Does Notion Work in China?

Is Notion blocked in China?

Not in GreatFire Analyzer’s latest tests of Notion’s websites, but some travel guides say it is. GreatFire, which tests websites from mainland China, lists notion.so and www.notion.com as not blocked. Its latest tests of the two were on October 18 and October 14, 2026. Its last test of www.notion.so, on August 8, 2026, also found it not blocked.

GreatFire revised these verdicts. It says that since late August 2026, refused connections have also shown up on routes with no other sign of interference, so it no longer counts them as evidence of blocking. Before the change, these pages read partly disrupted. GreatFire still rates the notion.so and notion.com domains as mixed, because results vary between Notion addresses.

Your workspace may now load from a different address. In June 2026, Create With, a site that tracks product updates, reported that Notion had finished moving workspaces from notion.so to app.notion.com. We found no Notion page that confirms it. GreatFire doesn’t have enough recent data on app.notion.com to give a verdict.

21YunBox, which sells web hosting and compliance services for China, said its own test from an Alibaba Cloud server in Zhangjiakou, in mainland China, loaded Notion on August 30, 2026. It added that Notion’s reachability from China has varied over time. In August 2024, a user-written post on sspai, a Chinese tech site, said Notion loaded slowly in China.

Some travel sites say the opposite. Travel China Now said in June 2026 that Notion has been blocked since 2020 and doesn’t load on local Wi-Fi or Chinese SIM cards. China Survival Kit lists Notion among completely blocked services, in a list it says it reviewed in October 2026. Because the reports disagree, we list Notion as unreliable.

Pages published to the web on notion.site get mixed results too. GreatFire lists some as blocked and others as loading normally.

Blocked for a day in May 2020

On May 25, 2020, Notion’s status account on Twitter said its service had been “blocked by a firewall in China,” TechNode reported. Users on Weibo complained that they had lost access to their notes overnight. About 24 hours later, Notion told TechCrunch it had been unblocked in most regions of China and that most users could reach their data. TechCrunch noted that the block came during China’s annual parliament meeting, when censorship normally tightens.

Getting the app

Notion’s app for iPhone and iPad is listed in Apple’s App Store in mainland China. Install the desktop or mobile app before you fly anyway, because Notion’s offline pages work only in the apps.

We found no Notion help page that restricts users in China. Notion’s help center does have one for Russia: since September 9, 2024, Notion has cut off users located there, citing U.S. sanctions.

Use Notion offline in China

Notion’s offline mode lets you open and edit pages without a connection, whether or not Notion loads in China. It’s on every plan, in Notion’s desktop and mobile apps, but not in a web browser. Set it up at home, using Notion’s steps:

• Open each page you need, select ••• at the top, and turn on Available offline. A progress bar shows the download.
• Do this on each device. Pages you download on your phone aren’t automatically on your laptop.
• Download subpages one by one. They don’t download with their parent page.
• For a database, Notion downloads the first 50 rows of its first view. Download any other rows you need individually.

On paid plans, Notion also downloads your recently visited and favorited pages. Go to Settings → Offline to see which pages are saved.

Offline, you can create pages and edit the ones you downloaded. Embeds, AI blocks, forms and buttons need a connection, and you can’t share pages or change permissions. Notion syncs your changes when you’re back online. In China, that may take a roaming eSIM or a VPN.

To keep a copy outside Notion, export the page as a PDF: select •••, open More, choose Export, then pick PDF.

Access Notion in China with a roaming eSIM or VPN

An eSIM that routes your data abroad carries it to a gateway outside mainland China before it reaches the internet. Airalo, which sells eSIMs, says blocked sites then open without a VPN, as long as you use the eSIM’s data rather than hotel Wi-Fi. A VPN does the same on any connection, including hotel Wi-Fi. See eSIM or VPN for China, VPNs that work in China and VPN for hotel Wi-Fi in China.

Travel China Now says Notion works over a VPN or on international roaming data. It warns against relying on a VPN alone for anything critical, because VPNs drop at inconvenient moments.

Notion alternatives in China

Several Chinese apps work much like Notion. In a 2022 comparison on sspai, a Chinese tech site, a writer said the main draw of FlowUs and Wolai for users in China was no network obstacles and a Chinese interface.

• FlowUs (息流). A knowledge management app from a Hangzhou company, with cloud documents, database tables and file folders. It imports CSV and Markdown files.
• Wolai (我来). A notes and team collaboration app from a Shanghai company, with database tables, several views and links between blocks.
• Yuque (语雀). A document and knowledge base tool for people and teams. Yuque says it’s built on the security technology of Ant Group, the company behind Alipay. Travel China Now says it’s popular with Chinese teams.
• Feishu Docs (飞书文档). Shared documents in Feishu, ByteDance’s workplace app, which has an international version called Lark, TechCrunch reported. Feishu Docs supports real-time editing by several people.

To move your pages, Notion exports pages as Markdown and full-page databases as CSV.

For other work tools, see Slack in China, Microsoft 365 in China and Google Docs, Drive and Meet in China.