Notion launches native Charts

Notion's introduction of charts has been the surprise of 2024 - the most important release alongside buttons. Thanks to their ease of creation, Notion becomes the most compelling option in the market for maintaining a centralized location to track your company's important metrics.

Whether you use Notion personally or professionally, you likely have lots of data accumulated in the tool. Now, thanks to Notion charts, you can create powerful visualizations.

But before diving in, let's cover the essentials to get you started with this new functionality.

Charts Are Not Available in the Free Plan

First, the not-so-good news: charts are only available in Plus plans or higher, meaning they're not available in the free plan.

For a while now, Notion has been looking to add more value to Plus and higher plans for personal use. While it makes sense for businesses to use a paid plan, it's also true that the free plan is sufficient for 80% of personal use cases.

Until now.

If you can afford it, upgrading to a paid plan is worth it to access charts. Otherwise, you'll only have the ability to create one chart for free. Beyond this free chart, you'll see a call-to-action to upgrade your plan.

Available Chart Types in Notion

For this release, we have 4 types of charts:

• Vertical bar charts
• Horizontal bar charts
• Line charts
• Donut charts

As we'll cover in detail in the Notion course, charts are simply another database view type, just like board or calendar views.

Bar Charts

Perfect for comparing categories - for example, how many tasks we have by Status or by Project. The goal is to enable informed decision-making at a glance.

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In these charts, you can configure:

• X and Y axes
• Sorting (e.g., highest to lowest or manually)
• Grouping (e.g., by assignee, department)
• Filtering, like any Notion database view

For colors, select and multi-select properties will adopt their label colors. You can also choose several colors for monochromatic charts.

Horizontal bar charts are particularly useful when there are too many options on the X-axis. Beyond this, there's little difference in configuration between vertical and horizontal charts.

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Line Charts

Line charts serve mainly to:

1. Show trends over time
2. Visualize relationships between variables

Configuration is similar to bar charts, with X and Y axes. Notably, Notion lets you group dates by year, month, week, and day - perfect for long, medium, or short-term visualizations.

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Gráfico de anillo

Personally, the donut chart is one of my favorites. It's the chart type that communicates most effectively visually - literally at a glance, you can grasp what you're seeing and make an initial analysis.

Ideal for:

• Showing proportions: Visually represents how a whole divides into parts
• Comparing parts to whole: Easily see what fraction each category represents
• Visualizing composition: Perfect for showing budget or population breakdowns

Configuration is straightforward, but watch out for too many segments as they can reduce readability.

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How we're using Notion Charts

Professionally, charts have been invaluable for understanding our sales pipeline management. Seeing our numbers graphically has been truly impactful, helping us rethink many strategies and validate others. That's why we've updated our CRM template with charts - so you can benefit too.

Personally, it's been fantastic for our personal finance system - exactly what we needed.

Beyond this, we've been creating amazing things with charts. In fact, we have a couple of busy weeks ahead with clients who are eager to start using charts.

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If you want to learn how to use Notion charts o want to implement them for your business, please reach out. We're more than happy to help!

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