Superhuman alternatives

Notion

Documents, databases and wikis in one workspace that bends to whatever shape a team wants, which is both the appeal and the risk. The same primitives make a meeting note, a project tracker, a CRM or a public site. Teams that agree on structure get a system of record; teams that do not get a sprawl nobody maintains.

Todoist

A task list that survives daily use for a decade, the harder test for this category. Natural-language input parses dates and recurrence as you type, projects and labels organise without ceremony, and it runs on essentially every platform. Deliberately unopinionated about method, so it fits GTD or a plain list equally.

Obsidian

Notes as plain markdown files in a folder you own. Links between notes build a graph, and a large plugin ecosystem covers everything from tasks to spaced repetition. Because the files are local and open, the notes outlive the application and any company behind it. Sync and publishing are paid add-ons; the core is free.

Raycast

A launcher that replaces Spotlight and then absorbs half the menu bar: window management, clipboard history, snippets, calculations, and extensions for the tools you already run. Everything is keyboard-driven and consistent, so muscle memory transfers between extensions. macOS only. The free tier covers most individual use.

Linear

Issue tracking fast enough that people keep it up to date, which is the only property that matters in a tracker. Keyboard-first, opinionated about cycles and projects, and deliberately short on configuration. Popular with product teams who found the alternatives slow and over-configurable. If your process needs heavy customisation, that opinionation is a poor fit.

Glide

Generates mobile and web apps from a table your team already maintains. Rows become screens, columns become fields, and the result is installable and works offline. Best for internal tools (inventory, inspections, field data, directories), where the alternative is a spreadsheet somebody edits on a phone.

Pipedrive

Deal-stage CRM a small sales team can run without an administrator. The pipeline view is the product: deals move through stages, activities are scheduled against them, and the reporting answers what is stuck and where. Deliberately simpler than the enterprise suites, which is exactly why teams choose it.

Buffer

Queue social posts once and let them publish on a schedule across the networks you use. Deliberately narrow (scheduling, a shared calendar, straightforward analytics and an engagement inbox), which is why small teams pick it over suites that do ten other things. The free plan covers one person managing a few accounts.

Canva

Design for people who do not design for a living. Templates cover presentations, social posts, documents, video and print, and Brand Kits keep colours, fonts and logos consistent across a team. The generative tools handle background removal and image editing. Designers tend to be sceptical of it, and it is nonetheless how most non-designers ship something acceptable.

Wise

Sends money across currencies at a rate you can check yourself, with the fee shown separately rather than buried in a spread. Multi-currency accounts hold and convert dozens of currencies with local bank details in several, which is how freelancers and remote teams get paid without losing a percentage to their bank. Business accounts add launch payments and an API.

ChatGPT

The assistant that made the category mainstream. It answers in a chat window, searches the web when a question needs current facts, generates and edits images, and runs Python in a sandbox for anything involving data. Custom GPTs let a team package a prompt and a set of files as a reusable tool. The free tier is generous enough for casual use; the paid one is about access to the newer models and higher limits.

Perplexity

A search engine that answers the question instead of listing pages that might. Every claim carries a numbered citation you can follow, which makes it useful for research you intend to defend later. Focus modes narrow a search to academic papers, forums or video. The trade-off is the usual one for answer engines: you read a synthesis rather than the sources, and the synthesis is only as good as what it retrieved.