The reason I stick with Obsidian is it just feels more natural to me, out of the box it’s a good enough product and for personal projects and knowledge keeping, linking notes together and management is straight forward as long as you’re familiar with markdown. There’s almost 2700 plugins which means if you want a certain workflow, there’s bound to be something that can fit your puzzle. The biggest thing for me is file privacy, if you just keep a local Obsidian Vault, your files are yours and yours only, they exist only on your system.
That being said, I haven’t used Notion much in the past, but when I did try it, it seemed more of a collaboration and data-driven tool, where as Obsidian is just you have a thought / idea / note, you write it and you can branch out from there. It’s all about how you employ it, I’m sure you could use either one to meet your goals.
Another thing of course, is the community, you have questions you come here you can get them answered relatively quick, and our Discord community has more members online currently than the Notion discord has total. Just food for thought
I find writing and editing long texts in Obsidian more comfortable because the text is a text, not a set of blocks. I remember Notion having problems with selecting several paragraphs, for example. And selecting a paragraph and a half was simply impossible.
Then the fact that Obsidian is local is super important for me. Internet connection is not very reliable this days where I live. And recently Notion became unavailable in my country without VPN. And even before that I felt it’s kinda stupid when my personal notes are kept somewhere on the server instead of my local device.
Also when I still used Notion I was finding the structure to be very confusing. In Obsidian you have just a list of files. But in Notion I never could get just a list of all my pages, because every block or other item can also be a page, but if you don’t remember in which other page or database you created them, it was pretty hard to find them. I was constantly stumbling upon items I thought I deleted long time ago, or couldn’t find something I thought should be here… Obsidian is much more straightforward.
Never used Notion.
But I doubt such customization is possible in it.
Basically you can create your own custom app with Obsidian. Core Obsidian with its core plugins and even with the plethora of 3rd party so called community plugins is still just a base to build upon.
If you are an engineer, you can build any custom work station on this.
Tip: look up Codescript Toolkit and how to patch Obsidian with scripts through it. The latest AI chat robots can look up Obsidian API functions and can help you build basically anything.
For me, it was 100% local vs. remote storage. One of the big reasons I’ve moved to markdown for notes is because I’ve lost a lot of notes and documents over the last 35 years to proprietary formats and dead servers, so Notion’s focus on cloud storage as the primary instead of backup turned me off from it.
I handle my own backups and cloud storage, using both a private github repo and a script to archive GFS backups to a local external SSD. If one of those fails, I have the other. If both fail, I still have my local copies. That’s not really the case with Notion.
I’ve also had issues in the past where having a focus on cloud storage as the primary storage has cause conflicts with local files, overwriting newer changes (hello, OneDrive, especially early-day OneDrive). Notion’s focus on cloud-first storage puts the fear of RNGesus in me due to past data loss, and I don’t want to experience that again. With Obsidian, it’s local-focused storage and I can control where I push my notes and when.
