I guess for a lot of users like myself using Notion ship has sailed. Most of them have moved to Obsidian, with the new database feature of Obsidian, and it being free, I do not see why users would choose Notion over Obsidian.
Notion for my team, Obsidian for myself.
We do everything in Notion. Book time off, HR policies, run books, playbooks, knowledge dumps, project management, sprint management. Search is a lot better so it really opens up the use cases.
Imo, if you're building a company with the goal of selling it you should use Notion. Get your team to use it, and capture everything about your business. When you go to sell it you have the whole business packaged up in a searchable, interactive knowledge base.
And if you not going to sell it from the day one, but rather deliver something you promised to deliver (not necessarily promised to others), you may want to use a set of self-hosted tools. I guess.
> deliver something you promised to deliver (not necessarily promised to others), you may want to use a set of self-hosted tools.
I don't see how one follows from the other, the vast majority of people use tools to deliver value without really caring whether they're self hosted or not
You missed ‘I guess’ in the quote, but anyway. The idea is that the parent commenter said about the intent to sell the company, and I’ve got the impression it’s a day-one intention. Like, we’re building a company to sell it. So if I’m planning to do the opposite, deliver some actual value and ideally never sell it, what should I do then? Is it self-hosting then? That’s why I’m saying ‘I guess.’ It’s an open question.
But I don't know why you'd guess such a thing. People have companies that they deliver value with and do not have an intention to sell yet nevertheless they don't use self hosted tools (in fact, doing so might a net negative as their time is valuable). So I simply don't get where this non sequitur came from. And like the other commenter said, you have an implicit assumption that those who want to sell a company haven't delivered value, well, what is the acquiring company paying for then if not value?
Your comment implies people who build companies with the intent to sell don't build companies that deliver value. That couldn't be further from the truth. There is nothing wrong with wanting to build something of value and don't want to work forever. Also, just because you don't see the value doesn't mean the value isn't there.
You're right, though, people who build businesses they have no intent of selling will also get similar value. They also reduce their hit by buss factor, make onboarding new employees easier, and so on.
I was simply offering one perspective. I don't think any commenter provides every single perspective, or when speaking on a product, all that products value.
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I've never heard of companies using Obsidian. Notion isn't really marketed or suitable for individuals (even if their free plan says otherwise).
I think you're correct. But I remember back around 2020 when Notion became very popular, it was definitely marketed toward individuals like students, or professionals who wanted to do a lot of planning or organization related to their working/personal lives.
I actively used Notion with a lot of my fellow students at the time. I've subsequently gravitated towards Joplin for 'richer' content and Obsidian for general text.
I love notion for school stuff. The databases are just absolutely neccesary for me, and collaboration is a must for me (and without a paid subscription as well). I'm going to check out Obsidian Bases too though now they're out.
yeah, when I downloaded the beta back in 2017/2018, I was using it as a replacement for Evernote. It was amazing. As the feature bloat made it slower and as the push towards companies made it less individual-focused, I started to use it more for group projects and now for teams.
Obsidian is just better for writing especially longer notes etc. Notion is great for sharing data intensive stuff, nicely formatted docs, and for collaborating.
That's somewhat true for team collaboration, but not if you consider individuals on teams. There are people at least 10,000 companies using Obsidian, and some large corporate sponsors. See obsidian.md/enterprise
I'm an "enterprise user" of Obsidian, but all I use it for is personal note taking at work. My company shows up on that page because I get them to pay for a commerical license. Outside of that it isn't an official internal tool. I don't use it to work on projects together with my teammates, for example.
Oracle has 162,000 employees, but because about 25 people total asked for reimbursement for licenses, they're on that page.
Isn't that pretty much how every "Trusted by these companies" marketing badge works nowadays?
I use Notion extensively as an individual, but I spend a lot of time thinking about knowledge management and have accordingly tuned it pretty closely to my typical workflows. Without that initial time investment it can be overwhelming.
It is suitable for individuals, I used it for a couple years and was very happy with it. I only decided to move on because I wanted a local database that I could mine as my personal knowledge base.
Notion works great for me as a store of WYSIWYG documents that I can drag around in a hierarchical set of pages. This means that I can easily use it on my phone, on the go.
But I don't use any of its Database functionality, or any of the other 90% of its features.
Notion needs to fear all of the people using (and loving) Obsidian at home that want to use it for work.
Notion is going to have a very hard time turning corporate Notion users into at-home/personal Notion users. Obsidian has already won this use case with one of the most rock-solid products ever.
Now Obsidian gets to fight the battle for corporate on their terms. And their tool is already developer friendly.
There are a million Obsidian champions, and there's probably a dozen of them in your org. I think Notion should be shaking in their boots right about now.
If Obsidian can get their organization management and syncing/backup strategy right, and if they make their product interface well with distributed git automations, Obsidian is going to take over so many new workflows. Not just knowledge bases, but mdbook -> webpage workflows, documentation, customer-facing pages, everything.
Notion makes product managers smile. Obsidian makes developers and product managers smile.
> Notion is going to have a very hard time turning corporate Notion users into at-home/personal Notion users. Obsidian has already won this use case with one of the most rock-solid products ever.
I don't think that's true; my (admittedly limited) understanding of Obsidian is that it strongly appeals to the type of person who reads HN; they're not going to appeal to someone who wants a WYSIWYG editor that they don't have to think about manually syncing with anything.
Obsidian makes developers smile, but it won't make sales people, customer service people, or executives smile unless they're already inclined to.
Apparently Amazon purchased a block of licenses recently. Since the product isn't usable without community extensions, the scale of data exfiltration resulting from this asinine idea will be staggering, and is likely underway.
> Since the product isn't usable without community extensions
Love when people just spout straight bullshit without any substance to it.
Gladly using Obsidian with no community extensions. It is completely usable as a PKM without any additions.
You're defending your own low standards with respect to software usability. That's fine, but not overly relevant.
Notion is used individually by a lot of students
For me, a lot of it is that the "plumbing on the outside" approach of Markdown isn't nice. I don't understand why anyone thinks that seeing and editing format codes all over the place is good UX in 2025.
Maybe Obsidian appeals to a particular type of techie who uses Vim and stores all their files locally, compared to someone who isn't technical and just wants "documents in the cloud".
I should add that I dislike Notion for most things. In particular, the database support (which a lot of people here are singing praises about), tables, lack of diagramming, and the poor search.
But my main problem with Notion and other document systems is that invariably dissolve into the equivalent of a hoarder's house, full of outdated, hard-to-find garbage deeply buried under other garbage.
That's because Notion only has hierarchy. It doesn't have a sense of "cross cutting". So everyone organizes their stuff in completely different ways, and you have to deal with poorly thought-out folder hierarchies. Where I work, any attempt to carefully "garden" pages is futile because there is no discipline enforced by the tool.
Lately I've been using Linear as a replacement for Notion for some things, and it's just a much better designed tool.
> I don't understand why anyone thinks that seeing and editing format codes all over the place is good UX in 2025.
For the same reason they liked it in the UX of 1985 and 1995...because Markdown gives you the ability to actually see the format codes that create your formatting and fix them if they're not what you want.
Now Obsidian (or any other Markdown editor) certainly isn't WordPerfect, but the one thing that diehard WordPerfect users loved was the ability to hit "reveal codes" and gain exacting control over their formatting...something Microsoft Word has never even tried to do. Markdown is far, far simpler, but the same control is there.
The reason I don't buy into this is that it shouldn't be necessary: If I've marked a word as bold, I can see it without format codes. The rendering is the desired outcome. In modern documents there's no kind of magical markup that somehow cannot be visualized "canonically". Format codes are less efficient as a representation because they obscure the "real" representation.
By analogy, to me it's like people preferring to draw by writing SVG, when drawing lines and circles is much more natural in a visual medium. Its not like sheet music where notation describes a completely different medium.
> I don't understand why anyone thinks that seeing and editing format codes all over the place is good UX in 2025.
Because if you can see them you can fix them when they inevitably get fucked up. (Literally commenting immediately after fixing some formatting that Confluence broke, like I do every day)
> "I don't understand why anyone thinks that seeing and editing format codes all over the place is good UX in 2025."
Two neatly separated editing, or one editing plus one preview, mode(s) don't equate to "all over the place".
> "But my main problem with Notion and other document systems is that invariably dissolve into the equivalent of a hoarder's house, full of outdated, hard-to-find garbage deeply buried under other garbage."
I have never used Notion. But if said program does support good enough search as well as tagging functionality (an essential of any KM tool to be considered at least decent), then the "hard-to-find and deeply buried" is on the user for being incompetent at managing (meta) data... which is often enough an inherited problem, e. g. through bad company policies or practices.
And if the tool, in 2025, does not support such essential functionality, the user is obviously also (at least partly) at fault: for choosing it.
> "That's because Notion only has hierarchy."
Easy to avoid as there have been lots of freeform knowledge management tools out there... since the likes of Lotus Agenda. In my experience their freeform-style makes them unpopular with most people for it takes... some... effort (e. g. discipline) to make proper use of them. Such software obviously has to be adapted for any corporate use, which makes them rather unpopular in that space. See below.
> "Where I work, any attempt to carefully "garden" pages is futile because there is no discipline enforced by the tool."
The garden's consistency and associated enforcement ("discipline") is the job of the gardener(s), not the tool.
You don't like Notion's hierarchy-only structure... but then complain about "poorly thought-out folder hierarchies" of the people that use it at your workplace. I mean... whatcha think is gonna happen when you introduce your crowd to powerful freeform KM tools... in a structure that is hierachical (your workplace) and conducts its affairs accordingly? XD
> I don't understand why anyone thinks that seeing and editing format codes all over the place is good UX in 2025
Lightweight markups in most basic usage are essentially punctuation extensions to natural language. It enables the UX in that what feels and looks like punctuation doubles as the effective key command you'd want to know for changing formatting modes anyways. This is why you'll find people like writers who like it.
TBH I'd prefer either Sharepoint's forced edit boxes or raw markdown over the hot mess that is editing in confluence. Pick a side and be done with it.
Linear the project management software?
Yep!
Tech-savvy people indeed do have some very interesting (while out of touch) perspectives.
Who needs SaaS when you can engrave your own punch cards?
I don't think Obsidian is even a major player in tech-savvy circles. I'd point to Apple Notes instead.
It's a major player for personal notes. Eg
> Love letter to @obsdmd to which I very happily switched to for my personal notes. My primary interest in Obsidian is not even for note taking specifically, it is that Obsidian is around the state of the art of a philosophy of software and what it could be.
— https://x.com/karpathy/status/1761467904737067456
And there's a lot of interest from tech-savvy folks wanting to use it at work. (Said as a cofounder of a co making business multiplayer tools)
Yeah why do you need a Markdown editor when you can just write normal text files. Personally I find the source to be more readable than the "rendered" view from Obsidian.
Obsidian is great for solo use, but then so is Apple Notes and a dozen similar options. Where Notion shines is team based sharing and collaboration. There's really nothing else like it with the same feature set.
Once iOS 26 drops Apple Notes will be much-much more useful with the combination of supported linking between notes and supporting Markdown.
Before it rapidly became untenable as a place to actually store my notes. I use it more as a "temporary note" that will be moved to the proper place later.
It's nice if you're on just Apple but if you use Mac, Linux, Windows, Android, iOS all mixed together it's pretty useless. Like most of apple's stuff.
I have been using Apple Notes' Import to Notes and Import Markdown features a lot in macOS 26 and it has been great so far.
What feature set exactly? Describe what makes it so amazing. Basically collaboration? Notes has that too.
Ever try to use the collaboration feature in Apple Notes? I find it remarkable how unreliable is.
Have Obsidian stopped requiring that you pay for a commercial license to use for work? I know it wasn't enforced but I think the free license limited you to personal use.
I bought a commercial license three years ago, and I don't really mind paying it, but then my job for the last year expressly forbid the use of Obsidian [1], and as such I didn't feel compelled to keep paying, though I still used it for personal stuff.
I looked at their website and it looks like the commercial license is optional now?
I don't really mind paying for it, I think it's a pretty decent notes app and I probably get more than $50/year of value out of it.
[1] I'm not 100% sure why, I think it might have been because the people doing the approvals thought that the Sync was an intrinsic to the app and they were afraid of company secrets going out.
> Have Obsidian stopped requiring that you pay for a commercial license to use for work?
I don't know if they ever required that, but they certainly do not now. They encourage purchase of a commercial license, but it explicitly is not required.
From the FAQ on their pricing page:
Do I have to pay for commercial use?
No. You are not required to pay for a commercial license, however if you are using Obsidian for work in an organization we encourage you to purchase a commercial license to keep Obsidian independent and 100% user-supported.
I don't get it. The pricing page only lists paid options. Not a free tier. What am I missing here?
There are no tiers or different features, just their own sync service is a paid service, and the commercial license is paid but optional.
Otherwise the free Obsidian has everything, and there are other plugins for self hosted syncing that don't use the paid service.
but without syncing is basically unusable, or can I access my texts from my pc and my cell for example?
You can absolutely sync your vault without a paid subscription. Simply save it within your OneDrive or Google Drive folder. Alternatively, you could use Syncthing if you prefer a self-hosted solution.
You can, but _you_ need to figure out how to do it.
If don't know how or can't be bothered, you can pay for Obsidian Sync - which Just Works.
I tried to roll my own syncing with syncthing and iCloud and Dropbox. In the end I spent so much time debugging and dealing with files clobbering each other mid-sync I figured out $4/month to support a project I use daily isn't too much.
Zero problems since and I use Obsidian regularly on 4 different devices.
Plenty of other sync options in the plugins if you didn't see the last part of my comment, or you can just sync the Obsidian directory with Syncthing.
Thanks, I misread what you said about the plugins. Will take a look then. thanks.
I wouldn't say it is unusable lol. Many people don't need to sync. My work notes for example stay on my work computer.
For those that want to sync without paying, many use syncthing, though I don't think this is a feasible workaround for iOS users.
There are some other syncing methods that I haven't really looked into.
Seconding this. I use Obsidian and Obsidian Sync for personal stuff, but my employer doesn't allow Sync, so I use Obsidian very happily as a standalone on my work computer. The work vault simply never gets exposed to the outside world (we don't allow USB memory devices either).
I have my obsidian vault saved in local Google Drive folder. Saved changes are synced with Google Drive windows app.
I use DriveSync on Android to sync selected Gdrive folder to my phone.
It works.
Ah, fair enough. That's actually fairly recent.
Personally, I use Obsidian. But I can’t imagine using it with a team. There’s too much friction sorting out what extensions to use, making sure everyone knows how to use said extensions. I don’t see how Obsidian is feasible for teams. If anyone has experience making it work well for their team, I’d love to hear about it.
I've the dev behind Relay [0] (real-time collaboration for teams using Obsidian), and we work with a lot of teams who have switched over to using Obsidian for work. We just hit 10,000 users yesterday.
You don't need a lot of the plugins to be productive in Obsidian, but I think a superpower people are overlooking is that you can build your own plugins for company specific features/workflows quite cheaply.
Combine that with having everything local, and you can use tools like claude code to actually make use of the knowledge/context that you're creating.
I find it crazy that people are pushing data into locked-in systems like Notion only to be limited by their weak-sauce AI tools.
In contrast, we are all in on file-over-app -- keeping the files locally on your computer so you can actually use them. Many of our customers run their Relay Server on-prem for total document privacy.
I know a team at my work is using it, though I'm fuzzy on how. I think they have a shared OneDrive folder that they use as a vault. How they deal with locking and such I haven't a clue.
I dunno. I love Obsidian, but it has a huge learning curve and is not currently the type of tool that I see companies adopting when they need to have their employees adopt it’s use. Obsidian is way too overwhelming for the average user, whereas Notion is far more user-friendly and intuitive for people who just need to interact with the system to do their job.
Edit: Not to mention that (last I checked) Obsidian lacks a lot of granularity when it comes to permissions for editing pages. It would be very easy for a beginner user to disrupt the markdown files or the organizational system. Even doing things like applying labels or tags in the YAML is less intuitive and requires a lot of consistency guidelines for users to make it worthwhile. Notion facilitates this kind of thing a lot better.
By default Obsidian is a markdown editor with the ability to link to other notes with a pretty graph of your note links. What is overwhelming about that?
Obsidian can be extremely simple at it's core, but to structure everything and make it easy to use by an organization will likely require a whole lot of additional infrastructure and adherence to strict guidelines for organization. Notion seems far more intuitive in this way. Notion is also a bit limited when it comes to customization, but that limitation seems like more of an asset in this case because it produces consistency of style and usage patterns across the platform.
Also, I don't find the Obsidian graph to be practical for organizing or locating files. It's impressive to look at, but not that practical in my experience.
You need to get out of your bubble. Notion is so much more popular than Obsidian you cannot imagine. My dentist office uses Notion for example. Migrating out of Notion is also very difficult and for most people it isn't worth the hassle. Obsidian not being web based is also a con not a pro to the average person. The number of people leaving Notion for Obsidian is a rounding error.
Yep. Notion databases are also the best implementation seamless of ux I’ve seen for relational databases for end users. It could probably be made even smoother but I cannot imagine obsidian being competitive, having used it. Just too much hassle for things Notion handles smoothly.
I would like to have more of the content available offline automatically though, i.e all text and image content, and big files downloaded on request. Closer to local first than this.
> Notion databases are also the best implementation seamless of ux I’ve seen for relational databases for end users.
Have you ever tried Airtable? How does Notion compare?
I have taken a glance, the integration between documents and db tables is what makes notion relevant for me in this space though and i don’t see how airtable competes.
Yeah. I feel like the ratio is probably more than Windows vs Linux. Of course for many users the ship has been sailed and they've switched to Obsidian. But for many many many more users they never even heard of Obsidian.
I think the market is big enough for Notion and Obsidian to both exist.
I use both.
Obsidian is very powerful for quick entry and working on Markdown knowledge bases, and it's great. I use it to manage my digital garden among other things.
On the other hand, Notion is great for processing data. I use their databases extensively incl. their charts and whatnot. I also host a couple of read-only public pages for friends or family as documentation.
I think they cater to different use cases and doesn't replace each other. I'd certainly won't run my digital garden over Notion, or store the databases I keep in Notion in Obsidian. Obsidian's Bases fill a different need, for now.
Also, Notion slightly pivoted recently. They altered their “single person” oriented Pro plan and made Business their “Entry level, full fledged” plan. They do not cater to individuals anymore. Where obsidian is more geared towards individuals.
For some kinds of data processing having your files in a local folder is a prereq. Every day I have my Obsidian vault open in Zed, and I interact with files via the tool-calling agent panel and via terminal.
I haven't tried Notion AI, maybe it's great. But I can't imagine going back to a world where all my knowledge lives in Notion's house. Notion CEO Ivan Zhao recently said: "If you think about applications, each application is kind of like a mini-prison of computing". (https://www.theverge.com/decoder-podcast-with-nilay-patel/75...) I think he's right. I don't want to be in Notion's prison even if it's big and nice.
> For some kinds of data processing having your files in a local folder is a prereq.
Of course.
> open in Zed, and I interact with files via the tool-calling agent panel and via terminal.
Ah no, I don't use AI for that kind of tasks. I generally use my own formulae and what Notion provides Sans-AI.
> I haven't tried Notion AI, maybe it's great.
Me neither. I asked for authors and synopsis for a couple of books, that's all.
> I can't imagine going back to a world where all my knowledge lives in Notion's house.
Before going in, I always check how the Export works. Notion gives your text as Markdown and tables/databases as CSV, which is good enough for me.
I don't prefer to use services which I need to move my stuff by hand.
If I can make Bases work for me in Obsidian, I might move completely to Obsidian, but I need to test that first.
Edit: Looks like the functions Obsidian supports are not enough for me to move over yet.
I switched to silverbullet[0], you get to write lua instead of YAML or whatever these apps are pushing.
In our small (~12) product studio, we switched to Obsidian for team stuff as well and it’s working really well.
Collaboration on the same notes works just fine, even if there is no “live editing” (which we realised is not really useful for us anyway). The fact that notes are just text files on disk has been transformative though - folks use the Shortcuts app, scripts and what not to manage and lookup things.
I like Obsidian a lot (especially for the ease of plugin development), but my impression is that most people don't use such comparatively heavy applications for managing their personal lives. It's more likely that they use a Google Keep or sticky notes just placed in random places. That leaves mostly enterprise use cases for such knowledge management tools, and Notion is much more full-featured for enterprise than Obsidian is.
web experience, many users do not use notion in an app
One thing I prefer in Notion is the index site, which is something Obsidian lacks.
PS: I’m aware there are plugins that solve this issue, but none of them have worked well enough for me.
Notion still has Database feature that Obsidian doesn't, e.g. a good Kanban board.
The AI search and multiplayer modes are still a strong differentiator.
Thank you, I downloaded the Obsidian app for iOS and I'm already sold. It has so many things I've wanted in a crisp clean UI.
Yeah, Obsidian is great. Enjoy.
Came here to say as much. No proprietary 'lock-in' with Obsidian, just plain .md, and honestly (if I recall correctly - it's been years now) I felt like I struggled using Notion's 'fancier' features. It seemed like copying/pasting out of it was often problematic.
Like others are saying, though, Notion is much more geared for collaboration. I couldn't care much less about that, so here I am with Obsidian, still, years later.
Yup. Too little, too late. Hard pass.
My only reasons for switching was performance and simplicity. (Okay, I guess now that I write out like that, it seems like a pretty substantial disillusionment.)
Notion was always very sluggish and bulky. If they added a simple way to very quickly load and write simple Markdown notes on desktop and mobile like Obsidian, I might not have switched. Meanwhile their mobile app was taking literally 10+ seconds to even open.
Are they comparable tools in a team context? The ease of linking documents to people and collaborating? Seems like solo, sure. But in a group.. Obsidian doesn't replace Notion at all.
Have you tried Relay [0]? It makes Obsidian work for groups by adding real-time collaboration features.
obsidian’s great for solo use, but for team collaboration, anytype is closer to notion-built-in group sync, permissions, and offline support. you don’t need plugins or external services for multi-user editing; it just works across devices
Anytype responds poorly to feedback and bug reports from users, they send LLM slop back for any feedback or bug reports sent to them.
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Appflowy is a great alternative
> users like myself
Nerdy devs are a niche.
HN is a tiny tiny bubble. Most users don’t know and wouldn’t care for obsidian or markdown etc.
I think is not a feature to appease the nerd community but for business users who are on the go.
I was a big Notion fan for years and am now solidly in the Obsidian camp.
Speed and local-first was originally the main differentiator, but over time Steph Ango's "file over app" philosophy has become my favorite feature.
Yesterday I used Claude Code to automate some Obsidian cleanup and it was trivial because everything's just a file.
Local-first becomes even better in combination with local LLMs.
yes! So many people are missing out on using claude-code directly on their knowledge base locally. Once you have it all local it seems completely crazy to push all of that context into a locked-in saas platform with mediocre AI tools.
You are not their current market, at all (individual vs team use) and your solution is unsuitable for theirs
People using their free offering for personal use is a critical part of Notion's sales pipeline. It's a hell of a lot easier to sell a piece of software to a company when all it's internal users have already trained themselves how to use it in their personal time. Those users are probably the ones generating the enterprise sales lead in the first place
See also: Google Docs
Yes but users who are satisfied by an alternative (Obsidian) which can't be used with teams aren't their audience. If the user wanted to introduce the tool to their team, they wouldn't be satisfied with Obsidian. Google Docs is one link share away from team-sharing. Obsidian requires ditching Obsidian to share the practice with your team.
Google Docs as a paid enterprise offering wouldn't fly without having Gmail lock-in and having that underpin Google SSO.
That's what Microsoft has that market sewn up with Office 365, despite being several years late to collaborative document editing -- Outlook anchors the whole thing together.
Never knew people viewed notion and obsidian in the same space.
i usually compare obsidian to joplin... seems like i should be looking more at obsidian because i was considering starting a new wiki in notion.
This is pretty impressive. A lot of people underestimate the amount of work required to make something available offline. Planning the syncing architecture alone is a monumental task, especially at the scale Notion operates. I built a custom sync solution for my own app, Brisqi (https://brisqi.com), and it took me weeks to get it right, albeit with some trade-offs.
Kudos to the Notion engineering team for achieving this milestone.
I'm a Notion fan but the lack of a native Linux app has me shopping for a replacement. Obsidian seems, from what I've seen, focused on the ability to graph notes, which I don't really care about. I want note-taking, list-making, and markdown friendly.
I do want to keep Notion's ability to work in a browser and to maintain a single, accessible store of my notes.
What are my options?
> Obsidian seems, from what I've seen, focused on the ability to graph notes, which I don't really care about. I want note-taking, list-making, and markdown friendly.
FWIW I use obsidian for "note-taking, list-making, and markdown friendly" and have not bothered with note graphs etc and it none of such features have gone on my way ever.
The good thing imo about obsidian is that it is perfectly possible to keep it all dead simple if that is what you want. The only "advanced" feature I use is rendering a slides-based presentation out of a markdown file (and setting up a css file for this). For any other notetaking or knowledge management tool I have spent more time configuring/learning to use it than actually taking notes.
For my uses, notion is unnecessarily complicated.
Note-taking, list making, and markdown friendly kind of describe obsidian. You can organize the files however you wish.
Zim wiki is brilliant. I've been using it for years. It's very extendable
> Zim handles several types of markup, like headings, bullet lists and of course bold, italic and highlighted.
OK, I think this may be a bit less powerful than Notion and Obsidian.
A good bit less powerful yes. But the simplicity is a huge strength when it comes to long term tech. I started using it in 2012 I believe.
The most important thing in any note taking app is to use it consistently and use it for years. And bring it with you as you change jobs.
Sometimes simple things that work in plain text files that can be exported and imported easily is what you need for long term note taking.
> I want note-taking, list-making, and markdown friendly.
I feel like you just described Obsidian. You can do more with tagging and linking but you definitely don't have to
Obsidian is a markdown editor. The graphing is not pushed, and can actually be disabled in the app settings. Very customizable. Worth a try!
I made the jump to AFFiNe (https://affine.pro/) a few months ago and have really liked using it. I am able to self host and have found it to be a _nearly_ 1:1 replacement for Notion. Affine's database implementation isn't nearly as nice though - but they are workable and they are improving.
My biggest gripe is that the OSS project is very oriented around a hosted product rather than the self hosted - so things like AI configuration is tricky at best and ive had to manually manipulate my account in the db to remove "free" user limitations.
I have the same set of requirements you’re describing and Obsidian is perfect.
You can disable the graph feature and never link any notes.
Obsidian's plug-in ecosystem is fantastic. I've used Obsidian for three years as a replacement for Notion, and I have never used the Graph mode. My Obsidian plugins enable automatic task synchronization with TickTick (where I manage my tasks) and allow me to set up features like templates. I strongly recommend giving it a spin.
The only downside for me is the inability to use it from a web browser. This isn't a major issue for my workflows.
What are you using to sync with TickTick?
Obsidian has all of that and more if you go for some of the advanced extensions. It's not about "graphing notes" as much as connecting a note to another. It's really not that different from inserting a page into the text of another page in Notion
if you’re open to something outside the browser, anytype runs natively on linux. local-first and e2e encrypted by default. you can sync via p2p or through backup nodes. markdown, lists, note-taking all covered - just no browser version yet
Joplin
Have you tried affine?
Offline mode is one of those features that sounds simple enough, but in reality gets pretty complex pretty fast, particularly if you want to do more meaningful capabilities or operations esp at scale.
Maybe it's just me, but nothing sounds simple about offline mode. The changeset resolution necessary to resync after going back online sounds TOUGH to build in a way that doesn't result in user data loss ever without being more cumbersome than it's worth.
I remember Notion talking about adding this YEARS ago. It has literally taken them YEARS to build this. So yes, very complex
I'm on a team building offline mode into an enterprise product at work and you are soooooo correct about this. Offline mode is a deceptively hard problem to begin with and it becomes 10x harder if you're trying to add it to a product that wasn't designed with offline mode in mind.
The best way to do it is right from the start. It's hard enough as is but adding it on after the fact is even harder.
For me one of the biggest issues with Notion (and to a smaller extent with Obsidian as well) is its ever present UI. When I write (or read) something, I don't want to see 20+ buttons scattered around distracting me from the content.
IA writer got this right, but it's too local and doesn't have colab or better online sync features. Shameless plug – I'm building https://kraa.io/about that's trying to be a writing app with a minimal, yet feature-rich, UI. (better offline and local-files functionality planned)
This is what differentiates Obsidian from many other note taking apps. Anyone who has an itch can build a plugin and customize it.
Unlike a venture-funded SaaS application there's no meaningful commercial incentive or issue with building something that will eventually get sherlock'd b the application vendor in the future.
Notion should enter "keyboard mode" as you start to type and fade out the header bar. You'll still need to close the sidebar since it's quite busy and we don't fade it automatically since it has an explicit toggle. I guess if you're building your own there's still too much noise. Good luck!
Yeah, that's a nice touch. Though the reading experience is also important. Notion is obviously super powerful and a more cluttered UI is hence probably unavoidable.
Are you talking about the sidebar? or is there some other element you'd like to disappear?
Oh, I like the minimalism of your start page, before you scroll.
In Obsidian you can disable almost all of the UI very easily in settings.
Only the Hider plugin did 'most' of the job. But yeah, Obsidian is good with this (with plugins)
Just use obsidian instead. Don't trust 3rd parties with your sensitive data if you dont have to - especially ones who've to IPO and delivet returns to investors
And obsidian is not open source either. If you rely on any of the functionality besides just raw text editing, you may lose it one day.
I recently migrated to Obsidian for personal use and configured it to sync my data to a private git repo that I can access across my devices. The data is all in markdown so I figure if Obsidian ever plays games I can migrate to another app pretty easily and still have my information intact and under my own control.
Kind of depends on which plugins you use and how much you depend on them. But in general yeah, local files and whatnot means you have very little risk of losing them if Obsidian shits the bed somehow.
Sure that's why I said text editing. But if you rely on any of it's extended functionality you are out of luck.
I don't see how "losing it one day" is possible for an offline app. Worst case scenario, I won't be able to update it, but I'm more than happy with what Obsidian offers currently.
It means if it's abandoned then it's not maintained and the longer ago that it stopped being maintained the harder it is to use quite often. I have some old truecrypt volumes and I had a hell of a time figuring out how to decrypt them. It's closed source but local only so exactly the same situation.
I don't understand how the benefits of open source are so easily downplayed.
But everything is stored as .md, which is ubiquitous. You'll still have access to your notes and be able to edit them with your preferred text editor.
This is always the argument but obsidian does a lot on top of these md files. NASA's mission control software stores data in JSON, it's an open format so I guess the NASA software is easily replaceable huh? If obsidian was such a thin layer then why isn't there a good open source alternative? People build their workflows on top of the obsidian functionality, not just the md data.
> but obsidian does a lot on top of these md files
What do they do besides the frontmatter (which is fairly trivial to process or ignore in a hypothetical future where one wants to stop using obsidian)?
this is only an issue if you use a ton of plugins
also, it's not unreasonable to think that a compatible alternative would be easier to build compared to a less standard format
I think the point they were making was obsidian by default does not upload to anyone's server, yes they sell obsidian sync but they also endorse using synthing instead.
My notes, which can include things like my location, appointments, plans, things I don't want a random company viewing never leave my device, which is the only way you can be sure they are not being viewed without an oss app.
That's cool. I typically don't use multiple or linked pages too often when I'm mobile, but there was always some kind of local cache for a page I had been reading or working on. This plugs one of the few annoyances I had.
Apparently in contrast to many of you, I think Notion is a better product for what I want, which is collaborative notes++. Personal info repo, shared project pages with people, and I straddle work and personal life using it everywhere. Tinkering with the backend is not a goal of mine, but I wonder if that's what people like about Obsidian.
Well this is good I suppose, but what I find rather alarming is how bad Notion used to (recently, maybe not after this?) behave when there was a connectivity or server issue. I figured with OTs and CRDTs, collaborative editing of rich text documents with intermittent connectivity was a solved problem. However, with Notion I've actually lost data, sometimes a lot of it. (Once when Notion was having some kind of outage, I silently lost an entire page I was working on.)
Personally, I don't really like Notion very much. Not silently losing data is a low bar to clear for an application that edits rich text. Notion didn't clear it.
Although I’m sure implementing this into a big codebase is a technical headache I hope this encourages other big Electron apps like Figma (or even Tana, a direct competitor) to support an offline mode of sorts.
can confirm - even building on crdts from the ground up in anytype was no small feat. adding them later to a cloud-first product like notion must’ve been a massive lift.. it reshapes the whole architecture. seeing this shift with more providers would definitely be welcome - too many apps still treat offline as optional, not essential
I'm surprised Figma doesn't support offline mode given this blog post about how they built it.
> Figma lets you go offline for an arbitrary amount of time and continue editing.
This sounds like they’re trying to support cases where you temporarily lose connection while editing a document. Very different from being able to start up your computer without an internet connection, open a document you’d previously downloaded, edit it, and sync sometime later once you come back online (which is what Notion now supports).
While we're here; as a long time zim-wiki user, and as someone who dabbled in org-mode for a year; Obsidian never felt compelling enough to switch.
For me, this year, Logseq did. The killer concept for me is that it does org-mode hierarchy and outline collapsing, but easier; being able to "zero in" on a block, regardless of whether its its own page is excellent.
I don't quite understand what you mean by that, but you seem pretty amped about it - do you have any recommended getting started guides for logseq? I've never heard of it before, and I'm curious about the feature you described.
It's very odd, I was looking around and none of the guides really clearly explain it, but basically, there are "Pages" (files) and "Blocks." Every page is itself a "Block," but may also contain multiple more blocks as an outline hierarchy. But what logseq seems to do differently is to let you zero in on a single block so that the block is all you see, despite ACTUALLY being merely part of a page.
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Just use Anytype. It‘s a free to use application where you actually own your data.
How do you guys save Slack messages which you want to either read or follow up at a later stage?
1. I was manually dumping the the link and manually adding the title.
2. Slack lists seems to be okayish but doesn't let me tag easily. Message is not highlighted as much as Later feature does.
3. Trying out Notion but it doesn't show message upfront.
I'm a little confused. They've supported offline for some time.
The article you posted doesn't mention "offline" at all. We use SQLite as a cache in the browser when available and in iOS/Android/desktop apps, but we didn't have any guarantee that a page you want offline is actually available offline.
It would "mostly work" offline before, but you could have cases where some blocks in a page aged out of the LRU, or they changed online in a way that invalidated the page but new content wasn't downloaded. When that happens we show a "go online to view" error instead of risking you viewing/editing a known-incorrect local snapshot of the page.
With "available offline", we now proactively download and keep up-to-date the content you want available offline. It will either work, or show an explicit error if things go wrong in the sync process. No more guesswork.
Been trying out [SiYuan](https://github.com/siyuan-note/siyuan) as a local alternative and love it so far. The files are single-line JSONs so not as ideal as Obsidian .md files, but it seems to be trivial to export to various human-friendly formats.
"It's true, we inserted disks into our beige towers and installed desktop software..."
"Let's get you to bed, grandma..."
We have strayed so far from God's light
If anyone is interested in an alternative Notes app for projects, I have my side project over here: https://www.lumifyhub.io
Finally!
The main aspect of this for me that is important is the ping. It seems like Notion hosts all their services in the US, and since i'm in Australia it somewhat annoys me the time it takes for pages to load. Just downloaded the update and it feels amazing.
The headline made me excited, the article left me disappointed. An offline mode that requires me to individually download the pages and database rows I’m expecting to need beforehand is not the kind of “offline mode” that meets my needs.
I haven't tried it yet but how do they handle conflicts?
Can someone report if it’s real actual offline first mode without some kind of ceremony before doing so.
I had to leave Notion far too many years ago and life is elsewhere.
At last! I remember asking for this almost 10 years ago.
ive wasted so much time fiddling with notion documents
INNOVATION!
> Remember to mark your pages as offline across your devices
Yeah, thanks, I’m good. Obsidian it is then.
when e2ee?
use anytype instead (i work at notion)
anytype has e2ee at its core - and you can verify it, since the code is open. can’t say the same for notion.
Oh, only 2 years after Notion AI. I guess we now know which is harder to create tickets for xD
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https://notesnook.com is better than Notion and Obsidian. The cross-platform apps are fast and smooth, and it have sync, which Obsidian requires a subscription for.
I was a notesnook subscriber. It was a good app riddled with some unpleasant bugs in their publish workflow, so I canceled after three months or so, sadly.
OTOH, you don't need to pay for Obsidian sync. You can sync it via any cloud provider or syncthing if you prefer.
I have a business related vault under Obsidian. It syncs via office's Nextcloud instance. I also added "Edit history" plugin, so I have unlimited diff and undo on that vault, too.
I guess for a lot of users like myself using Notion ship has sailed. Most of them have moved to Obsidian, with the new database feature of Obsidian, and it being free, I do not see why users would choose Notion over Obsidian.
Notion for my team, Obsidian for myself.
We do everything in Notion. Book time off, HR policies, run books, playbooks, knowledge dumps, project management, sprint management. Search is a lot better so it really opens up the use cases.
Imo, if you're building a company with the goal of selling it you should use Notion. Get your team to use it, and capture everything about your business. When you go to sell it you have the whole business packaged up in a searchable, interactive knowledge base.
And if you not going to sell it from the day one, but rather deliver something you promised to deliver (not necessarily promised to others), you may want to use a set of self-hosted tools. I guess.
> deliver something you promised to deliver (not necessarily promised to others), you may want to use a set of self-hosted tools.
I don't see how one follows from the other, the vast majority of people use tools to deliver value without really caring whether they're self hosted or not
You missed ‘I guess’ in the quote, but anyway. The idea is that the parent commenter said about the intent to sell the company, and I’ve got the impression it’s a day-one intention. Like, we’re building a company to sell it. So if I’m planning to do the opposite, deliver some actual value and ideally never sell it, what should I do then? Is it self-hosting then? That’s why I’m saying ‘I guess.’ It’s an open question.
But I don't know why you'd guess such a thing. People have companies that they deliver value with and do not have an intention to sell yet nevertheless they don't use self hosted tools (in fact, doing so might a net negative as their time is valuable). So I simply don't get where this non sequitur came from. And like the other commenter said, you have an implicit assumption that those who want to sell a company haven't delivered value, well, what is the acquiring company paying for then if not value?
Your comment implies people who build companies with the intent to sell don't build companies that deliver value. That couldn't be further from the truth. There is nothing wrong with wanting to build something of value and don't want to work forever. Also, just because you don't see the value doesn't mean the value isn't there.
You're right, though, people who build businesses they have no intent of selling will also get similar value. They also reduce their hit by buss factor, make onboarding new employees easier, and so on.
I was simply offering one perspective. I don't think any commenter provides every single perspective, or when speaking on a product, all that products value.
I've never heard of companies using Obsidian. Notion isn't really marketed or suitable for individuals (even if their free plan says otherwise).
I think you're correct. But I remember back around 2020 when Notion became very popular, it was definitely marketed toward individuals like students, or professionals who wanted to do a lot of planning or organization related to their working/personal lives.
I actively used Notion with a lot of my fellow students at the time. I've subsequently gravitated towards Joplin for 'richer' content and Obsidian for general text.
I love notion for school stuff. The databases are just absolutely neccesary for me, and collaboration is a must for me (and without a paid subscription as well). I'm going to check out Obsidian Bases too though now they're out.
yeah, when I downloaded the beta back in 2017/2018, I was using it as a replacement for Evernote. It was amazing. As the feature bloat made it slower and as the push towards companies made it less individual-focused, I started to use it more for group projects and now for teams.
Obsidian is just better for writing especially longer notes etc. Notion is great for sharing data intensive stuff, nicely formatted docs, and for collaborating.
That's somewhat true for team collaboration, but not if you consider individuals on teams. There are people at least 10,000 companies using Obsidian, and some large corporate sponsors. See obsidian.md/enterprise
I'm an "enterprise user" of Obsidian, but all I use it for is personal note taking at work. My company shows up on that page because I get them to pay for a commerical license. Outside of that it isn't an official internal tool. I don't use it to work on projects together with my teammates, for example.
Oracle has 162,000 employees, but because about 25 people total asked for reimbursement for licenses, they're on that page.
Isn't that pretty much how every "Trusted by these companies" marketing badge works nowadays?
I use Notion extensively as an individual, but I spend a lot of time thinking about knowledge management and have accordingly tuned it pretty closely to my typical workflows. Without that initial time investment it can be overwhelming.
It is suitable for individuals, I used it for a couple years and was very happy with it. I only decided to move on because I wanted a local database that I could mine as my personal knowledge base.
Notion works great for me as a store of WYSIWYG documents that I can drag around in a hierarchical set of pages. This means that I can easily use it on my phone, on the go.
But I don't use any of its Database functionality, or any of the other 90% of its features.
Notion needs to fear all of the people using (and loving) Obsidian at home that want to use it for work.
Notion is going to have a very hard time turning corporate Notion users into at-home/personal Notion users. Obsidian has already won this use case with one of the most rock-solid products ever.
Now Obsidian gets to fight the battle for corporate on their terms. And their tool is already developer friendly.
There are a million Obsidian champions, and there's probably a dozen of them in your org. I think Notion should be shaking in their boots right about now.
If Obsidian can get their organization management and syncing/backup strategy right, and if they make their product interface well with distributed git automations, Obsidian is going to take over so many new workflows. Not just knowledge bases, but mdbook -> webpage workflows, documentation, customer-facing pages, everything.
Notion makes product managers smile. Obsidian makes developers and product managers smile.
> Notion is going to have a very hard time turning corporate Notion users into at-home/personal Notion users. Obsidian has already won this use case with one of the most rock-solid products ever.
I don't think that's true; my (admittedly limited) understanding of Obsidian is that it strongly appeals to the type of person who reads HN; they're not going to appeal to someone who wants a WYSIWYG editor that they don't have to think about manually syncing with anything.
Obsidian makes developers smile, but it won't make sales people, customer service people, or executives smile unless they're already inclined to.
Apparently Amazon purchased a block of licenses recently. Since the product isn't usable without community extensions, the scale of data exfiltration resulting from this asinine idea will be staggering, and is likely underway.
> Since the product isn't usable without community extensions
Love when people just spout straight bullshit without any substance to it.
Gladly using Obsidian with no community extensions. It is completely usable as a PKM without any additions.
You're defending your own low standards with respect to software usability. That's fine, but not overly relevant.
Notion is used individually by a lot of students
For me, a lot of it is that the "plumbing on the outside" approach of Markdown isn't nice. I don't understand why anyone thinks that seeing and editing format codes all over the place is good UX in 2025.
Maybe Obsidian appeals to a particular type of techie who uses Vim and stores all their files locally, compared to someone who isn't technical and just wants "documents in the cloud".
I should add that I dislike Notion for most things. In particular, the database support (which a lot of people here are singing praises about), tables, lack of diagramming, and the poor search.
But my main problem with Notion and other document systems is that invariably dissolve into the equivalent of a hoarder's house, full of outdated, hard-to-find garbage deeply buried under other garbage.
That's because Notion only has hierarchy. It doesn't have a sense of "cross cutting". So everyone organizes their stuff in completely different ways, and you have to deal with poorly thought-out folder hierarchies. Where I work, any attempt to carefully "garden" pages is futile because there is no discipline enforced by the tool.
Lately I've been using Linear as a replacement for Notion for some things, and it's just a much better designed tool.
> I don't understand why anyone thinks that seeing and editing format codes all over the place is good UX in 2025.
For the same reason they liked it in the UX of 1985 and 1995...because Markdown gives you the ability to actually see the format codes that create your formatting and fix them if they're not what you want.
Now Obsidian (or any other Markdown editor) certainly isn't WordPerfect, but the one thing that diehard WordPerfect users loved was the ability to hit "reveal codes" and gain exacting control over their formatting...something Microsoft Word has never even tried to do. Markdown is far, far simpler, but the same control is there.
The reason I don't buy into this is that it shouldn't be necessary: If I've marked a word as bold, I can see it without format codes. The rendering is the desired outcome. In modern documents there's no kind of magical markup that somehow cannot be visualized "canonically". Format codes are less efficient as a representation because they obscure the "real" representation.
By analogy, to me it's like people preferring to draw by writing SVG, when drawing lines and circles is much more natural in a visual medium. Its not like sheet music where notation describes a completely different medium.
> I don't understand why anyone thinks that seeing and editing format codes all over the place is good UX in 2025.
Because if you can see them you can fix them when they inevitably get fucked up. (Literally commenting immediately after fixing some formatting that Confluence broke, like I do every day)
> "I don't understand why anyone thinks that seeing and editing format codes all over the place is good UX in 2025."
Two neatly separated editing, or one editing plus one preview, mode(s) don't equate to "all over the place".
> "But my main problem with Notion and other document systems is that invariably dissolve into the equivalent of a hoarder's house, full of outdated, hard-to-find garbage deeply buried under other garbage."
I have never used Notion. But if said program does support good enough search as well as tagging functionality (an essential of any KM tool to be considered at least decent), then the "hard-to-find and deeply buried" is on the user for being incompetent at managing (meta) data... which is often enough an inherited problem, e. g. through bad company policies or practices.
And if the tool, in 2025, does not support such essential functionality, the user is obviously also (at least partly) at fault: for choosing it.
> "That's because Notion only has hierarchy."
Easy to avoid as there have been lots of freeform knowledge management tools out there... since the likes of Lotus Agenda. In my experience their freeform-style makes them unpopular with most people for it takes... some... effort (e. g. discipline) to make proper use of them. Such software obviously has to be adapted for any corporate use, which makes them rather unpopular in that space. See below.
> "Where I work, any attempt to carefully "garden" pages is futile because there is no discipline enforced by the tool."
The garden's consistency and associated enforcement ("discipline") is the job of the gardener(s), not the tool.
You don't like Notion's hierarchy-only structure... but then complain about "poorly thought-out folder hierarchies" of the people that use it at your workplace. I mean... whatcha think is gonna happen when you introduce your crowd to powerful freeform KM tools... in a structure that is hierachical (your workplace) and conducts its affairs accordingly? XD
> I don't understand why anyone thinks that seeing and editing format codes all over the place is good UX in 2025
Lightweight markups in most basic usage are essentially punctuation extensions to natural language. It enables the UX in that what feels and looks like punctuation doubles as the effective key command you'd want to know for changing formatting modes anyways. This is why you'll find people like writers who like it.
TBH I'd prefer either Sharepoint's forced edit boxes or raw markdown over the hot mess that is editing in confluence. Pick a side and be done with it.
Linear the project management software?
Yep!
Tech-savvy people indeed do have some very interesting (while out of touch) perspectives.
Who needs SaaS when you can engrave your own punch cards?
I don't think Obsidian is even a major player in tech-savvy circles. I'd point to Apple Notes instead.
It's a major player for personal notes. Eg
> Love letter to @obsdmd to which I very happily switched to for my personal notes. My primary interest in Obsidian is not even for note taking specifically, it is that Obsidian is around the state of the art of a philosophy of software and what it could be. — https://x.com/karpathy/status/1761467904737067456
And there's a lot of interest from tech-savvy folks wanting to use it at work. (Said as a cofounder of a co making business multiplayer tools)
Yeah why do you need a Markdown editor when you can just write normal text files. Personally I find the source to be more readable than the "rendered" view from Obsidian.
Obsidian is great for solo use, but then so is Apple Notes and a dozen similar options. Where Notion shines is team based sharing and collaboration. There's really nothing else like it with the same feature set.
Once iOS 26 drops Apple Notes will be much-much more useful with the combination of supported linking between notes and supporting Markdown.
Before it rapidly became untenable as a place to actually store my notes. I use it more as a "temporary note" that will be moved to the proper place later.
It's nice if you're on just Apple but if you use Mac, Linux, Windows, Android, iOS all mixed together it's pretty useless. Like most of apple's stuff.
I have been using Apple Notes' Import to Notes and Import Markdown features a lot in macOS 26 and it has been great so far.
What feature set exactly? Describe what makes it so amazing. Basically collaboration? Notes has that too.
Ever try to use the collaboration feature in Apple Notes? I find it remarkable how unreliable is.
https://www.notion.com/help/intro-to-databases
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Have Obsidian stopped requiring that you pay for a commercial license to use for work? I know it wasn't enforced but I think the free license limited you to personal use.
I bought a commercial license three years ago, and I don't really mind paying it, but then my job for the last year expressly forbid the use of Obsidian [1], and as such I didn't feel compelled to keep paying, though I still used it for personal stuff.
I looked at their website and it looks like the commercial license is optional now?
I don't really mind paying for it, I think it's a pretty decent notes app and I probably get more than $50/year of value out of it.
[1] I'm not 100% sure why, I think it might have been because the people doing the approvals thought that the Sync was an intrinsic to the app and they were afraid of company secrets going out.
> Have Obsidian stopped requiring that you pay for a commercial license to use for work?
I don't know if they ever required that, but they certainly do not now. They encourage purchase of a commercial license, but it explicitly is not required.
From the FAQ on their pricing page:
Do I have to pay for commercial use?
No. You are not required to pay for a commercial license, however if you are using Obsidian for work in an organization we encourage you to purchase a commercial license to keep Obsidian independent and 100% user-supported.
Yes.
https://obsidian.md/blog/free-for-work/
I don't get it. The pricing page only lists paid options. Not a free tier. What am I missing here?
There are no tiers or different features, just their own sync service is a paid service, and the commercial license is paid but optional.
Otherwise the free Obsidian has everything, and there are other plugins for self hosted syncing that don't use the paid service.
but without syncing is basically unusable, or can I access my texts from my pc and my cell for example?
You can absolutely sync your vault without a paid subscription. Simply save it within your OneDrive or Google Drive folder. Alternatively, you could use Syncthing if you prefer a self-hosted solution.
You can, but _you_ need to figure out how to do it.
If don't know how or can't be bothered, you can pay for Obsidian Sync - which Just Works.
I tried to roll my own syncing with syncthing and iCloud and Dropbox. In the end I spent so much time debugging and dealing with files clobbering each other mid-sync I figured out $4/month to support a project I use daily isn't too much.
Zero problems since and I use Obsidian regularly on 4 different devices.
Plenty of other sync options in the plugins if you didn't see the last part of my comment, or you can just sync the Obsidian directory with Syncthing.
Thanks, I misread what you said about the plugins. Will take a look then. thanks.
I wouldn't say it is unusable lol. Many people don't need to sync. My work notes for example stay on my work computer.
For those that want to sync without paying, many use syncthing, though I don't think this is a feasible workaround for iOS users.
There are some other syncing methods that I haven't really looked into.
Seconding this. I use Obsidian and Obsidian Sync for personal stuff, but my employer doesn't allow Sync, so I use Obsidian very happily as a standalone on my work computer. The work vault simply never gets exposed to the outside world (we don't allow USB memory devices either).
I have my obsidian vault saved in local Google Drive folder. Saved changes are synced with Google Drive windows app.
I use DriveSync on Android to sync selected Gdrive folder to my phone.
It works.
Ah, fair enough. That's actually fairly recent.
Personally, I use Obsidian. But I can’t imagine using it with a team. There’s too much friction sorting out what extensions to use, making sure everyone knows how to use said extensions. I don’t see how Obsidian is feasible for teams. If anyone has experience making it work well for their team, I’d love to hear about it.
I've the dev behind Relay [0] (real-time collaboration for teams using Obsidian), and we work with a lot of teams who have switched over to using Obsidian for work. We just hit 10,000 users yesterday.
You don't need a lot of the plugins to be productive in Obsidian, but I think a superpower people are overlooking is that you can build your own plugins for company specific features/workflows quite cheaply.
Combine that with having everything local, and you can use tools like claude code to actually make use of the knowledge/context that you're creating.
I find it crazy that people are pushing data into locked-in systems like Notion only to be limited by their weak-sauce AI tools.
In contrast, we are all in on file-over-app -- keeping the files locally on your computer so you can actually use them. Many of our customers run their Relay Server on-prem for total document privacy.
[0] https://relay.md
Well damn, this looks fantastic!
thanks =]
Find me on our discord [0] and I'll gift you some free storage.
[0] https://discord.system3.md
I know a team at my work is using it, though I'm fuzzy on how. I think they have a shared OneDrive folder that they use as a vault. How they deal with locking and such I haven't a clue.
I dunno. I love Obsidian, but it has a huge learning curve and is not currently the type of tool that I see companies adopting when they need to have their employees adopt it’s use. Obsidian is way too overwhelming for the average user, whereas Notion is far more user-friendly and intuitive for people who just need to interact with the system to do their job.
Edit: Not to mention that (last I checked) Obsidian lacks a lot of granularity when it comes to permissions for editing pages. It would be very easy for a beginner user to disrupt the markdown files or the organizational system. Even doing things like applying labels or tags in the YAML is less intuitive and requires a lot of consistency guidelines for users to make it worthwhile. Notion facilitates this kind of thing a lot better.
By default Obsidian is a markdown editor with the ability to link to other notes with a pretty graph of your note links. What is overwhelming about that?
Obsidian can be extremely simple at it's core, but to structure everything and make it easy to use by an organization will likely require a whole lot of additional infrastructure and adherence to strict guidelines for organization. Notion seems far more intuitive in this way. Notion is also a bit limited when it comes to customization, but that limitation seems like more of an asset in this case because it produces consistency of style and usage patterns across the platform.
Also, I don't find the Obsidian graph to be practical for organizing or locating files. It's impressive to look at, but not that practical in my experience.
You need to get out of your bubble. Notion is so much more popular than Obsidian you cannot imagine. My dentist office uses Notion for example. Migrating out of Notion is also very difficult and for most people it isn't worth the hassle. Obsidian not being web based is also a con not a pro to the average person. The number of people leaving Notion for Obsidian is a rounding error.
Yep. Notion databases are also the best implementation seamless of ux I’ve seen for relational databases for end users. It could probably be made even smoother but I cannot imagine obsidian being competitive, having used it. Just too much hassle for things Notion handles smoothly.
I would like to have more of the content available offline automatically though, i.e all text and image content, and big files downloaded on request. Closer to local first than this.
> Notion databases are also the best implementation seamless of ux I’ve seen for relational databases for end users.
Have you ever tried Airtable? How does Notion compare?
I have taken a glance, the integration between documents and db tables is what makes notion relevant for me in this space though and i don’t see how airtable competes.
Yeah. I feel like the ratio is probably more than Windows vs Linux. Of course for many users the ship has been sailed and they've switched to Obsidian. But for many many many more users they never even heard of Obsidian.
I think the market is big enough for Notion and Obsidian to both exist.
I use both.
Obsidian is very powerful for quick entry and working on Markdown knowledge bases, and it's great. I use it to manage my digital garden among other things.
On the other hand, Notion is great for processing data. I use their databases extensively incl. their charts and whatnot. I also host a couple of read-only public pages for friends or family as documentation.
I think they cater to different use cases and doesn't replace each other. I'd certainly won't run my digital garden over Notion, or store the databases I keep in Notion in Obsidian. Obsidian's Bases fill a different need, for now.
Also, Notion slightly pivoted recently. They altered their “single person” oriented Pro plan and made Business their “Entry level, full fledged” plan. They do not cater to individuals anymore. Where obsidian is more geared towards individuals.
For some kinds of data processing having your files in a local folder is a prereq. Every day I have my Obsidian vault open in Zed, and I interact with files via the tool-calling agent panel and via terminal.
I haven't tried Notion AI, maybe it's great. But I can't imagine going back to a world where all my knowledge lives in Notion's house. Notion CEO Ivan Zhao recently said: "If you think about applications, each application is kind of like a mini-prison of computing". (https://www.theverge.com/decoder-podcast-with-nilay-patel/75...) I think he's right. I don't want to be in Notion's prison even if it's big and nice.
> For some kinds of data processing having your files in a local folder is a prereq.
Of course.
> open in Zed, and I interact with files via the tool-calling agent panel and via terminal.
Ah no, I don't use AI for that kind of tasks. I generally use my own formulae and what Notion provides Sans-AI.
> I haven't tried Notion AI, maybe it's great.
Me neither. I asked for authors and synopsis for a couple of books, that's all.
> I can't imagine going back to a world where all my knowledge lives in Notion's house.
Before going in, I always check how the Export works. Notion gives your text as Markdown and tables/databases as CSV, which is good enough for me.
I don't prefer to use services which I need to move my stuff by hand.
If I can make Bases work for me in Obsidian, I might move completely to Obsidian, but I need to test that first.
Edit: Looks like the functions Obsidian supports are not enough for me to move over yet.
I switched to silverbullet[0], you get to write lua instead of YAML or whatever these apps are pushing.
0: https://silverbullet.md
In our small (~12) product studio, we switched to Obsidian for team stuff as well and it’s working really well.
Collaboration on the same notes works just fine, even if there is no “live editing” (which we realised is not really useful for us anyway). The fact that notes are just text files on disk has been transformative though - folks use the Shortcuts app, scripts and what not to manage and lookup things.
I like Obsidian a lot (especially for the ease of plugin development), but my impression is that most people don't use such comparatively heavy applications for managing their personal lives. It's more likely that they use a Google Keep or sticky notes just placed in random places. That leaves mostly enterprise use cases for such knowledge management tools, and Notion is much more full-featured for enterprise than Obsidian is.
web experience, many users do not use notion in an app
One thing I prefer in Notion is the index site, which is something Obsidian lacks.
PS: I’m aware there are plugins that solve this issue, but none of them have worked well enough for me.
Notion still has Database feature that Obsidian doesn't, e.g. a good Kanban board.
The AI search and multiplayer modes are still a strong differentiator.
> with the new database feature of Obsidian
What database features?
https://help.obsidian.md/bases
Thank you, I downloaded the Obsidian app for iOS and I'm already sold. It has so many things I've wanted in a crisp clean UI.
Yeah, Obsidian is great. Enjoy.
Came here to say as much. No proprietary 'lock-in' with Obsidian, just plain .md, and honestly (if I recall correctly - it's been years now) I felt like I struggled using Notion's 'fancier' features. It seemed like copying/pasting out of it was often problematic.
Like others are saying, though, Notion is much more geared for collaboration. I couldn't care much less about that, so here I am with Obsidian, still, years later.
Yup. Too little, too late. Hard pass.
My only reasons for switching was performance and simplicity. (Okay, I guess now that I write out like that, it seems like a pretty substantial disillusionment.)
Notion was always very sluggish and bulky. If they added a simple way to very quickly load and write simple Markdown notes on desktop and mobile like Obsidian, I might not have switched. Meanwhile their mobile app was taking literally 10+ seconds to even open.
Are they comparable tools in a team context? The ease of linking documents to people and collaborating? Seems like solo, sure. But in a group.. Obsidian doesn't replace Notion at all.
Have you tried Relay [0]? It makes Obsidian work for groups by adding real-time collaboration features.
(disclaimer: I'm the dev)
[0] https://relay.md
obsidian’s great for solo use, but for team collaboration, anytype is closer to notion-built-in group sync, permissions, and offline support. you don’t need plugins or external services for multi-user editing; it just works across devices
Anytype responds poorly to feedback and bug reports from users, they send LLM slop back for any feedback or bug reports sent to them.
Appflowy is a great alternative
> users like myself
Nerdy devs are a niche.
HN is a tiny tiny bubble. Most users don’t know and wouldn’t care for obsidian or markdown etc.
I think is not a feature to appease the nerd community but for business users who are on the go.
I was a big Notion fan for years and am now solidly in the Obsidian camp.
Speed and local-first was originally the main differentiator, but over time Steph Ango's "file over app" philosophy has become my favorite feature.
Yesterday I used Claude Code to automate some Obsidian cleanup and it was trivial because everything's just a file.
Local-first becomes even better in combination with local LLMs.
yes! So many people are missing out on using claude-code directly on their knowledge base locally. Once you have it all local it seems completely crazy to push all of that context into a locked-in saas platform with mediocre AI tools.
You are not their current market, at all (individual vs team use) and your solution is unsuitable for theirs
People using their free offering for personal use is a critical part of Notion's sales pipeline. It's a hell of a lot easier to sell a piece of software to a company when all it's internal users have already trained themselves how to use it in their personal time. Those users are probably the ones generating the enterprise sales lead in the first place
See also: Google Docs
Yes but users who are satisfied by an alternative (Obsidian) which can't be used with teams aren't their audience. If the user wanted to introduce the tool to their team, they wouldn't be satisfied with Obsidian. Google Docs is one link share away from team-sharing. Obsidian requires ditching Obsidian to share the practice with your team.
Google Docs as a paid enterprise offering wouldn't fly without having Gmail lock-in and having that underpin Google SSO.
That's what Microsoft has that market sewn up with Office 365, despite being several years late to collaborative document editing -- Outlook anchors the whole thing together.
Never knew people viewed notion and obsidian in the same space.
i usually compare obsidian to joplin... seems like i should be looking more at obsidian because i was considering starting a new wiki in notion.
This is pretty impressive. A lot of people underestimate the amount of work required to make something available offline. Planning the syncing architecture alone is a monumental task, especially at the scale Notion operates. I built a custom sync solution for my own app, Brisqi (https://brisqi.com), and it took me weeks to get it right, albeit with some trade-offs.
Kudos to the Notion engineering team for achieving this milestone.
I'm a Notion fan but the lack of a native Linux app has me shopping for a replacement. Obsidian seems, from what I've seen, focused on the ability to graph notes, which I don't really care about. I want note-taking, list-making, and markdown friendly.
I do want to keep Notion's ability to work in a browser and to maintain a single, accessible store of my notes.
What are my options?
> Obsidian seems, from what I've seen, focused on the ability to graph notes, which I don't really care about. I want note-taking, list-making, and markdown friendly.
FWIW I use obsidian for "note-taking, list-making, and markdown friendly" and have not bothered with note graphs etc and it none of such features have gone on my way ever.
The good thing imo about obsidian is that it is perfectly possible to keep it all dead simple if that is what you want. The only "advanced" feature I use is rendering a slides-based presentation out of a markdown file (and setting up a css file for this). For any other notetaking or knowledge management tool I have spent more time configuring/learning to use it than actually taking notes.
For my uses, notion is unnecessarily complicated.
Note-taking, list making, and markdown friendly kind of describe obsidian. You can organize the files however you wish.
Zim wiki is brilliant. I've been using it for years. It's very extendable
> Zim handles several types of markup, like headings, bullet lists and of course bold, italic and highlighted.
OK, I think this may be a bit less powerful than Notion and Obsidian.
A good bit less powerful yes. But the simplicity is a huge strength when it comes to long term tech. I started using it in 2012 I believe.
The most important thing in any note taking app is to use it consistently and use it for years. And bring it with you as you change jobs.
Sometimes simple things that work in plain text files that can be exported and imported easily is what you need for long term note taking.
> I want note-taking, list-making, and markdown friendly.
I feel like you just described Obsidian. You can do more with tagging and linking but you definitely don't have to
Obsidian is a markdown editor. The graphing is not pushed, and can actually be disabled in the app settings. Very customizable. Worth a try!
I made the jump to AFFiNe (https://affine.pro/) a few months ago and have really liked using it. I am able to self host and have found it to be a _nearly_ 1:1 replacement for Notion. Affine's database implementation isn't nearly as nice though - but they are workable and they are improving.
My biggest gripe is that the OSS project is very oriented around a hosted product rather than the self hosted - so things like AI configuration is tricky at best and ive had to manually manipulate my account in the db to remove "free" user limitations.
I have the same set of requirements you’re describing and Obsidian is perfect.
You can disable the graph feature and never link any notes.
Obsidian's plug-in ecosystem is fantastic. I've used Obsidian for three years as a replacement for Notion, and I have never used the Graph mode. My Obsidian plugins enable automatic task synchronization with TickTick (where I manage my tasks) and allow me to set up features like templates. I strongly recommend giving it a spin.
The only downside for me is the inability to use it from a web browser. This isn't a major issue for my workflows.
What are you using to sync with TickTick?
Obsidian has all of that and more if you go for some of the advanced extensions. It's not about "graphing notes" as much as connecting a note to another. It's really not that different from inserting a page into the text of another page in Notion
Silverbullet?
https://github.com/silverbulletmd/silverbullet
if you’re open to something outside the browser, anytype runs natively on linux. local-first and e2e encrypted by default. you can sync via p2p or through backup nodes. markdown, lists, note-taking all covered - just no browser version yet
Joplin
Have you tried affine?
Offline mode is one of those features that sounds simple enough, but in reality gets pretty complex pretty fast, particularly if you want to do more meaningful capabilities or operations esp at scale.
Maybe it's just me, but nothing sounds simple about offline mode. The changeset resolution necessary to resync after going back online sounds TOUGH to build in a way that doesn't result in user data loss ever without being more cumbersome than it's worth.
I remember Notion talking about adding this YEARS ago. It has literally taken them YEARS to build this. So yes, very complex
I'm on a team building offline mode into an enterprise product at work and you are soooooo correct about this. Offline mode is a deceptively hard problem to begin with and it becomes 10x harder if you're trying to add it to a product that wasn't designed with offline mode in mind.
The best way to do it is right from the start. It's hard enough as is but adding it on after the fact is even harder.
For me one of the biggest issues with Notion (and to a smaller extent with Obsidian as well) is its ever present UI. When I write (or read) something, I don't want to see 20+ buttons scattered around distracting me from the content.
IA writer got this right, but it's too local and doesn't have colab or better online sync features. Shameless plug – I'm building https://kraa.io/about that's trying to be a writing app with a minimal, yet feature-rich, UI. (better offline and local-files functionality planned)
You want a focus mode plugin:
https://github.com/ryanpcmcquen/obsidian-focus-mode
This is what differentiates Obsidian from many other note taking apps. Anyone who has an itch can build a plugin and customize it.
Unlike a venture-funded SaaS application there's no meaningful commercial incentive or issue with building something that will eventually get sherlock'd b the application vendor in the future.
Notion should enter "keyboard mode" as you start to type and fade out the header bar. You'll still need to close the sidebar since it's quite busy and we don't fade it automatically since it has an explicit toggle. I guess if you're building your own there's still too much noise. Good luck!
Yeah, that's a nice touch. Though the reading experience is also important. Notion is obviously super powerful and a more cluttered UI is hence probably unavoidable.
Are you talking about the sidebar? or is there some other element you'd like to disappear?
Oh, I like the minimalism of your start page, before you scroll.
In Obsidian you can disable almost all of the UI very easily in settings.
Only the Hider plugin did 'most' of the job. But yeah, Obsidian is good with this (with plugins)
Just use obsidian instead. Don't trust 3rd parties with your sensitive data if you dont have to - especially ones who've to IPO and delivet returns to investors
And obsidian is not open source either. If you rely on any of the functionality besides just raw text editing, you may lose it one day.
I recently migrated to Obsidian for personal use and configured it to sync my data to a private git repo that I can access across my devices. The data is all in markdown so I figure if Obsidian ever plays games I can migrate to another app pretty easily and still have my information intact and under my own control.
Kind of depends on which plugins you use and how much you depend on them. But in general yeah, local files and whatnot means you have very little risk of losing them if Obsidian shits the bed somehow.
Sure that's why I said text editing. But if you rely on any of it's extended functionality you are out of luck.
I don't see how "losing it one day" is possible for an offline app. Worst case scenario, I won't be able to update it, but I'm more than happy with what Obsidian offers currently.
It means if it's abandoned then it's not maintained and the longer ago that it stopped being maintained the harder it is to use quite often. I have some old truecrypt volumes and I had a hell of a time figuring out how to decrypt them. It's closed source but local only so exactly the same situation.
I don't understand how the benefits of open source are so easily downplayed.
But everything is stored as .md, which is ubiquitous. You'll still have access to your notes and be able to edit them with your preferred text editor.
This is always the argument but obsidian does a lot on top of these md files. NASA's mission control software stores data in JSON, it's an open format so I guess the NASA software is easily replaceable huh? If obsidian was such a thin layer then why isn't there a good open source alternative? People build their workflows on top of the obsidian functionality, not just the md data.
> but obsidian does a lot on top of these md files
What do they do besides the frontmatter (which is fairly trivial to process or ignore in a hypothetical future where one wants to stop using obsidian)?
this is only an issue if you use a ton of plugins
also, it's not unreasonable to think that a compatible alternative would be easier to build compared to a less standard format
I think the point they were making was obsidian by default does not upload to anyone's server, yes they sell obsidian sync but they also endorse using synthing instead.
My notes, which can include things like my location, appointments, plans, things I don't want a random company viewing never leave my device, which is the only way you can be sure they are not being viewed without an oss app.
That's cool. I typically don't use multiple or linked pages too often when I'm mobile, but there was always some kind of local cache for a page I had been reading or working on. This plugs one of the few annoyances I had.
Apparently in contrast to many of you, I think Notion is a better product for what I want, which is collaborative notes++. Personal info repo, shared project pages with people, and I straddle work and personal life using it everywhere. Tinkering with the backend is not a goal of mine, but I wonder if that's what people like about Obsidian.
Well this is good I suppose, but what I find rather alarming is how bad Notion used to (recently, maybe not after this?) behave when there was a connectivity or server issue. I figured with OTs and CRDTs, collaborative editing of rich text documents with intermittent connectivity was a solved problem. However, with Notion I've actually lost data, sometimes a lot of it. (Once when Notion was having some kind of outage, I silently lost an entire page I was working on.)
Personally, I don't really like Notion very much. Not silently losing data is a low bar to clear for an application that edits rich text. Notion didn't clear it.
Although I’m sure implementing this into a big codebase is a technical headache I hope this encourages other big Electron apps like Figma (or even Tana, a direct competitor) to support an offline mode of sorts.
can confirm - even building on crdts from the ground up in anytype was no small feat. adding them later to a cloud-first product like notion must’ve been a massive lift.. it reshapes the whole architecture. seeing this shift with more providers would definitely be welcome - too many apps still treat offline as optional, not essential
I'm surprised Figma doesn't support offline mode given this blog post about how they built it.
https://www.figma.com/blog/how-figmas-multiplayer-technology...
> Figma lets you go offline for an arbitrary amount of time and continue editing.
This sounds like they’re trying to support cases where you temporarily lose connection while editing a document. Very different from being able to start up your computer without an internet connection, open a document you’d previously downloaded, edit it, and sync sometime later once you come back online (which is what Notion now supports).
While we're here; as a long time zim-wiki user, and as someone who dabbled in org-mode for a year; Obsidian never felt compelling enough to switch.
For me, this year, Logseq did. The killer concept for me is that it does org-mode hierarchy and outline collapsing, but easier; being able to "zero in" on a block, regardless of whether its its own page is excellent.
I don't quite understand what you mean by that, but you seem pretty amped about it - do you have any recommended getting started guides for logseq? I've never heard of it before, and I'm curious about the feature you described.
It's very odd, I was looking around and none of the guides really clearly explain it, but basically, there are "Pages" (files) and "Blocks." Every page is itself a "Block," but may also contain multiple more blocks as an outline hierarchy. But what logseq seems to do differently is to let you zero in on a single block so that the block is all you see, despite ACTUALLY being merely part of a page.
Just use Anytype. It‘s a free to use application where you actually own your data.
How do you guys save Slack messages which you want to either read or follow up at a later stage?
1. I was manually dumping the the link and manually adding the title. 2. Slack lists seems to be okayish but doesn't let me tag easily. Message is not highlighted as much as Later feature does. 3. Trying out Notion but it doesn't show message upfront.
I'm a little confused. They've supported offline for some time.
Even published a very cool article last July about all the (considerable) challenges one runs into when going after making wasm-sqlite work: https://www.notion.com/blog/how-we-sped-up-notion-in-the-bro...
The article you posted doesn't mention "offline" at all. We use SQLite as a cache in the browser when available and in iOS/Android/desktop apps, but we didn't have any guarantee that a page you want offline is actually available offline.
It would "mostly work" offline before, but you could have cases where some blocks in a page aged out of the LRU, or they changed online in a way that invalidated the page but new content wasn't downloaded. When that happens we show a "go online to view" error instead of risking you viewing/editing a known-incorrect local snapshot of the page.
With "available offline", we now proactively download and keep up-to-date the content you want available offline. It will either work, or show an explicit error if things go wrong in the sync process. No more guesswork.
Been trying out [SiYuan](https://github.com/siyuan-note/siyuan) as a local alternative and love it so far. The files are single-line JSONs so not as ideal as Obsidian .md files, but it seems to be trivial to export to various human-friendly formats.
"It's true, we inserted disks into our beige towers and installed desktop software..."
"Let's get you to bed, grandma..."
We have strayed so far from God's light
If anyone is interested in an alternative Notes app for projects, I have my side project over here: https://www.lumifyhub.io
Finally! The main aspect of this for me that is important is the ping. It seems like Notion hosts all their services in the US, and since i'm in Australia it somewhat annoys me the time it takes for pages to load. Just downloaded the update and it feels amazing.
The headline made me excited, the article left me disappointed. An offline mode that requires me to individually download the pages and database rows I’m expecting to need beforehand is not the kind of “offline mode” that meets my needs.
A lot of comments on Notion and Obsidian. Does anybody use Siyuan as a Notion alternative? https://github.com/siyuan-note/siyuan
I haven't tried it yet but how do they handle conflicts?
Can someone report if it’s real actual offline first mode without some kind of ceremony before doing so.
I had to leave Notion far too many years ago and life is elsewhere.
At last! I remember asking for this almost 10 years ago.
ive wasted so much time fiddling with notion documents
INNOVATION!
> Remember to mark your pages as offline across your devices
Yeah, thanks, I’m good. Obsidian it is then.
when e2ee?
use anytype instead (i work at notion)
anytype has e2ee at its core - and you can verify it, since the code is open. can’t say the same for notion.
Oh, only 2 years after Notion AI. I guess we now know which is harder to create tickets for xD
[dead]
https://notesnook.com is better than Notion and Obsidian. The cross-platform apps are fast and smooth, and it have sync, which Obsidian requires a subscription for.
I was a notesnook subscriber. It was a good app riddled with some unpleasant bugs in their publish workflow, so I canceled after three months or so, sadly.
OTOH, you don't need to pay for Obsidian sync. You can sync it via any cloud provider or syncthing if you prefer.
I have a business related vault under Obsidian. It syncs via office's Nextcloud instance. I also added "Edit history" plugin, so I have unlimited diff and undo on that vault, too.