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.
Illniyar · 3h ago
I've never heard of companies using Obsidian. Notion isn't really marketed or suitable for individuals (even if their free plan says otherwise).
pavel_lishin · 41s ago
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.
layman51 · 2h ago
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.
cholantesh · 1h ago
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.
numbers · 1h ago
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.
mmargenot · 2h ago
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.
kepano · 2h ago
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
rafram · 2h ago
Oracle has 162,000 employees, but because about 25 people total asked for reimbursement for licenses, they're on that page.
CER10TY · 34m ago
Isn't that pretty much how every "Trusted by these companies" marketing badge works nowadays?
paxys · 2h ago
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.
sfennell · 3h ago
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.
fudged71 · 52m ago
Notion is used individually by a lot of students
raincole · 2h ago
Tech-savvy people indeed do have some very interesting (while out of touch) perspectives.
tshaddox · 2h ago
I don't think Obsidian is even a major player in tech-savvy circles. I'd point to Apple Notes instead.
mgmobrien · 18m ago
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)
solardev · 2h ago
Who needs SaaS when you can engrave your own punch cards?
paxys · 2h ago
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.
0xCMP · 1h ago
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.
lawgimenez · 1h ago
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.
EGreg · 2h ago
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.
tombert · 2h ago
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.
dragonwriter · 2h ago
> 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?
Saris · 35m ago
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.
tombert · 2h ago
Ah, fair enough. That's actually fairly recent.
dimal · 2h ago
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.
dtkav · 38m ago
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.
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.
mgmobrien · 4m ago
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.
mmargenot · 2h ago
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.
graphememes · 3h ago
web experience, many users do not use notion in an app
baxtr · 2h ago
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.
ujkhsjkdhf234 · 3h ago
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.
savolai · 3h ago
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.
solardev · 2h ago
> 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?
raincole · 2h ago
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.
TimorousBestie · 2h ago
I think the market is big enough for Notion and Obsidian to both exist.
cschep · 3h ago
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.
dtkav · 55m ago
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
prox · 3h ago
Yup. Too little, too late. Hard pass.
meowface · 2h ago
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.
s0meON3 · 2h ago
Appflowy is a great alternative
photon_garden · 3h ago
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.
mxschll · 3h ago
Local-first becomes even better in combination with local LLMs.
dtkav · 29m ago
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.
wahnfrieden · 3h ago
You are not their current market, at all (individual vs team use) and your solution is unsuitable for theirs
jjfoooo4 · 3h ago
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
rchaud · 8m ago
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.
wahnfrieden · 3h ago
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.
SpaceManNabs · 3h ago
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.
trentnix · 3h ago
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?
freehorse · 18m ago
> 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.
cbdumas · 3h ago
> 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
LostMyLogin · 3h ago
Note-taking, list making, and markdown friendly kind of describe obsidian. You can organize the files however you wish.
roomey · 2h ago
Zim wiki is brilliant. I've been using it for years. It's very extendable
rafram · 2h ago
> 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.
cyanf · 3h ago
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.
sfennell · 2h ago
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.
c4wrd · 3h ago
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.
hed · 2h ago
What are you using to sync with TickTick?
datadrivenangel · 3h ago
Obsidian is a markdown editor. The graphing is not pushed, and can actually be disabled in the app settings. Very customizable. Worth a try!
mvieira38 · 3h ago
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
nomorewords · 3h ago
Have you tried affine?
maz1b · 2h ago
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.
strifey · 37m ago
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.
superfrank · 1h ago
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.
hrdwdmrbl · 1h ago
I remember Notion talking about adding this YEARS ago. It has literally taken them YEARS to build this. So yes, very complex
9x39 · 3h ago
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.
dcreater · 2h ago
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
colordrops · 2h ago
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.
reorder9695 · 2h ago
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.
static_motion · 2h ago
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.
levmiseri · 2h ago
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.
jitl · 2h ago
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!
levmiseri · 2h ago
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.
datadrivenangel · 2h ago
In Obsidian you can disable almost all of the UI very easily in settings.
levmiseri · 2h ago
Only the Hider plugin did 'most' of the job. But yeah, Obsidian is good with this (with plugins)
ale · 3h ago
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.
joeriddles · 2h ago
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).
jmetrikat · 2h ago
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
kevdoran · 2h ago
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.
jchw · 3h ago
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.
neonnoodle · 2h ago
"It's true, we inserted disks into our beige towers and installed desktop software..."
"Let's get you to bed, grandma..."
meel-hd · 2h ago
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.
bayindirh · 1h ago
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.
trn217 · 2h ago
Just use Anytype. It‘s a free to use application where you actually own your data.
codingwagie · 2h ago
ive wasted so much time fiddling with notion documents
silentsanctuary · 1h ago
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.
codruterdei · 2h ago
Oh, only 2 years after Notion AI. I guess we now know which is harder to create tickets for xD
DataDaemon · 2h ago
when e2ee?
jitl · 2h ago
use anytype instead (i work at notion)
jmetrikat · 2h ago
anytype has e2ee at its core - and you can verify it, since the code is open. can’t say the same for notion.
j45 · 2h ago
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.
But I don't use any of its Database functionality, or any of the other 90% of its features.
Obsidian is just better for writing especially longer notes etc. Notion is great for sharing data intensive stuff, nicely formatted docs, and for collaborating.
> 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)
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.
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.
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.
https://obsidian.md/blog/free-for-work/
Otherwise the free Obsidian has everything, and there are other plugins for self hosted syncing that don't use the paid service.
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
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.
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.
PS: I’m aware there are plugins that solve this issue, but none of them have worked well enough for me.
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.
Have you ever tried Airtable? How does Notion compare?
(disclaimer: I'm the dev)
[0] https://relay.md
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.
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.
See also: Google Docs
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.
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.
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?
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.
I feel like you just described Obsidian. You can do more with tagging and linking but you definitely don't have to
OK, I think this may be a bit less powerful than Notion and Obsidian.
You can disable the graph feature and never link any notes.
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.
The only downside for me is the inability to use it from a web browser. This isn't a major issue for my workflows.
https://github.com/silverbulletmd/silverbullet
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.
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.
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)
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.
https://www.figma.com/blog/how-figmas-multiplayer-technology...
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).
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...
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.
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.
"Let's get you to bed, grandma..."
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 had to leave Notion far too many years ago and life is elsewhere.