Craft and Notion get compared constantly on Reddit forums, and the discussion always lands in the same place: Craft wins on native app polish, Notion wins on database power. What most of those threads miss is that Craft just restructured its entire pricing model, dropping per-seat business pricing in favor of something that looks a lot more like a consumer app bundle. That change matters more than another round of "which one is prettier."
Two Different Products Wearing the Same Label
Craft is a document editor built Apple-first: block-based pages, real-time collaboration, backlinks, and daily notes, all wrapped in an interface that's noticeably faster and better designed than Notion on Mac and iOS specifically. It supports markdown input and exports to Markdown, PDF, and DOCX. What it doesn't do is databases, at least not in any form comparable to what Notion offers, there's no relational data, no rollups, no formulas, and no way to build even a simple linked task list the way Notion's database views handle natively.
Notion is a database-first workspace that happens to also do documents well. Linked views, rollups, formulas, and relations let you build a lightweight CRM, content calendar, or hiring pipeline without leaving the tool, and the public API (launched 2021) is solid enough that real integrations get built on it. The tradeoff is performance: workspaces past 500 pages slow down noticeably, and global search is measurably worse than dedicated note tools.
Craft's Pricing Just Changed, and It's a Real Story
This is the part worth reading past the usual comparison points. Craft's live pricing page no longer shows the per-seat "Pro" and "Business" tiers that used to define it. The current structure: Starter (free), Plus at $8/month billed monthly or $6.40/month billed annually for one full-featured account, Family at $15/month ($12 billed annually) as a fixed-price bundle covering 2 to 6 Plus accounts, and Team at a flat $50/month for up to 10 Plus accounts. Team isn't priced per seat at all, it's a flat fee, which works out to $5/account/month at full capacity, cheaper than either Plus or Family scale up to individually.
More telling than the numbers: I checked the current pricing page for any mention of SSO, SAML, or an admin console, features Craft's Business tier used to advertise, and found none. Craft has moved away from selling itself as an IT-managed enterprise tool and toward a consumer and small-team bundle model, closer in spirit to how Apple or Google price a Family plan than how a B2B SaaS company prices seats. If your evaluation criteria include centralized admin control or SSO enforcement, Craft currently doesn't have an answer, where it used to at least claim one.
Notion's Pricing Hasn't Moved
Notion's pricing confirms Plus at $10/user/month and Business at $20/user/month, unchanged and matching what's been true for a while. Business remains the "Recommended" tier on Notion's own pricing page, and it's the one that adds SAML SSO, 90-day page history, and private teamspaces, exactly the enterprise controls Craft just dropped from its own lineup. Enterprise is custom-quoted and adds SCIM provisioning and audit logs on top.
Worth sitting with for a second: two products that get compared constantly are now priced on completely different axes. Notion charges per user, scaling linearly with headcount the way almost every B2B SaaS tool does. Craft charges per bundle, flat regardless of exactly how many of the 2 to 6 (Family) or up to 10 (Team) seats get filled. A 4-person team on Craft Family pays the same $12-15/month whether it uses 2 seats or all 6, while a 4-person team on Notion Plus pays $40/month flat, scaling up precisely with headcount. Below the bundle's seat ceiling, Craft is almost always cheaper. Cross that ceiling and there's no smooth upgrade path, just a jump to the next bundle tier.
The API and Integration Gap
Notion's public API has been live since 2021 and it shows: real third-party integrations exist for automation tools, custom dashboards, and workflow builders, because developers have had years to build against a stable interface. Craft has no equivalent public API, which is consistent with its consumer-first repositioning, but it's a real limitation for any team that wanted to pull Craft documents into other systems. If workflow automation matters to how your team actually uses a notes tool day to day, Notion is the only one of the two with an answer.
Security Posture, Worth Checking Given the Pricing Shift
Craft's security page still lists end-to-end encryption options and GDPR compliance as an EU-based company storing data on AWS Frankfurt by default, none of that changed with the pricing restructure. What did change is who that security posture is aimed at: without an admin console or SSO, there's no way for an IT team to centrally enforce Craft's security settings across a group of users, each account manages its own settings independently. For a family or a small team that trusts each other, that's a non-issue. For any organization that needs centralized policy enforcement, it's a real gap that wasn't there when Craft still sold a Business tier.
Where Each One Actually Wins
Craft wins for individuals and small teams fully on Apple hardware who want the fastest, best-looking place to write and organize notes. The free Starter tier is genuinely one of the better free note-taking offers available, unlimited documents with real backlinks and markdown export. If your whole household or small team is on Mac and iPhone, the new Family tier at $12-15/month for up to 6 accounts is a legitimately good deal, cheaper per person than almost anything comparable.
Notion wins the moment structured data enters the picture, or the moment anyone on the team is on Windows or Android. Craft has no Android app at all, a hard stop for any mixed-device team regardless of how good the Apple experience is, and the Windows app, while functional, still trails the Mac and iOS versions noticeably in speed and polish. Notion's cross-platform consistency isn't exciting, but it's reliable everywhere, which is worth more than native polish once a team spans more than one operating system.
The Recommendation
If your team is Apple-only, values design and speed over structured data, and doesn't need SSO or admin controls, Craft is the better daily-writing tool and its new pricing (particularly Family and Team) is worth a serious look before defaulting to Notion out of habit. If you need databases, cross-platform consistency, or actual enterprise controls like SSO and audit logs, Notion remains the right choice and Craft's recent move away from those features only widens that gap. I wouldn't recommend Craft to any team with a single Windows or Android user on it, that's still the dealbreaker it's always been, pricing restructure or not, and no amount of Family-plan savings changes the fact that an Android user on the team simply can't open the app at all.
For a broader look at note-taking alternatives beyond just these two, the Notion alternatives roundup covers more of the field, and the Notion vs Obsidian refresh is worth reading if local-first storage and speed matter more to you than Notion's database features or Craft's Apple-native design.