Notion alternative for project management

Notion is a connected workspace for documents and databases, where a board is one view of a database that can just as easily be a table, a calendar or a page. Teams often end up tracking projects in it because the documentation already lives there, which is a perfectly reasonable way to arrive at a project tracker.

Otper is a delivery tool rather than a workspace. It does not hold your documentation. It tracks work through stages, keeps an owner on every card, and measures how that work is flowing.

Published plans

Notion prices per member once you move past the free tier, as does Otper past three teammates. The more useful comparison is not the number but what each tool is holding for you.

What Otper does differently

Delivery measurement you do not have to model. In a database you can build the properties and rollups to approximate a report, and it will be exactly as good as the discipline behind it. Otper computes the numbers from board activity: throughput, median days to finish a card, average days per stage ranked and scored, cards with no activity for seven days or more, and workload against the team average. Nothing to model, and core reporting is on the free plan.

Work-in-progress limits. Each list takes a soft limit that warns in amber and a hard limit that refuses the card outright. A stage that is overloaded stops accepting work rather than quietly growing.

Ownership with a recorded trail. Assignees are board members, and each card keeps a contributor history of who owned it and when they handed it on — rather than a person property whose previous values are gone once edited.

Structure you do not have to design. Lists, cards, labels, due dates, checklists and comments already exist with defined behaviour, and Board, List, Gantt and Tickets are four views of the same cards. That is a constraint, and it is also why there is nothing to set up before the first card.

Where Notion is the better choice

If your documentation, specs and meeting notes live in Notion and the project board sits beside them, that adjacency is genuinely valuable and worth keeping. Otper has no documents, no wiki and no page editor; moving delivery out of Notion means the tracker and the docs stop being in the same place.

It is also the better choice when you want to shape the data model yourself — custom properties, relations between databases, several views of one source — because that flexibility is precisely what Otper trades away.

Consider Otper when the tracking side has grown past what a database comfortably reports on: several people, work queueing at particular stages, and questions about flow that a rollup does not answer.

Moving your work across

There is no importer, so a move is a deliberate re-entry rather than a one-click transfer. That is slower, but it is also the moment to drop the work nobody was ever going to finish.

1. Create one board per active project.
2. Name your lists after the stages work actually passes through, not after the teams that own them.
3. Invite the people who need access. Card assignees are drawn from board members, so add the team before you start assigning.
4. Re-create only work that is still open. Leave finished items in Notion as the archive; there is no need to migrate history.
5. Once you can see real volume in each list, set a work-in-progress limit on the columns that collect work.

If there is too much open work to retype, boards, lists and cards are all writable through the GraphQL API on every plan, so a short script can create them in bulk. The API reference has the schema and an interactive playground.

Frequently asked questions

Try it on one project

Pick a single active project rather than migrating everything at once. Create an Otper account, run that project for a fortnight, and check the current plans and limits before inviting the rest of the team.