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Comparison · PM
Notion vs Kanri
A side-by-side editorial comparison of Notion and Kanri — release velocity, themes, recent moves, and the top alternatives to consider.
Notion vs Kanri: at a glance
What is Notion?
Notion is turning itself into the place other companies' agents come to work.
Notion's releases have stopped being about documents. The 3.5 Developer Platform put Workers — custom code running on Notion's infrastructure — behind Custom Agents, and 3.6 opened the workspace to External Agents like Claude and Cursor, assigned tasks from a shared board. The surrounding shipments fill that frame in: Workers are now shareable across a team, their usage is metered in the credits dashboard, agents got calendar tools, and agents got their own iOS app.
What is Kanri?
An offline-first kanban app whose solo maintainer has been quiet for ten months.
Kanri is a desktop-only, offline-first kanban board built on Tauri and maintained largely by one developer with community translation help. The last three releases pushed it past the basics into territory where it can replace a hosted board for a single user: tags, due dates, property-filtered search, and multilanguage support. Nothing has shipped since September 2025.
Notion vs Kanri: editorial side-by-side
Notion
5.0PMCOMMS
Notion is turning itself into the place other companies' agents come to work.
◆ Current state
Notion's releases have stopped being about documents. The 3.5 Developer Platform put Workers — custom code running on Notion's infrastructure — behind Custom Agents, and 3.6 opened the workspace to External Agents like Claude and Cursor, assigned tasks from a shared board. The surrounding shipments fill that frame in: Workers are now shareable across a team, their usage is metered in the credits dashboard, agents got calendar tools, and agents got their own iOS app.
◆ Where it's heading
The direction is orchestration, not authorship. Notion is positioning the workspace as the shared surface where a team's agents — its own and other vendors' — hold state, take assignments, and leave visible work behind, with Workers as the connective tissue to outside systems. Metering Workers in the credits dashboard before the beta ends signals this is being built as a billable platform tier, not a free add-on. Classic editor work still ships, but high contrast mode and merged table cells are now the smaller half of the changelog.
◆ Prediction
The Workers beta looks close to converting into paid capacity given the credits-dashboard groundwork, and the External Agents roster is stated as expanding beyond Claude and Cursor. Expect the agent surfaces that lag — mobile calendar tools are called out as not yet shipped — to close next.
Kanri
0.0PM
An offline-first kanban app whose solo maintainer has been quiet for ten months.
◆ Current state
Kanri is a desktop-only, offline-first kanban board built on Tauri and maintained largely by one developer with community translation help. The last three releases pushed it past the basics into territory where it can replace a hosted board for a single user: tags, due dates, property-filtered search, and multilanguage support. Nothing has shipped since September 2025.
◆ Where it's heading
The arc from v0.5 to v0.8 is a march toward parity with Trello for the local-first case — import paths from Trello and GitHub Projects first, then the tags and due dates those imports carry, then search that filters on them. Release intervals stretched from weeks to months to nearly a year, and the maintainer said v0.8.2 was held back by dependency migrations and Linux compatibility work.
◆ Prediction
The visible pattern is a long silence followed by one bundled release, so a v0.8.3 or v0.9 collecting deferred fixes and new translations is the likeliest next move. Ten months without a tag gives no basis for a date.
Alternatives to Notion and Kanri
Other PM products tracked by Sparkpulse, ranked by recent ship velocity. Each card links to a full editorial trajectory and lets you pivot into a head-to-head comparison with either Notion or Kanri.
Planify
A GNOME task app that has turned CalDAV interoperability into the product.
GanttProject
A desktop Gantt tool on a multi-year cadence, tethering itself to its own cloud
Super Productivity
A solo-focused task manager grows a plugin layer and, quietly, a collaboration story
Akiflow
A time-blocking client spending its releases on calendar correctness and crash fixes
Roadmunk
Roadmapping tool in slow, presentation-focused upkeep with a scrambled release feed
See all Notion alternatives → · See all Kanri alternatives →
Recent activity from Notion and Kanri
Latest ship moves from both products, interleaved chronologically. ⚡ = editorial spark.
- 1d agoNotionHigh contrast mode
- 7d agoNotionWorkers, now in your Notion credits dashboard
- 15d agoNotionNew calendar tools for your agent
- 22d agoNotionShare Notion Workers across your team
- 23d agoNotionMeet the Notion Agents iOS app
- 1mo agoNotionNotion 3.6: External Agents, HTML blocks, and more ⚡
- 10mo agoKanriSystem theme following, completable due dates, emoji sidebar pins
- 10mo agoKanriFive community translations and property-filtered search
- 1y agoKanriMultilanguage support and GitHub Projects import
- 2y agoKanriTrello imports carry tags and due dates
- 2y agoKanriCard tags, due dates, and search land together ⚡
- 2y agoKanriHotfix for unsaved card task checkboxes
Frequently asked questions
What is the difference between Notion and Kanri?
They serve adjacent needs but don't currently overlap on shipped themes. Notion is currently shipping more aggressively (velocity 5.0 vs 0.0), with 0 editorial sparks in the last 30 days against 0. See the at-a-glance table above for a side-by-side breakdown of velocity, recent sparks, and editorial themes.
Is Notion better than Kanri?
Sparkpulse doesn't pick a winner — we score release velocity, not feature parity. Notion is currently shipping more aggressively (velocity 5.0 vs 0.0), with 0 editorial sparks in the last 30 days against 0. For your specific use case, the alternatives sections above list other PM products to evaluate alongside.
What are the best alternatives to Notion?
Top Notion alternatives in PM are ranked by recent ship velocity. Browse the "Notion alternatives" section above for the current picks, or visit /alternatives/notion for the full list with editorial commentary on each.
What are the best alternatives to Kanri?
Top Kanri alternatives in PM are ranked by recent ship velocity. Browse the "Kanri alternatives" section above for the current picks, or visit /alternatives/kanri for the full list with editorial commentary on each.