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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
