Do I need rollups any more?

We’re often asked "Why should I use Rollups over Formulas in Notion [now that lists are supported]?

Here's the TL;DR:

• Rollups show rich objects where Formulas do not (In Formulas, referenced multi-selects get turned into strings, for example, so UI filters aren't as useful).
• Rollups are much easier to create/use if you need simple calculations! Zero code!
• Your formulas will break if you change a status or select since the values are hard-coded in the formula. Advantage rollups!
• Notion's Engineers have said Formulas should be faster, but I have no evidence or ability to verify this. It's probably about the same.

See below for how to recreate all of Notion’s Calculate functions available in rollups with Notion Formulas 2.0.

Setup

Let’s start with a simple setup with SCR Things being related to SCR Values. Each related page has a Value associated with it, which is a number property. You can see I’ve purposefully left one blank and one set to zero to make sure our calculations will be accurate.

SCR Things

SCR Values

Count all

We know we can get the count of all the Values related to the “A” record with a rollup set to Count all. And, indeed, the Count all (Rollup) rollup shows the count of the related pages.

Count all rollup

To recreate this with a formula is pretty simple, we just have to count the length of the list of Values.

prop("Values").length()