Notion Alternative | Managed Frappe Wiki

What Notion charges for, and what grows underneath it

A clear price per person, and two more meters below the line

Notion is refreshingly open about cost. Plus is ten dollars a member a month and Business is twenty. The part worth reading twice is what else the bill is made of once the workspace is real.

Every person you add is a permanent line on the monthly bill

Notion charges per member and a paid seat is held for the whole billing period. Forty people on Business is eight hundred a month before anybody has written a page. Hiring becomes a documentation cost.

The AI that sells the product is metered apart from the seat

Custom Agents are free to try, then ten dollars per thousand monthly credits. Workers start drawing on the same credits in October. The seat price is the floor rather than the figure.

Publishing the wiki on your own address is a third charge

A custom domain with Notion branding removed runs eight dollars a month billed yearly, or ten billed monthly, for each domain. Useful, reasonable, and a third meter to watch.

Comparison

Cascadia vs Notion

Every row below is about shape and cost rather than quality. Notion is a genuinely good product, and several of these rows are about the billing model rather than the software. Read the four cards further down before you read this table, because they carry the honest half of it. All of the configuration work here sits inside our managed Frappe Wiki service.

One monthly figure that does not change when the team grows

No per member seat count to reconcile at every renewal

No separate credit balance to buy before a feature will run

Your own domain on the documentation with nothing extra to pay

Single sign on and an audit trail without an enterprise contract

The person who built the approval workflow is the person who answers about it

Source you can read, change and keep running long after we are gone

One database holding the document, the project and the customer record together

A deployment that can move on premise if a policy ever asks it to

A fit review that costs nothing and can end with us pointing you at them

Notion

Where Notion fits

If you are a team of fifteen who want documentation, databases, projects and AI in one polished place today, and a per person subscription is fine at that size, Notion is the better purchase and it is not close.

Cascadia Web Services

Where the per seat line starts to matter

We are for the case where the headcount has gone past forty, where the wiki is the part that matters and the rest is noise, and where owning the instance beats renting a seat for every reader.

Where Notion is strong

Most of your next hires already know how to use it

Notion is close to a default in startups and agencies, so onboarding somebody into it takes minutes rather than a session. Frappe Wiki is plainer and less familiar, and that familiarity is a real cost we are asking you to pay.

It is far more than a wiki, and that is rather the point

Databases, projects, forms, a calendar and a knowledge base sit in one workspace. Frappe Wiki is a wiki. If you want all of that under one subscription, Notion answers a question we are not answering.

Below about twenty five people they are simply cheaper

Business is twenty dollars a member, so twenty five people costs five hundred a month and matches our Standard fee exactly. Below that number Notion is cheaper on licence alone, and we would rather say so here than let you work it out later.

The packaged AI tooling is a long way ahead of ours

Agents, AI meeting notes and enterprise search across Slack and GitHub are shipped products. We can build against Frappe Wiki, and we would not pretend to match that list as it stands.

None of that is grudging. Notion is an excellent product and for a small team it is the sensible purchase. What this page is about is the point where the seat count crosses the flat fee, and the documentation everybody reads is being billed to everybody who reads it.

What a flat five hundred a month covers once the seat count stops mattering

The wiki bends to your structure, rather than your structure to a sidebar

A finished platform gives you the hierarchy it shipped with. When the documentation has to mirror a department structure and an approval chain nobody anticipated, a hosted product answers with a workaround. Here it is a field, a workflow and an afternoon.

The price is flat, and the headcount does not touch it

Five hundred a month for Standard and a thousand for Priority. Add ten people, add a hundred readers, open it to the whole company. The figure at the bottom of the invoice reads the same.

Readers are free, because there is nobody counting them

Most people in a business read documentation and never write any. On a seat price each of them is a full licence. On an instance you own they are a login, and the difference compounds every month you keep hiring.

One instance, if ERPNext already runs the rest of the business

Frappe Wiki sits alongside ERPNext, so the procedure, the project it governs and the customer it was written for are one database rather than three systems and a search box each.

Notion will run documentation beautifully for a team small enough that the seat price stays small. Ours is the case where the reader count has outgrown the writer count, and the structure of the documentation is the thing that needs designing. The same reasoning runs underneath the rest of our managed Frappe services.

Onboarding process

What the first sixty days look like when the wiki has to survive the move

Standing the software up takes an afternoon. Everything below is the part that decides whether anybody still trusts the documentation a year from now.

We read the structure before we open the software

Somebody in your business knows which pages are load bearing, which are stale, and who is allowed to change the ones that matter. That conversation comes first, because it is what the space and permission model has to satisfy and it is almost never written down anywhere.

Records cross over and reconcile before anyone is asked to trust them

Pages, attachments, comment history and the sidebar hierarchy move into a copy first. Nothing is announced until the page counts agree on both sides, and anything that will not convert cleanly is listed rather than quietly dropped.

Only the approvals you actually enforce get built

Who reviews, who publishes, which spaces stay private and what happens to a page nobody has opened in two years are each a decision rather than a checkbox. We build the ones your process runs on and leave the rest of the surface switched off.

One full review cycle runs while we are still alongside it

A real edit, a real review, a real approval and a real publish, on your data, with us watching. Handover happens after that has worked once, and not before.

Testimonials

Don't Take Our Word For It

I can't say enough about how grateful I am to [Cascadia] for helping me resolve my tech problems. I was in a real bind, and [they] calmly and cooly fixed the problem--something two other tech support folks could not do. [They are] gonna be my go-to from now on.

Sandy S.

[Cascadia] is amazing! They are so patient and explains things in such a clear way. I'm very grateful to them for making me feel more confident in my work with the CRM. Can't recommend them enough!!

Aventurina K.

I've been on Upwork for 5+ years hiring various contractors for my service based business and there is no doubt that [Cascadia] is one of the top 5 I've ever hired for ANYTHING. For domain related questions, a selfless work-ethic, and a deep & reliable source of knowledge, [Cascadia] is the right choice.

Andrew K.

I've worked with Cascadia for nearly three years, and the service is fantastic. The benefits are reasonably priced, and the turnaround time is better than any titan within the industry. I love this company, and we look forward to growing with them.

Carl B.

Two ways a per seat wiki turns into the wrong purchase

Two situations with one thing in common. In both the software was more than capable and the shape of the bill is what failed. If you are reading these and still choosing a first knowledge base at all, our managed Zoho Learn service is usually where that decision starts.

A woman carrying labelled binders past a wall of shelved documentation.

How this plays out

Ninety readers were licensed so that eight people could write

Scenario one. A distributor of ninety puts its procedures into a per member workspace. Eight people write and the other eighty two read. At twenty dollars a head the documentation costs eighteen hundred a month, and nobody can say which part of that figure is the writing.

Two colleagues comparing notes over a shared laptop in an open office.

When this comes up

The renewal arrived after a year of hiring and nobody had modelled it

A second situation. An agency signs at eighteen people and renews at forty four. Nothing went wrong and nobody made a bad decision. The line simply grew with the payroll, and the wiki is now a larger monthly cost than the accounting system.

500-1,000

Dollars a month, flat, whether ten people read the wiki or five hundred

Everything from the first structure conversation to the monthly report, with no separate line for readers, credits or domains.

Dollars of software licence, and no per member charge above it

Frappe Wiki is open source, so the software costs nothing and the figure above buys the work, the hosting and the support.

4-8

Weeks before a real edit, review and publish run end to end

Four to eight weeks for most teams, and longer where years of pages, attachments and a deep sidebar hierarchy are in scope.

Notion alternative and managed Frappe Wiki FAQs

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a Notion alternative?

Anything that can hold a company's documentation and let people find it again. That takes in the other platforms on this hub, meaning Confluence, Document360 and Guru, the shared drive full of loose documents that a surprising number of businesses still rely on, and open source systems such as Frappe Wiki. The first thing worth working out is how many of your people would ever write in it.

How is Cascadia different from Notion?

Notion is a finished workspace you rent a seat in. Cascadia is a wiki somebody builds for you. We shape spaces, permissions, the approval workflow and search around the documentation you already have, host it on Frappe Cloud and look after it afterwards. The price is per company rather than per person.

What does Notion actually cost?

Ten dollars per member a month on Plus and twenty on Business, with up to twenty percent off if you pay for a year. Custom Agents run on credits at ten dollars per thousand a month, and a custom domain is eight to ten dollars a month on top. Cascadia is five hundred dollars a month for Standard and a thousand for Priority, and none of it moves with headcount.

Is Notion cheaper than this?

Below about twenty five people, yes, and clearly so. Twenty five members on Business is five hundred a month, which is our Standard fee exactly, so that is the line where the two meet on licence alone. Under it Notion wins on price, and we would rather you heard that from us.

Is Frappe Wiki as good an editor as Notion?

No, and it is the plainest limit on this page. Notion's editor, its databases and its template library are better than anything Frappe Wiki ships. What Frappe Wiki gives you instead is a structure you control, a licence you own, and a bill that does not read your payroll.

Why not install Frappe Wiki and run it ourselves?

You can, and there is no licence to buy. Getting it running is quick. What takes the time is deciding how spaces map to teams, who approves a change, what happens to a page nobody has read in a year, and how search is expected to behave. None of that is in the documentation.

Should we buy this at all?

Often not. If you are twelve people who like Notion and use its databases and projects as much as its pages, stay where you are. The fit review exists to reach that answer honestly and it costs nothing.

Can we just stay on Notion's free plan?

For one or two people, yes. Past that the free workspace limits blocks once a second member joins, caps file uploads at five megabytes, keeps seven days of page history and allows ten external guests. It is a trial of the paid plans rather than a plan, and most teams cross one of those lines inside a quarter.

Do we have to migrate everything at once?

No, and staging it is usually the better idea. The pages people open weekly cross first, because those are what somebody needs on Monday morning. Archives, attachments and the long tail nobody has opened since last year follow at whatever pace suits.

Does anything break while you take over?

No. Nobody loses a page they are working in and links inside the documentation keep resolving. We migrate into a copy, and the cut across waits until the page counts match on both sides.

What if we already run Frappe Wiki and it was set up badly?

It happens more often than you would expect, and the work is a rebuild rather than a tidy up. We read the space structure, the sidebar, the permission model, the revision history and whatever anybody customized, then say which of it should stand and which should be built again.

Do you own the system or the data?

You do, on both counts. Frappe Wiki is open source, the instance and the database sit in your name, and the spaces, templates and custom fields we build are yours as well. If you stopped paying us tomorrow every part of it would keep working.

What is included at each tier?

Standard buys implementation, configuration, data migration, handover, customization, development work, Frappe Cloud hosting and support that does not stop. Priority adds a second concurrent request, quicker turnaround and a quarterly review. Neither one meters users, pages or logins.

Most of our people would only ever read the wiki. Does that matter?

It is the whole argument of this page. A per member price charges the same for the person who wrote the procedure and the ninety who looked it up once. On an instance you own the readers are logins, and the cost of adding one is nothing.

What does the monthly report actually contain?

The month's changes, what we built or configured, anything that still looks fragile and what we intend to do about it. Upstream Frappe Wiki release notes that will affect you go in as well. The month runs from your start date rather than the calendar.

What if I want to leave?

Thirty days notice, and there is no disentangling to do. You already hold the instance, the database and the configuration, so nothing needs exporting and nothing needs handing back. What ends is our involvement.

A Notion Alternative Priced Per Company Rather Than Per Person