3 Proven Ways to Use Notion with Obsidian

Notion is a new-age all-in-one tool for note-taking, project, and task management. Though it shines with its extensible databases and beautiful dashboards, its privacy and security aren’t that pretty. For starters, it lacks proper end-to-end encryption. We have a dedicated blog post explaining it, can read it here.

This is the place where Obsidian truly shines, by default all the notes are created and stored on a local device folder. You can choose to sync it with any service or stay completely local. With everything being just a bunch of markdown files, you can even encrypt it with any tool of your choice.

For personal knowledge management, I mainly use Obsidian. I find that its features for taking literature notes and synthesizing information into evergreen notes are superior to those in Notion. However, I do use Notion to manage my tasks, projects, and team knowledge, mainly due to its collaborative features.

To keep my Readwise highlights synchronized between both apps, I use the Readwise integrations with both Notion and Obsidian. This way, I can make use of the best features of both apps for my knowledge management needs.

However, 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 lab, where I mix and match my various ideas, I get more insights, and those insights will fit into my various projects maintained in Notion.

In other words, I treat Obsidian as my Idea Factory and Notion to create a system for me and my team to operate in. The Notion system will evolve, reflecting the new insights generated in my laboratory.

I also tend to move the top 4% of knowledge gems from Obsidian into my "Life areas" notes in Notion. This helps me easily put the insights into action as I already have a weekly/monthly/quarterly/yearly review habit in Notion.

Similar to Akshay, I use both Obsidian (personal) and Notion (aesthetics and collaboration). I don’t like the idea of being chained to a particular tool or system.

So, I prioritize flexibility and portability. My philosophy is more inclined towards using the “Right tool for the job”. I make extensive use of the native markdown features. Though it might sound obvious, when you have text neatly formatted in markdown, you can easily copy from Obsidian and paste it into Notion and vice versa.

Most of my note-taking start with Obsidian; I copy it over to Notion if I ever want to share that with anyone. There’s an exception to this when I’m taking notes on something more visual rather than textual, say learning about color theory; in that case, I start with Notion as it makes it easier to embed media. Once I feel it’s ready, I move that note back to the Obsidian vault. Most of my notes are related to programming, so I have the same vault open in VS Code as well. It makes it easier to have notes and code side by side. Another advantage of using VS Code here is you can use a wide collection of extensions; if there’s something you need, chances are someone has already made an extension for it. I do occasionally use Logseq and Dendron as well.

This solution requires you to create a Notion integration token (API Key) and using an Obsidian community plugin to sync notes from Obsidian to Notion. This will sync the notes from the Obsidian vault to a Notion database.

These are the steps required to make it work:

If you want to sync images to your Notion workspace, you can use the "Obsidian Image Auto Upload" plugin. This plugin will automatically upload images from Obsidian to your Notion workspace. In order to use this plugin, you will need to install it and fill in the following information:

Once you have filled in this information, click "Save." You can then click "Upload Images to Notion" in order to upload images from Obsidian to your Notion workspace. A sharing link will automatically be generated after a successful upload.

ℹ️ Note: This is a somewhat technical solution that needs prerequisite knowledge of how to run python scripts.

This method isn’t fully tested, so try at your own risk.

The method is useful for sharing stuff from Obsidian to Notion; what if you want to move stuff from Notion to Obsidian? That’s still possible according to this article by alexmikhalev, which explains the entire process in detail. Here we’ll go through the summary of the steps required. You can refer to the original if you want to try it out yourself.

Though there are advantages to having everything in one place, everyone has different needs and preferences.

If you want to do everything with one tool, we suggest you read the in-depth Obsidian vs Notion comparison we have made. At the end of the day, you must find a balance and decide what works best for you.