Notion Finally Adds an Offline Feature

Notion quietly added an offline feature to its flagship note-taking app, but it’s extremely limited and requires manual oversight.

“With Notion’s offline functionality, your most important pages stay accessible and editable—no internet required,” the Notion Help Center explains. “Whether you’re flying, commuting through dead zones, or working from a café with spotty Wi‑Fi, your projects are always within reach, keeping you productive wherever you are.”

Well. Sort of.

In its initial implementation, Notion’s offline functionality is pretty basic. You can mark any individual page to be available offline, but there’s no way to automate this process across collections of notes or your entire Notion. If you’re familiar with Notion, you know that pages can be standalone units, but also folder-like containers for other pages; if you mark one of these container pages to be available offline, only that page is changed, not all the sub-pages it contains.

The good news? This feature is available to everyone, even free users, and it works across the desktop and mobile (but not web) Notion apps. If you do pay for Notion, it will also automatically download recent and favorited pages for you. And you can create new pages while you’re offline, though certain features, like embeds, forms, and buttons require a live connection and aren’t available offline.

Notion says this is just a first step for offline mode and that it will keep improving the feature. And it separately admitted that offline mode has been its number one customer request for over five years, which isn’t surprising. Despite all this, Notion is one of the best apps I use, and this will only make it better, albeit just a little bit better.