Zuuna vs Notion: when notes turn into real projects

Straight up, so nobody wastes their time: Zuuna is not a Notion clone. If you are looking for a wiki, nested pages, databases with relations and formulas — stay with Notion; nobody does that better. This comparison gets interesting for teams whose projects started in Notion databases and have now outgrown them: no real sprint, no velocity, no commit on the card — and the board is, strictly speaking, a filtered database view. That is the point Zuuna is built for.

Honest up front: Zuuna is not a Notion replacement

Notion is a tool for knowledge: notes, wikis, documentation, an enormous template ecosystem and a flexibility that can rebuild almost anything. Zuuna is a tool for work in motion: boards, cards, sprints, time tracking, git. Many teams do well with both — the knowledge stays in Notion, the projects move. So the question this comparison answers is not “which tool is better” but: where does a database stop being a project tool?

Where Notion databases fail as a project tool

The kanban board in Notion is a view onto a database. That is elegant — the same data as a table, timeline or calendar — but it also means: everything that makes a project tool, you build yourself. And some of it cannot be built at all:

• Sprints and burndown exist only as DIY constructions from databases, formulas and charts — no built-in sprint planning, no automatic burndown, no velocity as a first-class number.
• No native time tracking — if you need hours on tasks, you bolt on a third tool (as of June 2026).
• Dependencies only of the finish-to-start type — no other types, no critical path, no workload management (ProjectManager.com, December 2024).
• No commit on the card — Notion does not know which branch, which pull request, which release belongs to a task. In Zuuna that is exactly the core of the git integration.

ProjectManager.com sums it up in its review: for complex project execution, Notion is “a data visualization tool rather than project management software”.

Where your data lives

For many European teams this is the real question behind “Notion alternative”. The facts, stated fairly: Notion does offer EU data residency — but only on the Enterprise plan. And it governs where data is stored at rest; it does not eliminate access by subprocessors outside the EEA (as of 2026-07-30, Notion's own help pages). On Free, Plus and Business, your data does not sit in the EU by default.

Zuuna is hosted in Germany on every plan — the Free plan included. A DPA is there to self-sign, enforced workspace-wide two-factor authentication is on every plan too, and any board exports to Excel or CSV at any time. That is not legal advice — but it is a much shorter checklist for your data protection officer.

Feature comparison

Criterion	Zuuna	Notion
Hosting location	Germany — on every plan	Global; default storage not in the EU
EU data residency	Every plan, Free included	Enterprise only (governs storage at rest)
DPA	Yes, self-sign	DPA available
Kanban board as its own object	Yes	No — a view onto a database
Sprints and backlog	Yes (Developer)	DIY via templates and databases
Story points and velocity	Yes (Developer)	Manual via formulas and charts
Planning poker	Yes (Developer)	No
Git commits and PRs on the card	Yes (Developer)	No
Releases and code graph	Yes (Developer)	No
Time tracking	Yes (Business Pro)	Not native
Documents / wiki	Documents from Business Pro; no wiki	Core strength
Databases, relations, formulas	No	Yes
Automations	From Private Plus (200 runs/month)	Database automations
API and webhooks	Yes (Developer)	Public API
SSO / SCIM	Business Pro	Higher tiers
Starting price (paid)	€4 incl. VAT	$10 (annual; as of 2026-08-03)

Documents in Zuuna — what exists and what does not

So no wrong impression forms here: Zuuna has documents, but they are not a Notion. What exists (from Business Pro): multi-page rich-text documents right on a board or standalone in the sidebar, Word import and export — HTML, Markdown and plain text import too —, images by copy-paste, and public share links. What does not exist: databases, relations, formulas, rollups — and no live co-editing; two people writing in the same document at once overwrite each other. Specs and meeting notes next to the board: yes. A company wiki: no.

Pricing

All Zuuna prices per seat per month, incl. VAT: Free €0 (2 members, 100 cards), Private Plus €4, Business Standard €8, Business Pro €16 (time tracking, reports, documents, SSO), Developer €24 (sprints, git, API, webhooks). Details on the pricing page.

Notion (as of 2026-08-03): Free $0, Plus $10, Business $20 per member per month billed annually — $12 and $24 monthly —, Enterprise on request. The official pricing page showed us €9.50 and €19.50 when fetched. Worth factoring in: full Notion AI (Agent, AI Meeting Notes) starts at Business; Free and Plus get only a limited trial. And the EU data residency from above only comes with Enterprise.

Where Notion wins

• Wiki and knowledge base — nested pages, everything linkable, everything searchable. That is Notion's core, and Zuuna does not even try to compete there.
• Databases with relations, rollups and formulas — the same data as board, table, timeline or calendar, connected across database boundaries. Zuuna simply does not have this.
• Templates and community — a huge ecosystem of templates for almost any use case. Zuuna is nowhere near it.
• AI in the seat price — the Business plan ($20) includes full Notion AI at no surcharge, where other vendors charge an AI add-on (as of June 2026).
• The Free plan — for a single person, Notion is astonishingly complete for free.

If your team mostly documents and only manages tasks on the side: stay with Notion. Switching pays off only once the project work outgrows the tool.

Moving from Notion

The route runs through CSV: Notion exports each database as a CSV file, and Zuuna turns it into a board via the spreadsheet import — pick the header row, map columns to title, status and custom fields, check the preview, done (up to 15 MB, 50 columns, 10,000 rows). Honest limits: relations between databases do not come along, and neither does the page content behind the database rows. Exported Notion pages can, however, be imported into Zuuna documents as HTML or Markdown files (Business Pro).

Next steps

Test the difference yourself: 14 days free, no credit card.

• GDPR-compliant project management — the detailed look at hosting, DPA and data-subject rights.
• Zuuna vs Trello — the comparison with the board classic.
• Zuuna vs Jira — when the full agile toolkit is the question.

Where the data sits, who processes it and what we explicitly do not claim is set out on the security and privacy page — subprocessor table included.