Notion alternative · AI notes · Tool comparison
Free Notion AI alternatives: what each free plan includes
By T. Krause
Notion AI now comes with the Business plan, and the Free plan only gets a trial. If you want an AI in your notes without paying for a seat, here is what Notion gives you for free, which alternatives include AI on their free plan, and where Notion is still ahead.
As of October 2026, Notion AI is part of the Business plan, which notion.com/pricing lists at €19.50 per member a month. Free and Plus get a trial. Notion's AI help page says users on those plans "get a limited number of complimentary AI responses" and doesn't say how many.
If you want an AI in your notes for free, you have two real options today. Prompt Notebook, which we make, gives every person 30 AI actions a day on its free plan. Craft's free plan includes 15 AI credits and 1,500 blocks. Obsidian is free but has no built-in AI, and AFFiNE sells its AI as a paid add-on.
Everything below about other products comes from their own pricing pages, checked on 18 October 2026. Prices change, so open the links before you decide.
What Notion gives you for free
Notion's Free plan is still a capable notebook. You get pages, databases and sharing, with limits that start to bite once two or more members join a workspace.
The AI is where Free stops. The pricing page lists "Trial of Notion AI" on both Free and Plus, described as a way to "trial AI capabilities like generating docs, or autofilling databases". The full set sits on Business:
- Notion Agent, for chat, generating, autofill and translation
- AI Meeting Notes, which transcribe a meeting and write a summary
- Enterprise Search, in beta, which finds answers across your workspace and connected tools
- Research Mode, in beta, which writes longer reports
So on Plus at €9.50 a member you still only get the trial. To use Notion AI past it, every member moves up to Business.
The free options, one by one
Prompt Notebook
Prompt Notebook is ours, so weigh this section with that in mind. It is a browser notebook with nested pages, a block editor and databases with table, board, list, calendar and gallery views. The free plan includes all of it, plus 30 AI actions per person per day. The counter resets at midnight UTC, and you don't need a card to sign up.
The AI does three jobs:
- Draft a page. Describe it in one sentence and get a page with headings, lists and to-dos that you edit like anything else.
- Work on a selection. Continue, summarise, improve, make shorter, fix grammar, translate, pull out action items or explain a dense passage. You insert the result, replace your text with it or throw it away.
- Ask your workspace. Ask a question and get an answer written from your own pages, with a numbered link after each claim so you can open the source.
Each of those counts as one action. The model is Claude, by Anthropic, and we have not agreed to any use of your notes for training.
The limits are real. Ask your workspace uses keyword search, so if your notes say "invoice" and you ask about "bills", it may miss the page. It reads the eight best matching pages per question. There are no relations, rollups, formulas or automations, no teamspaces, no desktop or mobile apps and no API. Two paid plans, Plus at €6 and Business at €12 per member a month, are announced but not on sale yet, so the free plan is the only one you can use today.
Craft
Craft is a polished document editor. Its free plan includes 1,500 blocks across all your documents, 1 GB of storage and 15 AI assistant credits. Plus is €8 a month, or €6.40 a month billed yearly, and raises that to 50 AI credits a month with unlimited blocks.
The catch is the block cap. Every paragraph, heading and list item is a block, so 1,500 runs out sooner than it sounds if you write every day. The free plan is enough to try the AI. For a notebook you use daily, plan on Plus.
Obsidian
Obsidian is free without limits, keeps your notes as Markdown files on your device and needs no account. Sync costs $4 a month per user billed yearly, and Publish $8 a month per site. A commercial license at $50 per user a year is encouraged for work use but not required.
Its pricing page says nothing about AI. Any AI in Obsidian comes from community plugins, so what you get depends on which plugin you install and how you set it up. That suits people who like to build their own setup, and is a long way from Notion's AI button.
AFFiNE
AFFiNE has a free cloud plan with 10 GB of storage, up to 3 members per workspace and 7 days of version history. Pro is $6.75 a month billed yearly. Its AI is a separate add-on at $8.90 a month billed yearly, and I found no free AI allowance on the pricing page. It is a free Notion alternative, then, but not a free AI one.
Side by side
| Tool | AI on the free plan | Main free-plan limit | Cheapest way to more AI |
|---|---|---|---|
| Notion | A limited trial, number not published | Block limits once 2+ members join | Business, €19.50 per member a month |
| Prompt Notebook | 30 AI actions per person per day | No relations, formulas, apps or API | Plus at €6, not on sale yet |
| Craft | 15 AI credits | 1,500 blocks in total | Plus, €6.40 a month billed yearly |
| Obsidian | None built in, plugins only | None on the app itself | Depends on the plugin |
| AFFiNE | None found on the pricing page | 3 members per workspace | AI add-on, $8.90 a month billed yearly |
Where Notion is still ahead
If you pay for Business, Notion's AI does more than any free option here. It transcribes meetings, fills in database properties for you and searches tools outside Notion. Our comparison with Notion lists the rest row by row, and Notion is ahead in most rows. It has relations, rollups and formulas, timeline and chart views, automations, desktop and mobile apps, a public API and SSO.
So the honest answer depends on what you use. If your Notion is a web of linked databases and your team already pays for seats, Business is probably worth it. If you mostly write notes, docs and a wiki and want the AI to draft pages and answer questions from them, you don't need a €19.50 seat for that.
Questions people ask
Is Notion AI free?
Not in full. Notion's help centre says Notion AI is available on the Business and Enterprise plans. Free and Plus users get a limited number of complimentary AI responses to try it.
How many free AI responses does Notion give?
Notion doesn't publish a number on its pricing page or in the AI help article. Once the trial runs out, the AI features need a Business seat.
Is Prompt Notebook's AI free for good?
The free plan includes 30 AI actions per person per day, and that is the plan you sign up for today. We have said we will email you at least four weeks before anything about the free plan changes.
Can I move my Notion pages over?
Prompt Notebook imports Markdown, one file per page. Export the pages you use from Notion as Markdown, import ten of them and ask your workspace a question you already know the answer to. If the sources check out, you have your answer.
Start writing free, or read six Notion alternatives in 2026 if AI isn't the main reason you are leaving.