A Notion alternative for project planning — Gantt, capacity and scenarios on your desktop
Looking for a Notion alternative for project planning? Notion is a workspace for docs and databases; timelines and capacity are bolt-ons. shadow-planner is a dedicated desktop planner — Gantt, resource utilisation, what-if scenarios, local data, €4,99 once.
Notion is a superb place to write things down. Docs, wikis, meeting notes, a database of tasks with a board view — it's flexible enough that many teams run their whole operating manual in it. But when you try to plan a project in Notion, you're building the planner yourself: a timeline view on top of a database, relations and rollups to fake dependencies, a formula to approximate who's overbooked. It works, up to a point, and then it becomes a second project.
shadow-planner is the piece Notion doesn't have: a dedicated project planning tool. Gantt with real finish-to-start dependencies, weekly resource utilisation with over-capacity highlighting, a portfolio roll-up, what-if scenarios, and an AI assistant that knows the plan. It's a desktop app for Windows, macOS and Linux, keeps data on your machine, and the unlimited version is a €4,99 one-time purchase — no subscription, no per-seat fee, no account.
Side by side
| shadow-planner | Notion | |
|---|---|---|
| Primary job | Planning and controlling: timelines, capacity, scenarios | Docs, wikis and flexible databases |
| Pricing | Free tier; €4,99 one-time, no per-seat fee | Free for individuals; paid plans per user per month for teams; AI is a paid add-on |
| Where data lives | Locally on your machine (SQLite) | Notion's cloud |
| Collaboration | Single-user desktop app; share via export (XLSX / CSV / JSON) | Real-time multi-user editing, comments, sharing |
| Gantt / timeline | Core feature, with finish-to-start dependencies and cascade preview | Timeline view on a database; dependencies via relations |
| Resource utilisation | Weekly capacity vs. allocation, cost roll-ups from daily rates | Not built in — rollups and formulas you maintain yourself |
| What-if scenarios | Isolated scenarios, snapshots, templates | Duplicate the database |
| AI | Chat assistant over your data + planning agent; bring your own model (local Ollama or cloud key) | Notion AI, paid add-on |
| Offline | Fully | Limited |
Who should switch
- People who built a "project tracker" in Notion and outgrew it. A timeline view is not a Gantt chart. When a task slips in shadow-planner, the dependency cascade is previewed before anything is written, and the successors move with it. In Notion you move each row by hand.
- Anyone who needs to know who is over capacity. shadow-planner's utilisation view compares weekly capacity with allocation per person, highlights the overload, and rolls daily rates up to a cost per project. That's the part Notion databases can't express without a spreadsheet's worth of formulas. See resource utilisation planning.
- Planners who want to model before they commit. Copy the baseline into a scenario, move people and dates, compare, then decide. The baseline stays untouched. Snapshots keep a point-in-time record.
- Solo PMs, consultants and freelancers who don't want a per-seat subscription for what is, in practice, one person's planning tool.
- Anyone with plans that can't live in a SaaS. Everything stays in a local file, the app works fully offline, and the AI can run locally through Ollama — see offline project planning.
Who should stay
- Your team's knowledge — specs, decisions, notes — lives in Notion and the task list is mostly a way to link to it. shadow-planner is a planner, not a wiki.
- You need real-time, multi-user editing with comments and mentions. shadow-planner is single-user by design.
- Your "projects" are light enough that a board or a simple timeline does the job and capacity planning isn't a question anyone asks.
Plenty of people use both: Notion for the writing and the team's shared context, shadow-planner for the schedule, the capacity plan and the what-ifs. Export a scenario to Excel or CSV and link it from the Notion page, or paste the project brief into shadow-planner's planning agent and let it draft the epics and tasks for review. If the AI side interests you, see AI-assisted Gantt planning.
Install shadow-planner for free — the Gantt, utilisation and AI assistant are all in the free tier.