Notion
One workspace for tasks, notes and client documents. Build a task board, a client wiki and a proposal template in the same place, and share pages with clients who do not need an account. Free for solo use.
Features
Notion is a workspace built from pages and databases. A database can be shown as a table, a board, a calendar or a list, so the same set of jobs can be a kanban board one minute and a deadline calendar the next. Pages sit alongside them for notes, briefs and documents.
How freelancers tend to use it
- A jobs database with a status per job (Enquiry, Quoted, In progress, Invoiced, Paid), shown as a board for the day-to-day and a calendar for deadlines
- A page per client holding the brief, contacts, meeting notes and links, so everything about a client lives in one place
- A shared client page with the project plan or deliverables. Clients can view a shared page without a Notion account, which saves the weekly "where are we?" email
- Reusable templates for proposals, onboarding checklists and project kick-offs, so each new client starts from the same footing
Worth knowing
The free plan works well for one person. The paid Plus plan, from $10 a month, adds more for teams and larger file uploads.
There is no built-in time tracking or invoicing. If you bill by the hour, pair it with a tracker such as Toggl, and keep your invoices and books in accounting software such as FreeAgent.
The flexibility cuts both ways. It is easy to spend a week building the perfect system and not a minute using it. Start with one jobs database and one page per client, and add to it only when something is missing.
Who it suits
Best if your work is document-heavy, with briefs, research, drafts and client notes, and you want those next to the task list rather than in a separate app. If all you need is a list of jobs and their stage, Trello is quicker to set up and harder to over-engineer.
Compare it with five other options in our guide to the best task management tools for freelancers.