Notion and Monjiro: When to Use Each

Summary

• Notion has many features suited to members with accounts managing documents and sharing knowledge as a team (meeting notes, project management, internal wikis and so on).
• For documentation such as product manuals and help centers, where there are few writers and many readers outside the team, readers do not know how the pages are organized and are only looking for answers. Monjiro is suited to this kind of use.

Introduction

This article is for people who use Notion every day. It explains how you can use Notion and Monjiro for different purposes.

To start with, Monjiro is not a replacement for Notion. It is not a question of which is better; we think each tool is suited to some uses and not others.

We also use Notion a lot for things like project management and meeting notes, but there are still many cases where we use Monjiro. For example, we write and deliver system operation manuals for our clients in contract development projects with Monjiro.

Notion is an excellent tool for teams

We keep materials such as meeting notes, discussion notes, project progress tracking and to-dos in Notion. In our experience, Notion is well suited to uses like the following.

• Editing together at the same time: All members can edit meeting notes and discussion notes in real time, right there in the meeting.
• Handling structured information: With databases, task management and Gantt chart views, you can visualize how a project is progressing.
• Building up an internal wiki: Employees can easily post what they notice, and the team's knowledge keeps growing.

What these have in common is that everyone on the team is a writer and a reader at the same time. You can share pages even when they are unfinished, and whoever notices something fixes it, so the documents grow over time.

What happens when you publish customer documentation with Notion

Once you are used to Notion, it is tempting to write customer-facing system documentation in Notion too and publish it on the web. In fact, Notion has a feature for publishing pages, so you can write and publish documentation with it.

However, customer documentation differs from meeting notes and internal wikis in that its main readers are outside the team. We write operation manuals for contract development projects in Monjiro, separately from Notion, because problems like the following tend to occur.

The answer is written, but readers cannot get to it

Customers do not know how the documentation pages are organized. They rarely follow the page tree to find the page they need, and if they cannot find it, they give up and contact you. Even though the answer is in the documentation, inquiries do not go down.

You cannot see what the documentation is missing

Inquiries reach the person in charge one by one by email or chat. Busy replying to each one, they cannot get an overall picture of which questions come up often or where the documentation falls short.

Internal writing styles creep in

If you write it the same way as an internal wiki, pages tend to keep terms that only make sense inside the company and the history of discussions that led to a specification. This feels natural to team members but is hard for customers to understand.

You have to be careful about what you publish

When internal pages and customer pages are in the same place, you need to be careful every time you add a page so that you do not publish a page by mistake.

The root cause: writers and readers are no longer the same people

In meeting notes and internal wikis, the writers and readers are members of the same team. In customer documentation, the writers are a few people on the team and the readers are many customers outside the team. When writers and readers are separate, the assumption that everyone on the team is both a writer and a reader no longer holds.

The writers (team members) use Notion every day and have no trouble, but readers outside the team (customers) cannot find the page they need, and inquiries reach the person in charge one by one.

Notion is designed for members with accounts to manage documents and share knowledge as a team. Most readers of customer documentation do not have a Notion account. As a result, many of the features the team finds useful do not reach the readers.

Living documentation and abandoned documentation

There is one more difference that is easy to overlook: whether the pages keep being worked on.

Notion pages stay up to date because writing them is part of everyday work. Changing the status of a task or writing meeting notes directly updates the pages.

Customer documentation, on the other hand, tends to be treated as "finished" once it is written. Nothing in the team's everyday work prompts anyone to open the documentation and fix it. So even within the same Notion workspace, project pages stay alive while the customer pages alone are left untouched and slowly go out of date.

The difference is not in the tools' features but in whether there is something that keeps the documentation alive.

• Notion: Writers using the pages in their everyday work is what prompts updates.
• Monjiro: Readers asking the AI chat questions, and those questions reaching the maintainers as a record, is what prompts updates. Even if the writers do not open the pages every day, the documentation keeps being used from the readers' side.

How to improve documentation based on readers' questions is covered in detail in "Why Your Documentation Needs an AI Chat".

The deciding question: are the writers and readers the same people?

Which of Notion and Monjiro is a better fit can be summarized as follows.

When we recommend Monjiro

In cases like the following, we recommend Monjiro over Notion. We explain each one using our operation manuals for contract development projects as an example.

Readers and writers are clearly separate

The operation manuals for our contract development projects are written by a few of our staff and read by the many people at the client who use the system. Monjiro is designed for cases where the team that maintains the documentation and its many readers are separate.

Readers do not know the structure and only want answers

Documentation published with Monjiro comes with an AI chat. Readers do not need to search for pages; they just ask a question such as "Can I export to CSV?" and get an answer based on the documentation. For anything not written in the documentation, the AI chat does not guess, and answers that it is not documented.

The goal is resolving inquiries, not getting pages read

Questions to the AI chat are recorded in "Q&A history". The maintaining team can review in one place which questions come up often and where the documentation is missing information.

Use each for its role

You do not have to choose between Notion and Monjiro. We use each for its own role, too.

• Notion: Keeps information used within the team, such as discussions, reviews and how decisions were reached.
• Monjiro: Publishes documentation for readers outside the team and keeps updating it based on their questions. Readers are not limited to customers; they may also be other departments in the company or new members.

For example, a new feature is discussed and specified in Notion, and how to operate the system as decided there is written and published in Monjiro. Information used within the team stays in Notion as before, and documentation read by people outside the team is published with Monjiro.

Conclusion

In this article, we looked at when to use Notion and when to use Monjiro from two angles: "Are the writers and readers the same people, or separate?" and "What keeps the documentation alive?"

When you are not sure which to use, it helps to ask: "Who reads this page?" and "Who will keep using this page?" If the readers are outside the team and there are many of them, Monjiro may be a good fit.

On Monjiro's Free plan, you can publish one project with an AI chat for free (up to 100 AI answers per month). See Plans for the differences between plans. Start with one piece of customer documentation by signing up.