installed, no guessing. Also, when someone tags you in a comment, it shows a big red bubble at the top of the app — nothing subtle about it. It’s honestly aggressive, but effective.
The underrated bit? Craft sends unread activity digests. If you’ve missed a few pings, it summarizes them daily without requiring a login. In Notion, if I don’t open the doc, I basically forget anything happened. It’s a weird tension between helpful minimalism and too much trust in context.
Real time editing without fighting the cursor
Editing the same block in Notion at the same time as someone else can trigger a full-on cursor war. There’s this tiny indicator that someone is viewing, but it doesn’t lock sections. So yeah — two people typed over each other during a launch plan and we lost three bullet points without even realizing. Notion won’t warn you if simultaneous edits clash.
Craft actually handles this better, surprisingly. It locks the block you’re editing, so if someone tries to type in the same place, they’ll see a message that says “User is editing this block.” No overwrite drama.
But here’s the tradeoff: this block-locking means you can’t do chaotic live brainstorming in one paragraph. That… might be a dealbreaker for some. Our design team hated it at first because they loved the chaos. But when it came to writing signed-off copy, the lock kept things clean.
Designing collaborative pages that are readable later
Both platforms let you add callouts, headings, media, tables, embeds — but only Craft keeps the aesthetic clean by default. I know that sounds like a weird thing to say, but honestly, Notion pages turn into Franken-docs real fast.
In Notion, it’s almost too easy to drop in five databases, six embeds, a toggle list, two podcast players, and a quote block in one page. Sometimes that makes sense. But during a client review session, they were visibly overwhelmed scrolling through our doc. More than once I heard, “Wait where does this start?” 😬
Craft forces some simplicity. It doesn’t support giant embedded databases, and its design templates (like meeting page, agenda, notes) all encourage sequential reading. If you want to make a dashboard-style page, Notion clearly wins. But if you want a doc to look like something real people will read without needing a coffee and a Xanax, Craft is better.
Exporting and handing off docs without weird artifacts
This one snuck up on me. Notion’s default export formatting is… odd. Tables don’t translate cleanly into Word or PDF, and embedded content like Figma frames or Loom videos don’t carry over when you download. Also for some reason, bullet points get extra line breaks depending on your Notion spacing settings.
Craft nails export. Pages become real PDF files with preserved formatting. We sent a partnership proposal using Craft and the recipient printed it (!) and said it looked like a designed booklet. That’s not something I cared about until I saw half our Notion exports breaking image formatting.
If your team hands content to clients, vendors, or external reviewers — Craft’s better for final packaging. If it’s all internal? Notion’s chaos flexibility wins.
The hidden setting in Craft that made sharing sane
Here’s the thing I missed the first two weeks of using Craft with the team: the default share setting includes Edit access, but from the page itself, it just looks like “Shared.” I kept getting surprised by people moving things around until I opened *space settings > Manage Members* and saw their role was Editor by default. 😑
The fix? Set a role called “Comment Only” and assign that instead — THEN share the page. That took care of half the movement chaos. Now if someone needs edit rights, they have to ask.
It’s weirdly hidden, definitely not intuitive, but it solved like seven micro-annoyances in a row. Made me actually enjoy commenting again 😛