Have you ever thought you made the right decision, based on what seemingly everyone around you is saying, but then realized seemingly everyone is wrong? Or maybe not wrong necessarily, but…incomplete? That is my experience with Obsidian so far, and why I’m currently straddling the line between it and Notion.

If you’ll indulge me for a little while, I’m going to opine a bit about what I’m trying to do, my experience with both Obsidian and Notion, and why they’re both, quite frankly, terrible. I know, I know, before the PKMS and open source zealots raise their pitchforks and come to attack me (there’s a reason this blog is semi-anonymous right now), give me a chance to explain.

Changes in Latitudes, Changes in Attitudes

I ask a lot of my note-taking software. Or more like, I have a lot of things I want to track, record, save, etc. and I need a good system for doing so. Up until a couple of weeks ago, I used a suite of applications for this. Specifically, the iCloud suite, notably for this discussion, Apple Notes for free form notes and ideas, and Apple Reminders for task lists, tracking lists, etc. It worked reasonably well for me, so the first question I’m often asked is: why change?

The sidebar of Apple Notes in dark mode with several folders shown

After several years I only ended up with a couple hundred notes, and hardly ever reference them.

As I mentioned in my previous post, I’m in the process of moving with my SO. Due to this move, we need to start keeping track of house projects, appliance details, and all sorts of things about the house together. That means collaboration, and that means organization. Is this possible in the Apple kit? Yes. Is it easy? No. Apple’s set of tools is fantastic for quick notes and reminders, and gets better nearly every release. It loses it’s usefulness once you need to manage projects, keep track of bills, and create an easily referenced database of everything in the house, though.

What we need is a Quick Reference Handbook for the house, but also a place where we can mood board rooms, plan furniture to purchase, and just generally keep track of everything we plan for the house. Being able to track the car and whatever else is just a nice bonus.

If this is sounding a lot like this blog post, that’s because it is. That’s where I got the idea, and man how incredibly useful it would be to just have everything in one place that we can then hand off to the next owners whenever we go to sell. I’m not going to go to that extreme though. I don’t need to use mkdocs, I don’t want to write code here.

So if I’m going to change, I want a robust piece of software that can do everything I need it to, and can work with my SO easily. I need

  • A way to jot down basic thoughts and ideas. Simple notes.
  • A way to track projects and their status. And also keep notes and details on those projects, and link them back to rooms in the case of the house.
  • A way to keep of documentation - like user manuals and how-to guides I put together.
  • A way to record furnishings that we find online, so we can decide which ones to eventually purchase. Also a way to track those purchases (e.g. price, order dates, etc.). This means a good web clipper tool.
Several dark green couches in row with shop names and room tags

Which couch do you like?

  • A way to tabulate monthly utilities and prices.
  • A way to store relevant contacts for things like contractors, our agent, etc.
  • Easy links between relevant notes, e.g. the repainting project is being done in the living room by our painter.
  • Something structured and searchable.
  • Something with a good UI. This is often forgotten about, especially in the open source space, but if something isn’t pleasant to use, it just becomes a slog to try to use it, so it needs to be good.

But that’s just for the stuff with the house. For my personal use, I also need:

  • Something to keep track of daily notes.
  • Something incredibly easy to use, preferably via handwriting (via iPad). As a bonus, something I can actually draw on and make freeform notes.
  • Something I don’t need to fiddle with too much, because I’ll get bogged down in it.
  • Something private, and ideally self-hostable.

Note that last one - if you recall my last post, my server is currently in a box somewhere, and there it will stay until the next move. This means my interim solution needs to be something I can either host on a VPS and easily move, local-first, or I give up on that requirement entirely.

Spoiler alert: I gave up on it. But first, let’s talk about Obsidian.

Like A Rock

My obsidian vault with this post being worked on

If you have a magnifying glass, you can see drafts of posts that I never wrote and will never finish and release.

Go anywhere on the internet looking for a good note taking tool, and you’ll find someone saying that the answer is just Obsidian. Don’t even look at other things, Obsidian solves all your problems! This sort of zealous dedication to a tool is interesting, but once I started using it I realized that it was all just hype, and I should have paid more attention to the warning signs.

“Warning signs?” Yes, warning signs. For example, on basically every single post I see online about note-taking apps, there’s a large group who, regardless of what the poster is asking for, says “Obsidian is the way.” This reddit post, for example. I think this post put it best when they called everyone shilling it a cultist for the program - it very much feels that way, and that’s a problem. When there’s too much devotion to a tool, it’s downsides are difficult to find, and it loses the interest of non-devotees.

So let me be clear: Obsidian is a good tool. But it is, by no means, the best tool for all, or even most, people who want to take notes. Let’s break down the pros and cons:

Pros

  • Incredibly extensible, hundreds of community-maintained plugins to do just about anything you want.
  • Excellent wikilinking and backlinking system
  • Good graph view to make connections between notes you may not otherwise realize exist
A graph of points connected by lines

Even a fairly small vault has a pretty graph view. The note titles are usually visible, I just removed them for the screenshot.

  • Daily notes and templating system is robust
  • Markdown is first-class: it’s the way you format notes.
  • You can configure the web clipper quite extensively.
  • Free and local. You don’t have to worry about servers going away, and if you use, say, iCloud to sync and collaborate on your vault, you don’t have to pay for that either.

Wow, that sounds amazing! But for every pro, there is a con, and then some.

Cons

  • Base tool is very basic, and not any more useful then just Apple Notes out of the box.
  • Out of the box experience is, uh, let’s just call it confusing and unclear.
  • Community plugins are a mish-mash of maintained, supported, unsupported, and unmaintained, and may or may not work together or conflict. More often then not they haven’t been updated in 2+ years, and are only halfway-feature complete. Case in point: the effectively mandatory Dataview plugin, while it is still actively developed, has been in maintenance mode for two years while the authors work on a successor called Datacore which is still a work in progress and not worked on particularly frequently. What a mess! Sure they’re open source developers doing this on a volunteer basis and owe us nothing…but the core program (which is not open source) should have stuff like that built in.
  • If a community plugin doesn’t quite do what you want, you can probably hack it to…if you want to pull out the javascript and css and spend hours fixing something instead of being productive.
An image of javascript to be used with the dataview obsidian plugin

When you need to write javascript to do something basic, you’re no longer in a knowledge management system.

  • Community plugins often generate visual-only notes that don’t actually exist in markdown (again, dataview), so the actual usefulness of the markdown on disk can be…questionable.
  • Wikilinks are great, but automatically generating links between pages is a royal pain. (i.e. I’ve created a link to a room from a project, and I want the room to link back to the project. This took multiple hours to solve.)
  • Graph view is kinda pretty, but functionally useless day to day.
  • Oh man, that web clipper is a pain to configure, and it’s not very good at what it does. It relies heavily on open formats that many shops just plain don’t use. And why the hell is it a separate app entirely on iOS? Just build it into the main app! Now I’ve got two identical icons clogging up the place!
  • Markdown is wonderful, but Obsidian’s implementation is so glitchy it’s a pain to use. In Live Preview mode, markdown syntax appears and disappears semi-randomly, and is very, VERY precise in it’s usage, with no real UI help. In source mode, you can’t see your changes until you go back to reader mode. Also, why the hell is there a read-only mode? And why can’t I use the up-arrow between bullets in a bulleted list? C’mon, that’s basic stuff. Oh, and I just learned while writing this that the markdown interpreter might just give up on you mid note! That’s a great bug.
  • Which leads to the UI in general: Man, is it terrible. Trying to do anything semi-complicated is a royal pain in the ass.

Oh man, now it sounds terrible, doesn’t it?

Let’s be clear though: On the whole, it’s still a good app. I’m using it right now to write this blog post, because it’s a great markdown editing tool…if you can get past the UI problems. And they’re best feature is that it’s offline and private. That’s nothing to sneeze at and can outweigh a lot of cons.

The UI has to be good though to minimize friction with people who don’t want to deal with javascript, and unfortunately, Obsidian isn’t there.

So, what about Notion?

A Notion of Confidence

A simple notion page without much in it

Notion is so much prettier, but what’s with the banana?

Notion is an interesting tool socially. It’s very devisive. People either love it or hate it, and there’s no real in between. I use Notion at work, so I’m familiar with it and how to deal with it’s databases and pages in pages concept, and ultimately I like the idea.

Notion has it’s own “Warning Signs,” though. Mostly, the hundreds upon hundreds of posts looking for “Notion Alternatives” or “Self-Hosted Notion” (just look at the reddit posts I linked earlier - they’re both trying to find something to replace Notion). Now that I’ve tested it for personal use, though, what are the pros and cons?

Pros

  • Extremely powerful out of the box, lots of “lego pieces” (blocks) you can put together to do a lot of what you need.
A red 4x2 lego brick, not what the caption says

A screenshot of a notion block

  • Easy to use command system to quickly format notes or pull in blocks from where ever.
  • Huge community database of templates to get started on whatever you need.
  • Pages in pages in pages in pages means you get organization by default, you don’t have to put together a directory structure.
  • Databases are extremely powerful - and each database item is itself just another page, which can contain it’s own pages.
  • The block system allows for easy restructuring of pages
  • A web clipper that actually works out of the box without a lot of configuration
  • Collaboration is trivially easy.
  • Everything is a single company, so major features will continue to be supported without any worry of things falling apart…right?

Oh wow, now Notion sounds great! …what’s the catch?

Cons

  • No real guidance on how to get started (other than email marketing). You’re just kinda expected to explore and figure it out.
  • Command system means bespoke formatting, not anything standard. Exportable to markdown or pdf, sure, but not nearly as good as just having markdown out of the gate. At least the exported markdown will contain everything that’s on the page.
  • Pages in pages in pages is a confusing concept to get started with.
  • Notion, and Databases in particular, can be tweaked to the ends of the earth, taking valuable productive time.
  • Yeah, I hope you don’t care about the format of your clipped websites, Notion will just throw together whatever it wants.
  • Can we please stop pushing Notion AI? Bloody hell what an annoyance. If I didn’t buy it, I don’t want it.
  • Online only. Want to work offline? Too bad.
  • Not E2E encrypted, which means online only and they can snoop everything you do. Privacy? LOL NOPE. How do you think they trained Notion AI?
  • SAML integration looks to be broken, maybe? Might be Authentik that’s broken? Future post coming!
  • There’s a free version…if you want to be limited. $10/mo. for the basic plan or $15/mo for the business plan (the one I chose). Per user. And that’s only if you pay annually. Talk about needlessly expensive.

Man, that’s just about as bad as Obsidian!

Just like Obsidian though, Notion is a good tool. In fact, I think if they had some way to use Notion detached from the Notion cloud, it would probably be far and away the best note-taking app out there, and there wouldn’t be a litany of other apps trying to replicate what it does on your own server.

And that UI man. Chef’s Kiss. That’s what a note-taking app should be. Clean, minimal, out of the way, but powerful all the same. Just, uh, get rid of that creepy face hanging out staring at me in the bottom right, please? I suppose it’s a good reminder that everything I’m doing on Notion is being watched and used for that creepy AI.

The notion ai face from the bottom right of the notion UI

Quit staring at me please. Oh, and it moves around, too, but I didn’t record it.

So both Notion and Obsidian are terrible, is my final conclusion, but Notion edges out Obsidian on functionality, while Obsidian is far and away better than Notion on both cost and privacy.

There’s an underlying assumption under both of those tools, though, which really just makes them not comparable despite everyone in r/PKMS trying to compare them.

My Way or the Highway

Both tools follow complete different paradigms of note taking. Both tools expect you to follow their way of thinking. Neither tool explains what their paradigm is. Both tools pretend that you can take notes however you like…but basically force you onto guide rails to take notes the way they want you to.

Let’s keep this part short.

Obsidian wants you to implement a system around daily notes and tags. Yes, you can create folders, it’s easy to do, but you really should be clicking that “Daily Note” button that’s right there on the side bar, using [[wikilinks]] to create backlinks to notes that don’t exist yet, creating them when you need them, tagging them well, and allowing a structure to emerge in the graph for you.

If you want to do anything more complicated, you’ll be diving into the realm of YAML, Javascript, DQL (Dataview’s unique SQL-like language), and other technical details.

This is basically the Zettelkasten method, if you’re into the whole PKMS mumbo-jumbo, and it’s a great way to keep track of stuff (If you’re interested, try reading How to Take Smart Notes by Sönke Ahrens. I haven’t read it yet but plan to). But don’t be fooled by Obsidian saying “you can shape Obsidian to fit your way of thinking” on it’s homepage - it’s not what it wants you to do, when you actually start using it.

Notion wants you to work with people. It’s collaboration tools are amazingly good. It also wants you to be highly structured in your note taking, more akin to a Wiki with a directory structure. It wants you to use databases to track individual items.

Linking between notes works, tagging notes works, but it’s not it’s strength. You can do it, but you’ll be fighting the tool more often then not if you care about things like backlinks.

You can set up a Zettelkasten system here, but it’s probably better suited to a PARA method practitioner (not that the two are strictly exclusive, but I digress). Set up your buckets, and make pages in those buckets. Then make pages in those pages for the notes you need to take.

Both tools are built for a particular way of working, but pretend to be extensible and configurable enough for any way of working. I, personally, need both at different times. So what can we conclude?

Futures Unknown, and Presents Uncertain

For today, both Obsidian and Notion are really good at what they’re good at. And man are they absolute crap at everything else.

Notion is expensive in monetary terms and Notion AI is creepy as hell, not to mention the privacy concerns. But man is it pretty, and the databases and organizational structure are amazing.

Obsidian is expensive in temporal terms and the UI is…not the best. The linking system is fantastic though, and if you really committed to the right system it could be amazingly powerful.

So where do I stand? I dunno!

Notion is the best for keeping track of house stuff and collaborating with my SO on project management and the like.

Obsidian is the best for my day to day notes, writing this blog, and just anything personal. I’d love to use it to start tracking media I watch and read and like, but I think we all know that’s going to just be a rabbit hole to the depths of the earth.

Neither of them hit all of my requirements. Handwriting notes in either of them on an iPad is a royal PITA, for example, and both are incredibly fiddly and need a lot of work out of the box.

After the move, once my server is set back up, I’m going to (potentially to my SO’s chagrin) start exploring self hosted Notion alternatives. Pretty much none of them seem to hit all the right beats, but as long as I can get something that does what we need to keep track of the house and stuff reasonably well, then we’re good. I really want something that I own, not something I have to pay endless, expensive subscription fees for.

So I guess the answer is…both? neither? Maybe I go back to Apple Notes for personal stuff? Not sure!

I guess I’m still on this journey for a while yet to come.