There are dozens of note-taking apps in the market. I have researched and used pretty much all of them. But finally, it was all about Notion versus Obsidian. In this post, I will compare Notion and Obsidian in seven carefully selected aspects. And also, at the end of this post, I will explain to you how I make use of both Notion and Obsidian together synergistically.

What is Notion?

notion

Notion is an all-in-one workspace that you can consider your online home. Instead of using separate apps for project management, to-do lists, calendar, and note-taking, you can use Notion. I use Notion to manage my tasks, projects, goals, content production, meetings, and team documents, for managing the highlights of the content I consume. The most incredible sense of Notion comes from its features like database, team sharing, notifications, and other project management-specific features.

What is Obsidian?

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Obsidian, on the other hand, is a specialist in note-taking. In Obsidian, you’ll be internally linking the notes with each other, leading to the emergence of new ideas and insights. You can explore the connection between various ideas using their backlinks pane or spectacular graph view. Obsidian simulates how our brain stores information. The human brain is non-linear: we constantly jump from one idea to another. Right? So, according to Obsidian, your second brain should work the same way, making absolute sense.

Now let me start comparing Notion and Obsidian when it comes to note-taking and personal knowledge management.

New feature: Obsidian tabs

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Obsidian recently announced a new feature called “tabs” which is similar to a browser’s tabs, where you can simply open multiple tabs and switch between them from a horizontal line view. This feature is an extension of already existing panes mode, where you could easily stock one above the other. This feature was popularised by Andy Matuschak, later also called Andys mode.

Organization

Notion page called  Parent Note  has a sub-note called  Child note

When it comes to the organization of notes in Notion, you have two options. One, you can create a page and create sub-pages inside of that page. As you may have guessed, in this case, the sub-page is physically located inside the parent page. You are constricting a page location to the possibilities inside this creative space. Another option is to create the notes in a database, which can be preferable.

On the other hand, although you can store notes in folders in Obsidian, there is no concept of sub-notes or sub-pages. All the notes are stored independently, but they can be interconnected, especially when relevant. You can have your multiple notes open side-by-side for massive productivity, which is not pretty much possible in Notion.

Obsidian’s organizational structure makes more sense as I believe our second brain’s structure should be fluid, similar to how our first brain works.

Winner: Notion, if you prefer having things organized in a specific hierarchy, you prefer structure in notes. Obsidian, if you want to connect things in specific ways, you prefer connectivity in notes.

Notion is a cloud application. You don’t need to worry about syncing your data. Your Notion workspace can be accessed on the web. Or via the dedicated apps for Windows, Mac, iOS, and Android. But the major disadvantage is the lack of offline support. This means you can’t dream of taking a vacation in the woods only with your laptop with no internet connection and having access to your second brain.

Unlike Notion, Obsidian is built offline first. All the notes you create will be stored locally on your device in markdown files. You can optionally use any cloud storage solutions or Obsidian’s sync feature to sync the vaults across multiple devices. Obsidian has apps for Mac, Windows, iOS, and Android.

But when it comes to sharing notes with other team members, Notion is the best. They have native sharing functionality and commenting features to enable collaboration with team members.

Although Obsidian has a feature called shared vaults in their roadmap, still, I am not convinced to use Obsidian in a team setup unless you manage a team of researchers or closely knit content writers.

Winner: Notion, if having notes available in the cloud to access anywhere is a priority for you. Obsidian, if having notes available offline to access even without an internet connection is a priority for you

Searchability

Comparison of search in Notion and Obsidian.

The notes you create in notion are easily searchable using CMD+P on your keyboard. You can sort the results and also add various filters.

On the other hand, with Obsidian, you can search the notes by title with the CMD+O. If you want to search the note content, you can do CMD+Shift+F or CTRL+Shift+F. You can use various search modifiers, queries, and boolean operators here. You can even favorite any of these complex searches as a saved search for subsequent use.

One compelling feature is fuzzy search. You can enter fragments of words; still, Obsidian will pull relevant notes. But one downside for many people is that, although there are sorting options, there’s no option to sort by relevancy. Many people are ditching Obsidian because of the lack of this feature.

One area where Obsidian shines is its speed. As all your files are stored locally, searching them is lightning fast. On the other hand, Notion’s search is painfully slow. And as a fix for this, many people use apps like Command E or Raycast to search Notion pages quickly. Because, after all, your second brain shouldn’t be sluggish, right?

Winner: Obsidian. Easy, fast, and powerful searching capabilities. It passes the 5-sec rule (even 2sec). It can be additionally paired with Alfred on Mac.

Formatting & Multimedia: Notion

Notion can be considered a complete WYSIWYG; what you see is what you get. You can use various blocks that notion comes with to craft your note beautifully, but for some people, this is a visual distraction.

With Obsidian, formatting is more markdown driven. Although it supports standard hotkeys like CMD+B for Bold CMD+I for Italics, some things need improvements. For example, there is a lack of direct keyboard shortcuts for heading levels. It takes 3-4 additional keystrokes to insert the right heading level. Speaking of headings, one cool feature is that I can easily reorder the structure of my Obsidian note by reordering the outline. Pretty cool, huh? I wish Notion has this feature.

When it comes to bullets and sub-bullets, Obsidian excels; as it supports the folding of bullets. To extend this further, you can use the Outliner plugin to enable zooming in to bullets as you do with Roam Research, Workflowy, or Dynalist.

A GIF showcasing obsidian’s list bullets features.

When it comes to multimedia, you can indeed drag and drop any image or a file with both of these applications, but when it comes to embedding with Notion, it’s easy. For example, when embedding any YouTube video, you just need to paste the YouTube link.

Whereas in the case of Obsidian, you need to make use of iframe code – which is just not beginner friendly unless you use some Obsidian templates to speed up the process.

In this regard, Notion has an edge, especially if you are a preference for visuals or aesthetics.

Side-by-side comparison of inserting multimedia in Notion and Obsidian.

Winner: Notion: If you’re someone who likes to have more control over the aesthetic of their notes. Obsidian: If you like your notes to be completely markdown-driven, and future-proof, and you embrace mouse-less workflows.

Linking & Graph: Obsidian

It’s not the year 2010 for you to store notes in folders and forget about them. And also, it’s not recommended to clip all the random information you find on the web and wait for your app to become an elephant.

It’s 2022, and it’s clear the future of note-taking is linking your ideas together. Any good note-taking application should come with bidirectional linking capabilities. You should be able to visualize how your ideas link together.

Notion has a backlink functionality wherein you can link two different pages together and see incoming links to a note under the backlinks section. But the unbearable slowness of Notion- search makes proactive backlinking way too sluggish. And also, Notion’s backlink feature is not feature-rich like that of Obsidian.

Backlinks to a Notion page show up at the top. This can be further customized to either show up in a popup or can be completely hidden.

In the case of Obsidian, not only will you be able to insert backlinks quickly. But also, you will be able to see linked mentions and even unlinked mentions of an idea or a note and quickly link the notes together with a click of a button. You will also quickly see the context in which the notes link to each other and further expand the context within the current page.

If needed, you can also visualize your link network or how the notes link in a feature-rich graph view. Obsidian is the clear winner here. Some people feel that the graph view is just fancy-looking and serves no real purpose. But that’s not the case. You can read more about the usefulness of the graph view in this post by obsidianroundup.

This is 7yr old vault of obsidian user shatteredorbit. Each done in this image is a note, and there are 17,000 of them.  ~ Source

Winner: Obsidian. It has a great graph view with unique customization features that can filter out specific notes and find connections.

Extensibility & Automation: Obsidian

Although Notion has many third-party browser extensions, those are pretty much limited to CSS changes and some basic front-end enhancements.

But Obsidian has official support for community themes and plugins. As of writing this video, Obsidian has over 100 teams and 641 plugins in its repo.

Some notable plugins are sliding panes which alter the note pane behavior and make the notes slide over each other.

Sliding panes plugin in Obsidian

And you have the MindMap plugin, which allows you to visualize your Obsidian notes as a mindmap. You have an outliner, which adds zooming and other features to bullet lists. If you love Roam Research or Workflowy, or Dynalist. You will love this plugin.

And also have Kanban, which enables you to create markdown-backed Kanban boards for task or project management. A Calendar plugin also helps you create a simple calendar view for visualizing and navigating your daily notes. And also have other plugins like dataview, templater, and advanced tables that bring some Notion features to Obsidian.

Notion comes with native API support. This means you’ll be able to find Notion in apps like Zapier and Integromat. On the other hand, Obsidian lacks an API, but indeed you can find some community plugins for integrations, and also, more importantly, Readwise supports integration with Obsidian. So through Readwise, integration with Obsidian works fine.

Obsidian can be integrated with all other apps.

Winner: Obsidian. It all comes down to where you value community plugins to get geeky features or API for automation (not-so-privacy friendly). For note-taking, I value the former. For project management, API!

Interoperability & Future-Proofing: Obsidian

Say you decide to migrate from Notion to a different platform -when exporting Notion notes, pretty much all your organization and formatting will be gone except the primary markdown data.

From Obsidian’s about page on their commitment.

But with Obsidian, all the data will be stored locally on your computer in folders and markdown files. So suppose in the future, if you decide to jump ship to another shiny new PKM app, you can easily refactor the notes you created with Obsidian using, say, regex search replace to be compatible with that shiny new app.

And also, due to Obsidian’s organizational structure, you can let your Obsidian Vault be accessed by other apps like Bear or Logseq and enrich your writing experience if you want.

I see many people simultaneously using different apps to manage their single Obsidian vault.

Winner: Obsidian. It gives you optionality to safely store your own data. On the other hand, with Notion your second brain will be stored on Amazon SES servers without end-to-end encryption. Ads based on your daily journals in the future? Maybe! 🤯

So, which one to pick?

Suppose you are into serious knowledge management and building your second brain based on organic connections rather than a rigid folder structure. In that case, there’s no doubt – you need to ditch Notion For Obsidian.

Obsidian offers superior backlinking features and graph view, performance, and security. This is a no-brainer for friction-free knowledge management and note-taking. But indeed, with Obsidian, you’d be making some trade-offs like complicated multimedia blocks, lack of easy team sharing, project management, and lack of collaboration features.

But for collaborative note-taking like that of managing the SOPs, team wiki, and content outlines, I still prefer Notion. I use both Obsidian and Notion for my business and knowledge management purposes.

How i use them together?

I use Notion to manage my tasks, projects, goals, and team knowledge, mainly due to its collaborative features. For personal knowledge management, I make use of Obsidian mainly.

Indeed, some people prefer using one app like Notion to manage their entire business. And also, I’m very well aware of the systemic benefits of having all the organizational insights under one platform. Because it leads to the emergence of new ideas, right? Synergistically.

Readwise in Obsidian
Readwise in Notion

For this reason, I sync all my Readwise highlights from the books I read, articles, or podcasts that I listen to, both Notion and Obsidian, through Readwise integrations with both of these tools.

But when it comes to taking literature notes out of those highlights, the media highlights, and also synthesizing those notes to evergreen or permanent notes – I use Obsidian.

Obsidian is like my knowledge lab where I mix and match my various ideas, I get more insights, and those ideas will feed my projects maintained in Notion.

In other words, I treat:

The Notion system will evolve, reflecting the new insights generated in my laboratory.

If you know you need a drill, not a hammer 🔨 when it comes to knowledge management, go with Obsidian. It is the best in its game.

Despite my recommendations, If you decide to stick with Notion for personal knowledge management, do give Evergreen notes Chrome extension for Notion a try.

Thank me later.

Final thoughts

Whatever tool you choose, remember not to fall victim to collector’s fallacy and intellectual entertainment. It may be tempting to follow rabbit holes, losing the purpose of why you are doing what you are, but resist it. You can always use information purposefully and ensure your consumption is aligned with your projects. That alignment is essential. I can’t emphasize this enough.