Stack replacement
Replacing Notion, Jira and Slack
Two tools you can connect this afternoon and one that is a project with a start date and an owner.
What the move costs
Notion, Jira and Slack split cleanly into two halves. Notion and Slack are in the Polaris connection catalog and need no export, so that half is done in an afternoon. Jira has no importer and no connector, and moving off it means a CSV export plus a manual rebuild of live issues. Treating those halves as one project is why these migrations stall.
- Connect today
- Notion and Slack
- Separate project
- Jira
- Jira import path
- CSV export, manual rebuild
- Software cost after
- $0, unlimited people
Two of these are not like the third
This is the most common stack in companies between twenty-five and a hundred people, and it usually arrived in layers. Slack came first because everyone needed to talk. Notion came second because someone wanted the handbook somewhere better than a shared drive. Jira came third, when engineering got big enough that a board in Notion stopped being credible.
Because it arrived in layers, it can leave in layers too, and that is the useful insight for this combination. Notion and Slack are both in the connection catalog, which means the first half of this migration involves no export, no cutover and no argument. Jira is a different kind of task, with a real cost and a real risk, and it deserves its own timeline.
Most failed consolidations here fail because someone scoped all three as one initiative, ran into the Jira workflow scheme in week two, and lost the momentum that the easy half would have given them.
The three seams, and which half each belongs to
| Seam | Where work is lost | Fixed by |
|---|---|---|
| Slack to anywhere | Decisions scroll past and never reach a task | The free half. Connect Slack, approve Inbox suggestions |
| Notion to Jira | The spec and the ticket stop agreeing after grooming | The free half, partly. A worker can flag the differences |
| Jira to Notion | Closed issues never update the page that described them | The Jira half. Only closing when tracking moves |
| Jira to Slack | Bot notifications that nobody reads and cannot be replied to | The free half. Inbox suggestions replace the firehose |
Half one: this afternoon
No export, no risk, and it costs nothing because the software is free.
- 1
Connect Slack and Notion
Two authorisations, org-wide, credentials verified live and stored server-side. Slack starts feeding the Inbox with prefilled task suggestions. Notion becomes readable to any AI worker you give the connection to.
- 2
Import the handbook, not the workspace
Run the Notion importer over the pages people actually open. Twenty-five per run, sub-pages three levels deep, capped at sixty pages and fifteen hundred blocks. Read the skipped count afterwards, because it tells you how much of your documentation was tables and screenshots rather than words.
- 3
Put the company's non-negotiables in Focus
Focus is the home screen, a time-based lane across today, this week and the next thirty days, pinned first in every view. It is the one thing this stack has no equivalent of, because a Jira board answers what a team is doing and never answers what must not slip.
Half two: the Jira decision
A separate project with its own owner. Run it only after the first half has been live for a month.
- 1
Find what outside Jira reads Jira
Deploy gates, alerting integrations that open tickets, compliance reports built on issue history. Every one of these has to be rewritten or left in place. Polaris has no workflow engine and no issue transitions for them to hook into.
- 2
Rebuild one team's live board
CSV export for the archive, manual creation for the live work, an owner and a date on every task as you type it. Leave the backlog behind deliberately. Items that matter get raised again within a fortnight.
- 3
Drop write seats, keep the archive
Cancel seats rather than the account once nobody needs write access. Keeping the history readable costs a fraction of what full seats cost and removes the only genuinely irreversible step from this plan.
Read next
Replacing Notion and Jira
The spec lives in one product, the work lives in another, and the two stop agreeing about four days in.
Replacing Jira and Slack
Engineering teams on Jira and Slack have a tracker, a chat tool, and specs living in ticket descriptions.
Replacing Jira, Confluence and Slack
An Atlassian estate with a chat tool bolted to it, and exactly one piece of that you can move this quarter.
Connect Slack to Polaris
Six scopes, no access to direct messages, and a bot that only reads the channels somebody invited it into.
Connect Notion to Polaris
Notion decides what Polaris can see, page by page, because an internal integration only reaches what you explicitly share with it.
Jira pricing, checked August 2026
The only vendor in this cluster whose per-user price you cannot read off a page.
Tool stack cost for a 50-person team
Three work tools and two AI subscriptions, which is where most companies of this size actually are.
Questions people ask
+Why not move all three at once?
Because two of them require no work and one of them is a project. Bundling them means the easy half waits on the hard half, and the hard half is where a Jira workflow scheme or a deploy gate stops everything. Connect Slack and Notion now, and put a date on the Jira conversation separately.
+Can we run Polaris and Jira side by side indefinitely?
Yes. Polaris software is free with no seat count, so running it alongside an existing stack has no licence cost. Plenty of teams end up with docs and cross-functional work in Polaris and engineering tickets still in Jira, and that is a legitimate steady state rather than a failed migration.
+What does the Notion importer skip?
Images, files, embeds, tables, databases, synced blocks and column layouts, and it reports how many blocks it dropped. Numbered lists arrive as bullets and toggles arrive as bullets that no longer fold. Page properties, comments and version history never come across. Text, headings, lists, to-dos, quotes, code, callouts and dividers all do.
+Does connecting Slack mean Polaris posts into our channels?
Connecting brings Slack signals into the Polaris Inbox as suggestions that a human approves. Signals become suggestions rather than silent tasks. What any individual AI worker is allowed to do with a connection is set by the SKILL.md you write for it, which is a file you can read and edit rather than a hidden prompt.
+How much does this save a fifty-person company?
Three per-seat subscriptions multiplied by fifty people is the figure to beat, and the cost pages carry the current list prices with the date they were checked. After the move the software line is zero and the variable line is roughly two dollars per human-equivalent hour of delivered agent work, logged job by job and challengeable from the work log.
Related
Replacing Notion and Jira
The spec lives in one product, the work lives in another, and the two stop agreeing about four days in.
Replacing Jira and Slack
Engineering teams on Jira and Slack have a tracker, a chat tool, and specs living in ticket descriptions.
Replacing Notion, Linear and Slack
The default startup stack, three subscriptions, and a decision that has to be written down three times to stay true.
Replacing Jira, Confluence and Slack
An Atlassian estate with a chat tool bolted to it, and exactly one piece of that you can move this quarter.
Connect Slack to Polaris
Six scopes, no access to direct messages, and a bot that only reads the channels somebody invited it into.
Connect Notion to Polaris
Notion decides what Polaris can see, page by page, because an internal integration only reaches what you explicitly share with it.
Jira pricing, checked August 2026
The only vendor in this cluster whose per-user price you cannot read off a page.
Tool stack cost for a 50-person team
Three work tools and two AI subscriptions, which is where most companies of this size actually are.