Aamir Siddiqui / Android Authority
Writing things down is one of the first and easiest steps you can take toward leading an organized life. You can always pick up a pen and paper and get to work, but that’s the old-fashioned way of doing things. As a better alternative, you can write things down digitally on an app or service, vastly increasing the scope of what you can do with the note. If you’re exploring whether you should pick up Notion or go with Obsidian, we try out and compare the two services and recommend which one is better in this Obsidian vs Notion comparison.
Obsidian vs Notion: How do they stack up?
Obsidian is a freemium app that is built on top of Electron. It serves as a note-taking app and a personal knowledge base, with the service referring to itself as your “second brain” with its rather unique graph view visualization.
Notion is a freemium SaaS (Software as a Service) product. It is a productivity app that can be used extensively for note-taking as part of its core processes.
Obsidian has a laser focus on taking notes, while Notion has a wider productivity focus.
Both apps are fairly distinct from each other but have note-taking as their overlapping premise. How they go about taking down notes is where they strongly differ.
Notion is a productivity tool instead of a note-taking app, and it thrives in complex scenarios involving multiple layers of organization and team collaboration.
Obsidian kicks up the note-taking by two notches with a very narrow focus, not spreading wide enough to encompass all of your productivity needs. As a result, Obsidian is better suited as a knowledge base and as a tool for academics.
Obsidian vs Notion: Pricing and Features
Obsidian is a freemium service that is rather liberal with how it monetizes, as it barely does it. Obsidian is 100% free for personal use forever, with complete access to plugins and APIs. In fact, you don’t even need to create an account or sign up anywhere to use Obsidian.
If you want to support the development of Obsidian and get access to insider builds, you can pay. If you use Obsidian to contribute to revenue-generating, work-related activities in a company, you need to get a commercial license which costs $50 per user per year.
The bulk of Obsidian’s personal user monetization comes from its Sync and its Publish add-ons, each of which will cost you $96 per year. The Sync plugin is fairly handy if you use multiple devices, but you can achieve similar results using your preferred cloud storage apps like Google Drive and OneDrive.
Both Obsidian and Notion are freemium services with different approaches to monetization.
Notion is also a freemium service, though with a bit more persuasive monetization model. You can try out most of its core features without needing to sign up for any of the paid features, but you’d ideally want to move up a tier for more nice-to-have features.
Notion has four tiers of service, with the top plan being an Enterprise tier. It also has an optional Notion AI add-on that can be added to any plan.
Obsidian pricing and features
Obsidian is largely free, so here’s a comprehensive look at all of Obsidian’s features:
- Cross-platform app for Windows, Linux, macOS, Android, and iOS. However, there is no web version.
- No need for account sign-up. It can be used entirely offline.
- 25 core plugins (including the monetized Sync and Publish plugins) and hundreds of community plugins to expand functionality.
- Plain text files with formatting that is handled through Markdown with an instant preview.
- Allows for internal linking between notes.
- Unique graph view that shows a map of notes with backlinks and outgoing links.
- Themes are made by the community to customize the appearance.
- Obsidian Canvas: Canvas view allows you to creatively visualize your notes alongside images, PDFs, videos, audio, and even interactive web pages. Canvas files are also stored locally with an open-source JSON file format.
At a cursory glance, you may feel that Obsidian is very barebones, and it is by design. The core app focuses on taking notes and doing it to the point of surgical precision. For added functionality, you will need to rely on plugins. As such, you can start off with basic notes and then develop a vision of what more you want out of Obsidian as a note-taking app.
As mentioned, most of Obsidian’s monetization is through the $94 annual plugins, namely Sync and Publish. The Sync plugin is particularly useful as it takes Obsidian from an offline-app to an online app that can sync your notes across multiple devices. Publish is useful for selectively publishing notes without needing any technical
