Compare / Notion vs Pinterest
NOTION
Ivan Zhao spent four years building a product almost nobody used, ran out of money, moved his entire team to K…
Ben Silbermann built a virtual pinboard for collecting pretty pictures and accidentally created one of the mos…
AT A GLANCE
FUNDING HISTORY
Notion
BUSINESS MODEL
Notion
Notion uses freemium pricing. The free plan is generous — unlimited pages and blocks for individuals.
The Plus plan is $10/user/month for small teams. Business is $18/user/month.
Enterprise is custom-priced. The free tier is intentionally powerful enough that individuals and small teams can use it forever without paying.
The revenue comes when those individuals bring Notion to their companies and entire organizations adopt it.
Notion also has an AI add-on at $10/member/month that adds AI writing assistance, summarization, and Q&A across your workspace.
Pinterest makes money through advertising — specifically through "Promoted Pins" that look nearly identical to organic content. This is the magic of Pinterest's business model: ads don't interrupt the experience because the experience IS discovering products and ideas.
A promoted pin for a kitchen knife set appears right alongside organic pins of kitchen designs. The user doesn't distinguish between "ad" and "content" because both serve the same purpose.
Shopping ads are the fastest-growing segment. Brands upload their product catalogs, Pinterest matches products to user searches and boards, and users can buy directly through the platform or click through to the retailer's site.
Pinterest gets paid per click or per thousand impressions.
Revenue reached $3.65 billion in 2024, up from $3.05 billion the year before, and 2024 was its first genuinely profitable year. Average revenue per user is growing but still well below Meta's — the upside is enormous if Pinterest can close that gap.
HOW THEY STARTED
Notion
Ivan Zhao studied cognitive science at the University of British Columbia, obsessed with the idea that computers should be creative tools, not just consumption devices. He was inspired by pioneers like Alan Kay and Douglas Engelbart who envisioned computers as tools for thought.
In 2013, he started Notion with the idea of building a tool that combined documents, databases, and project management into one flexible workspace.
The first version of Notion launched in 2015 and basically nobody cared. The product was too abstract.
People didn't understand what it was or why they needed it. The company burned through its initial funding.
By 2015, Notion was nearly dead — Zhao had to lay off almost the entire team.
With the last of his money, Zhao kept just one engineer — Simon Last — and moved to Kyoto, Japan, where the cost of living was a fraction of San Francisco. For over a year, Zhao and Last rebuilt Notion from scratch in a tiny apartment.
They rewrote the entire product, making it simpler and more intuitive. The 2.0 version launched in March 2018.
This time, it clicked. Product Hunt loved it.
Twitter loved it. Within months, Notion was growing 50% month over month.
Ben Silbermann was a former Google ad operations employee who quit in 2008 to build apps. His first attempt was an iPhone app called Tote — essentially a mobile catalog that let women browse and bookmark products from fashion retailers.
Nobody downloaded it. But Silbermann noticed something in the data: users were saving products obsessively.
The collecting behavior was more interesting than the shopping behavior.
He teamed up with Paul Sciarra, a classmate from Yale, and Evan Sharp, a designer who was studying architecture at Columbia. Together they built Pinterest — a visual bookmarking tool that let people "pin" images from around the internet to organized boards.
Think of it as a digital mood board that anyone could make.
Pinterest launched as an invite-only beta in March 2010. Growth was painfully slow at first.
Silbermann personally wrote to the first 5,000 users, giving them his phone number and asking what they wanted. The early community was overwhelmingly women interested in home decor, fashion, recipes, and DIY projects.
By 2011, Time magazine named Pinterest one of the 50 best websites. By 2012, it was the fastest site in history to reach 10 million unique monthly visitors.
HOW THEY GREW
Notion
Notion grew almost entirely through organic love. The product was so flexible that users built incredible things with it and shared them on Twitter, YouTube, and Reddit.
Template creators built entire businesses around selling Notion templates. YouTubers made "my Notion setup" videos that got millions of views.
Notion didn't need a marketing team because its users were the marketing team.
The template ecosystem was a massive growth driver. Notion made it easy to duplicate and share templates.
Productivity influencers and creators built elaborate systems — life dashboards, second brains, CRM systems, content calendars — and shared them with their audiences. Every shared template was a free advertisement for Notion.
The community strategy was deliberate. Notion hired community managers early and empowered super-users to become Notion ambassadors.
There are Notion meetups in cities worldwide. Notion Campus Leaders run groups at universities.
The company understood that for a tool this flexible, community was the best way to teach people what's possible.
Pinterest grew organically through women sharing boards with each other. The weddings use case was the killer app — brides-to-be would create boards for dresses, venues, flowers, and invitations, then share them with their wedding parties.
That viral loop drove millions of signups.
SEO is the secret weapon. Pinterest pages rank extremely well in Google Image Search.
Someone searching "modern living room ideas" often sees Pinterest results on page one. That drives a large stream of organic traffic from people who were not looking for Pinterest at all.
Unlike other social platforms, which compete with Google for attention, Pinterest quietly benefits from it.
The shopping pivot has been the growth unlock. Under CEO Bill Ready (former Google and PayPal executive who took over in 2022), Pinterest aggressively invested in shopping features — catalog integrations, buyable pins, merchant verification, and visual search for products.
The thesis: Pinterest users are already in a shopping mindset, so removing friction between "I like this" and "I bought this" is the straightforward path to revenue growth.
THE HARD PART
Notion
The "too flexible" problem. Notion can do almost anything, which means new users often stare at a blank page and have no idea where to start.
The learning curve isn't steep, but it's wide. People give up before discovering the product's power.
Every Notion user remembers the moment it finally "clicked" — but many potential users never reach that moment.
Enterprise adoption has been slower than expected. Notion is beloved by startups and small teams, but large enterprises need things like advanced permissions, audit logs, compliance certifications, and admin controls.
Building enterprise features while keeping the product simple for individuals is a constant tension. Companies like Confluence (Atlassian) have decades-long enterprise relationships that are hard to displace.
Performance at scale has been a persistent complaint. Notion pages with hundreds of blocks or large databases can become sluggish.
The app has improved significantly but power users with massive workspaces still hit performance walls. For a tool that promises to replace multiple apps, it needs to be as fast as each individual app it replaces.
Pinterest's demographics are both an advantage and a limitation. The platform skews heavily female (over 60% women) and is strongest in home, fashion, food, and weddings.
Expanding beyond these categories to attract male users, younger demographics, and different use cases has been slow.
Competition for ad dollars is fierce. Pinterest competes with Meta, Google, TikTok, and Amazon for advertising budgets.
Most advertisers allocate the bulk of their spend to Meta and Google first, then consider others. Pinterest needs to prove its return on ad spend is competitive to win larger budget allocations.
Creator economy is underdeveloped. While Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube have massive creator ecosystems with monetization tools, Pinterest has historically been about content discovery, not content creation.
Users pin other people's content — the original creators often don't even know their work is on Pinterest. Building a creator program and driving original content creation on the platform has been a recent focus but lags far behind competitors.
THE PRODUCTS
Notion
Notion is a workspace that combines notes, docs, wikis, project management, and databases into one tool. Pages can contain any mix of text, tables, kanban boards, calendars, galleries, and embedded content.
Notion Databases are the power feature — structured data that can be viewed as tables, boards, timelines, or calendars. Templates let users start with pre-built setups for everything from CRM to habit tracking.
Notion AI adds writing assistance, summarization, and the ability to ask questions about your workspace content. Notion Sites turns any Notion page into a published website.
Pinterest Home Feed — the core discovery surface showing personalized pins based on user interests, boards, and search history. Pinterest Lens — visual search technology that lets users take a photo of any object and find similar items to buy on Pinterest.
Pinterest Shopping — integrated e-commerce allowing users to browse and purchase products directly from pins linked to retailer catalogs. Pinterest Boards — the organizing system where users save and categorize pins into collections, used for wedding planning, home renovation, recipes, fashion, and more.
Pinterest Shuffles — a collage-making app for Gen Z users to create aesthetic mood boards, driving younger user adoption.
WHO BACKED THEM
Notion
Index Ventures, Sequoia Capital, Coatue Management, Dragoneer Investment Group
Bessemer Venture Partners, FirstMark Capital, and Andreessen Horowitz were early investors. Fidelity and Valiant Capital participated in later rounds.
Rakuten invested strategically. The April 2019 IPO raised $1.4 billion at a $12.7 billion valuation.
Elliott Management, the activist investor, took a large stake in 2022 and pushed for operational improvements that contributed to the company's path to profitability.