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A Notion Sites alternative, for when the doc needs to be a website

Notion Sites is the shortest path from “I wrote this in Notion” to “this is on the web”. You click publish, you get a notion.site address, and the page updates when you edit it. If the thing you are publishing is a doc, a wiki, a job board or a reading list, that is hard to beat, and you should keep using it.

This post is for the narrower case: you published a Notion page as a landing page or a small product site, and it is starting to feel like a doc pretending to be a website.

Where Notion Sites wins

You already wrote it. The content is in Notion, your team edits it there, and publishing is a toggle. With Micropage, you write a .page file, which is a small syntax to learn, even if an agent writes most of it.

It is free to publish. Notion lets every plan publish unlimited pages to the web, with one notion.site domain on Free and up to five on paid plans (pricing, Sites availability). Micropage’s free plan is one project.

Databases. A Notion database published as a site gives visitors filterable tables, galleries and boards. Micropage has tables, but they are plain text in the file, not a database.

Collaboration. Comments, mentions and many people editing the same page are what Notion is built for. Micropage is one account and a file.

Where it gets awkward for a website

It looks like Notion. A Notion Site is a published Notion page: blocks, toggles, Notion’s typography. Paid plans add site customizations such as a header bar, favicon and light or dark mode. For a doc, that is right. For a product page with a hero, columns, buttons and a call to action, it is the wrong shape.

A Micropage site is built from website parts. Here is a complete one:

[site]
title: Harbor
description: Nightly backups for your Notion workspace

[nav]
Pricing -> /pricing
btn: Join -> /#waitlist

[Home -> /]

/// hero align:center
h1: Your Notion workspace, backed up nightly
p: Set it once. Restore any page, any day.
button: Join the waitlist -> /#waitlist

/// section

col:
  h3: Nightly
  p: Every page and database, every night.

col:
  h3: Restorable
  p: Pick a day, get the page back.

/// section
form: waitlist
input: Email*
submit: Get early access

It compiles to static HTML with one small stylesheet, self-hosted fonts and almost no JavaScript. Sitemap, robots.txt and Open Graph tags are generated (SEO notes).

Your own domain costs more than it looks. On Notion, a custom domain needs a paid plan, which is priced per member, plus a custom domain add-on of $8/month per domain billed annually or $10/month billed monthly. The add-on is also what removes Notion branding (Notion help).

Micropage Pro is $6/month or $49/year, flat: your own domain on up to 5 projects, no badge, the CLI, the MCP server and zip export. You add one CNAME and the certificate is handled for you (connect your own domain).

Forms go somewhere else. Notion has forms that fill a database, which is useful inside a workspace. On a Micropage site, the form is part of the page: three lines in the file, submissions stored per project, Turnstile and a spam filter in front. CSV export and a daily digest on Pro, webhooks on Pro+. Turn on Newsletter and the form collects subscribers, and on Pro you can email them a post. How forms work.

What stays the same

Writing in Markdown. If you like Notion because you can just write, Micropage posts are Markdown files with front matter, published at /content with an RSS feed, from the editor or the CLI. This post is one of them.

AI help. Notion has its own AI. Micropage has an AI tab in the editor, and on Pro an MCP server so Claude, Cursor or VS Code can edit and publish the site. The .page grammar is closed, so agents write valid markup instead of inventing components.

Getting out. Notion can export a workspace as HTML, Markdown and CSV, which is a fair exit for the content. On Micropage, the .page source is plain text on every plan, and Pro downloads any build as a static .zip that runs on any host.

So which

Use Notion Sites if the page is really a doc, a wiki or a database, your team already lives in Notion, and a notion.site address is fine. It is the better tool for publishing what you already wrote.

Use Micropage if the page is a landing page or a small product site, you want it to look like a website rather than a document, you want a form that works without wiring up a database, and you want your own domain without an add-on.

A common split: keep the docs on Notion, put the front door on Micropage, and link one to the other.

Free publishes a real site on a micropage.sh subdomain, forms included, without a card.

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