Visualizing Your Notion Data: A Guide to Creating Charts from Notion Databases (before native Notion Charts)

Dec 8

This essay and video were published before it was possible to create charts natively in Notion.
This content is still applicable, but you may find it easier to create charts natively in Notion now that there is the option.
Read/watch how to create native Notion Charts here.

If you store information about your business processes on Notion, such as project management data, marketing campaigns, content calendars, or other business management processes, it can be valuable over time to provide insights into key patterns and internal knowledge. This information can help you and your leadership team make informed decisions and draw conclusions from the data. Despite the useful information contained in your Notion databases, as of December 2023, there are no native charts or summary widgets available, preventing you from visualizing and pulling rich insights from your data.

As a data analyst or a leader in your team, you understand the immense value of having an up-to-date dashboard with analytics and charts that are automatically refreshed at regular intervals as your team uses the databases in your Notion workspace. This can enhance your team's decision-making capabilities and allow you to share valuable insights with senior leaders or board members without having to invite them to navigate the complex Notion interface.

If you're wondering whether there's a way to create embeddable charts from Notion databases using third-party tools in this age of analytics and APIs, the answer is yes (as of December 2023). This article explores various possibilities for creating charts from Notion databases, some of which are relatively simple and rely on third-party tools designed to integrate with Notion, while others are more complex and scalable, leveraging the Notion API and established analytics tools.

How to create charts from Notion databases

As a data analyst or a leader, you have several options available to create charts from Notion databases. You can select the most suitable solution based on your current situation and data analytics requirements. Below is a list of the main tools that can be used to create charts from Notion databases. Some of these tools are custom solutions and offer more powerful features (e.g., Graphext, Coda, Tableau, Power BI), while others have a simple interface and chart options that work well but are not very customizable (e.g., Notion2Charts, Grid). The quality of your data will also affect your ability to create meaningful charts. Before creating visualizations, it may be useful to define the type of visualizations you want to produce from your data sources, and determine whether all the necessary data points are present in them.

Without API

There are options available that do not require the use of the Notion API or much effort on your part. These tools have a seamless integration with Notion through a native integration, and you can use them in a plug-and-play fashion. Simply provide the link to the Notion databases you want to use, and the tools will fetch all the data for you. You can then choose how often you want to sync updates from Notion to your preferred tool.

Graphext

Graphext is one of the most advanced “plug-and-play” solutions for creating charts from Notion databases. It is an advanced data analytics tool for businesses, and they only recently released their native Notion integration. Once you give access to the Graphext bot to your target Notion databases, you can simply select which database to use as the source of your chart, and several options are pre-populated for you depending on the type of data in your database. One unique feature of Graphext is its graph, an interconnected visual representation of the data providing unique insights on the relationships of pages in your database. This can be especially useful for knowledge management systems or “Second Brains”.

You can create as many chart variations and types as you like due to the advanced nature of this tool. Finally, since Graphext is a web-based application, you can get the link to any graph and embed it on any Notion page, allowing you to create a visual dashboard directly on a Notion page, composed of embedded widgets.

ChartBase
ChartBase (previously Notion2Charts) is a simple and effective plug-and-play solution for creating visualizations from your Notion databases. It was purposefully created to integrate with Notion databases, and the user experience is optimized for Notion users and beginners in data visualization. This is a straightforward tool that can be most beneficial when you want to quickly create charts from Notion databases and you do not need advanced customizations or chart types. ChartBase is embeddable on any Notion page, also allowing you to create a widget-based dashboard on any Notion page.
Grid
Similar to Graphext, Grid is a tool that allows you to create graphs from several software tools, including Notion. Their approach to graphs is document-based, in which you create graphs as part of documents, intertwined with text and other elements on the page. When integrating a Notion database in Grid, the tool automatically creates a copy of your source database in Grid in the form of a simple spreadsheet-like table that you cannot modify (since it is a “copy” of the Notion database) and that you can use as the source of your data visualizations. The graph options are quite simple and the user experience is streamlined and rather beginner-friendly.

Middle ground

Coda
An alternative solution to create charts from Notion databases is Coda. I am personally currently using this solution for some of my data because of the degree of customization and native control this option provides. In Coda, you can use the Notion Pack to automatically sync data from your Notion databases of choice to a Coda doc. This creates an exact “copy” of your Notion databases as Coda tables that you can customize as needed for data analytics purposes. That is a clean solution because you can add any extra columns as needed directly to the Coda tables, without impacting the source Notion database in any way. When you use Notion with non-technical users, this is an advantage because it avoids clutter in the properties seen and used by the end users.
Coda has native charts, which makes it easy to create visualizations from your synced tables, without the use of third-party tools. One disadvantage of this option is that the maximum number of rows supported by the synced table is 10,000. This can prove to be a significant limitation for scalability.

With API

When it comes to optimizing for scalability, using established data analytics tools can be a wise choice because of the amount of data they can comfortably store. Below are more advanced data visualization solutions that you can use by integrating them with your desired Notion databases via the API (application programming interface). The advantage of these options is their scalability and advanced customization capabilities. Their disadvantage is in the maintenance “costs” they may require, as the APIs of the tools may vary over time, servers sometimes fail, or data structures change and temporarily “break” the underlying API calls until updated.

Airtable
One advanced option for creating charts from Notion databases is Airtable. This is also a no-code tool, which makes it easy to create graphs through Airtable Interfaces. You can sync data from Notion to Airtable via the API of these tools, by using Make/Zapier/Pipedream, or your custom solution. In Airtable, you would create one Base, composed of multiple tables—one table for each database you intend to sync from Notion. Each table would contain all the columns you intend to sync from Notion. Similar to the Coda solution explained above, this approach creates an exact “copy” of your Notion databases, and syncs the data regularly to Airtable. Once the Base structure and data are there, you can create charts via Interfaces.
Tableau
Tableau is a business intelligence software. It is one of the most scalable and advanced tools mentioned in this essay, and is well-established in the market, as part of Salesforce. With Tableau, you can manipulate data and use it for descriptive, predictive, or prescriptive analytics, depending on your needs. You can upload a CSV file of your Notion database to Tableau. You can download a CSV file of Notion databases from the three dots at the top right corner of the database, selecting “Export”, and choosing “Markdown and CSV” among the available options. Currently, it is not possible to publish a data source to Tableau via the API, which makes this solution involve a human in the loop.
Power BI
Similar to Tableau, Power BI is a business intelligence software (owned by Microsoft). This tool has an available API to create, update, or delete datasets and their rows. Therefore, you may use the Notion and Power BI APIs to automatically sync data from your Notion databases into Power BI and seamlessly keep the data analytics tool up to date for effective visualizations. In particular, the POST dataset and POST rows endpoints can be useful in your pursuit of the automatic sync. First, you will need to create the tables you intend to sync in Power BI, using the same column names and data types as in Notion. Once all the tables are posted in Power BI, you can use them regularly to sync data from Notion databases to the Power BI tables. You can implement this automation with a low-code tool such as Make (or similar), or through your custom API calls.

Once you select the tools you intend to use (or before then), it can be beneficial to ensure your data in Notion is well-structured and ready to be used for analytics insights. You can then define the data that you want to visualize in your analytics dashboard, assess what properties you may need to create those visualizations, and finally proceed with creating the charts that you may embed on your Notion pages or keep outside of Notion. Over time, you will maintain the system to ensure the data sync is happening correctly, and update any structure as your systems evolve.