Best Docs & Planning for Founders
23 tools reviewed honest opinions, no fluff.
Our Picks
The docs & planning tools we recommend most for founders.
Notion
The everything workspace. Docs, wikis, databases, projects. Your second brain's second brain.
Use when: You need one place for all your thinking
Linear
Issue tracking that doesn't suck. Keyboard-first, blazing fast, beautiful. Jira is shaking.
Use when: You have a team or serious project to track
Beautiful API documentation. Write in MDX, get docs that look like Stripe's. Every developer tool should use this.
All Docs & Planning Tools
23 tools reviewed with honest opinions.
Notion
The everything workspace. Docs, wikis, databases, projects. Your second brain's second brain.
Use when: You need one place for all your thinking
Linear
Issue tracking that doesn't suck. Keyboard-first, blazing fast, beautiful. Jira is shaking.
Use when: You have a team or serious project to track
Coda
Docs that work like apps. Tables, automations, buttons. Notion on steroids for power users.
Obsidian
Local-first markdown notes with a graph view. Your brain, mapped. Plugin ecosystem is bonkers.
Basecamp
Project management for people who hate project management. Opinionated, simple, flat fee.
AI-native project management. Auto-categorizes tasks, suggests workflows. Linear's younger sibling.
Todoist
The to-do app that respects your time. Natural language input, clean design, just works.
ClickUp
Does everything. Docs, tasks, whiteboards, goals. Feature-stuffed. Love it or drown in it.
Jira
The project tracker everyone loves to hate. Powerful, complex, enterprise-standard. Your company probably uses it.
Asana
Project management that non-technical teams actually enjoy. Clean UI, good automations, solid free tier.
Visual project management. Colour-coded boards that make status updates obvious. Teams love the flexibility.
The doc everyone defaults to. Real-time collaboration, clean, free, and it just works. No reason to overthink it.
Spreadsheets that do more than you think. Formulas, pivot tables, integrations. Most startups run on these longer than they admit.
Clean, collaborative presentations. Not as flashy as Keynote, but free and everyone can edit.
Custom email, Drive, Docs, Sheets under your domain. The boring-but-right business move.
Quick surveys and forms, zero learning curve. Not pretty, but free and gets responses fast.
The OG spreadsheet. Power users swear by it: macros, pivot tables, analysis that Sheets still can not touch.
Email that 1.8 billion people use. Labels, filters, and integrations with everything. You already know.
Knowledge base for small teams. Clean, searchable, AI-powered answers. Like Notion but focused on documentation only.
Docs and wiki for modern teams. Templates, approval workflows, and version control. Notion meets Google Docs meets GitHub.
Beautiful document editor for Apple users. Native macOS/iOS app, gorgeous exports. Notion if it was designed by Apple.
Beautiful API documentation. Write in MDX, get docs that look like Stripe's. Every developer tool should use this.
Open-source wiki and knowledge base. Self-hostable Notion alternative for teams that care about data ownership.
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