Notion to Obsidian Migration Service

Hi all!

We are building Jump Ship, the service that enables you to simply and easily import very large and complex Notion workspaces for use in Obsidian.


Here’s a few screenshots of the service in action.


You can sign up for beta-testing here.


How is Jump Ship different from existing solutions?

The standard Notion export has problems.

The ZIP process from Notion gives a set of ZIP files which are very large, as well as incompatible with each other. There are file-name conflicts, broken links, weird structuring.

Sometimes the ZIP export process doesn’t even work.

The bigger and more complex the workspace, the more problems you’re going to run into.

To avoid all of this, and get a closer match with your Notion content, we retrieve your data through direct API access. This is instead of through the ZIP export process.

This enables us to:

  • Retrieve more data about your pages.
  • Avoid common standard Notion export issues:
    • Notion export crashes due to large files.
    • Notes exporting with titles and no content.
  • Export a render that is:
    • Already formatted.
    • Immediately available.
    • Requires no post-processing.

We also provide advanced templating support, enabling you to get your Notion pages imported in the same way as you’re used to in Obsidian.

Using our templating system, you are able to filter to only export the pages and files that you actually care about, as well as format them in the way that you need:


Templating format subject to change.

We also provide custom, dedicated support for switching, so if you run into any issues with how notes are imported and/or formatted, we can work with you to get that right.


How does it work?

  1. Login to our Jump Ship service.
  2. Press the “add workspace” button.
  3. Use the web selector to click on the Notion workspace to export.
  4. Change your export template(s) (or use the default).
  5. Press the “add to queue” button.
  6. Download your workspace as a ZIP file when it’s ready.

Extra Special Features

  • Naming pasted images as the page title instead of “Untitled”.
  • Choose between # tags or [[links]] for Select & Multi-Select properties.
  • Smart & automatic note title truncation, preserving the original title in the file.
  • Clean organisation of files on the file system with actual names (instead of random IDs).
  • Page properties formatted in a way that Dataview can read.
  • Fetching page titles in bookmark links.
  • Embedded content, with clean sync blocks and image embeds.

What does Jump Ship support?

  • Properties.
  • Links between notes.
  • Databases.
  • Covers.
  • Files.
  • Images.
  • And more…

(Keep in mind that we aim to get as accurate render as possible. Anything missing here, contact us and we can work to resolve this.)


If you’re interested, please sign-up for beta testing here.

Public release coming “soon” (most likely Q4 2023).

3 Likes

This is really cool! I just have one question. Will this service be free once its released to the public?

Thanks!

We’re going to be releasing with a free tier and a paid tier.

The free tier will give you access to 15 notes a day, while the paid tier will let you export as many notes as you like (useful for full workspace exports!)

Nice! Thanks for developing this service, I’m excited to use it once it’s available!

1 Like

#Markimus, do you have any idea about when this service will be available? Thanks

Hi vinispira,

The plan is Q4 2023, though right now we are open to trialling this out to individual beta testers. If you’re open to testing a service where things may go slightly wrong (though will be ironed out as and when that happens) sign up using our beta testing link.

@Markimus Would love to test and provide feedback, as I think I have an interesting “data set” with about 250 MB, not too large and nothing super crazy.

1 Like

So I tested this service and it seemed BY FAR the BEST export option from Notion to Obsidian. Previously I tried the N2O.py and found a lot of problems that couldn´t be solved with additional Python scripts. I had thousands of notes inside Notion with various kinds of content, summing to about 15 Gb of text, images, videos etc. Markimus and I worked (intermitently, of course) for almost three months to adjust a number of details and issues, and I felt this service improved a lot during this time. Main challenges were the inclusion of a customized frontmatter and an issue with Notion notes previously imported from Evernote (they were not immediatly recognized by the Notion API used by this service). So although this service is in Beta Testing, the import went surprisingly well, with Markimus being very attentive in dealing with all the obstacles. I recommend to everybody!

1 Like

It took me almost a year of investigations and trials and errors to come to this point, and this is the cost apps like Notion want everybody to pay to get out of their claws :frowning: I still use Notion for teamwork and to share content on the web, but I will never upload sensitive content and trust in a company like that. Thanks Obsidian, and thanks Markimus for allowing this transition.

1 Like

I’ve just finished migrating my Notion workspaces to markdown and I’m so happy that I discovered Jump Ship. I initially exported my Notion workspaces to .md using the Notion app but was massively underwhelmed when I opened the new vault in Obsidian: the documents weren’t linked, they had horrible names (each file name had a UUID appended to it) and my database pages weren’t correctly converted. I started manually fixing these issues, but after spending 20mins on it, I realised that it would take me weeks to finish – not a good use of my time! Jump Ship was a pretty painless experience and @Markimus was great at answering my questions. There is also a “templating” system available which was really useful for me as I wanted my converted markdown files to be slightly different from the default output. If you’re migrating from Notion it’d be a good use of your time to try Jump Ship.

1 Like

I normally used to create all my notes in notion in the last few years—so meanwhile around 45,000 notes.
It is a disaster to work with such many notes in notion.
Notion is terrible slowly, and I was spending more time on waiting than doing my work.
It was so frustrating.
Meanwhile, I also took a look at obsidian – I was looking for a database / tool which is not working on other cloud services and where I can OWN my notes.

I also tried to do the export from Notion (CSV) and tested an import in Obsidian.
To be honest – that was a disaster.
The format of the Notion export is terrible!
You will get files with a fancy long unique and so you have to spend a lot of time to get everything working.

I was really lucky – because just at the right time, Markimus wrote me an E-Mail and remembered me that I signed up to his “Notiontoobsidian” Service some time ago.

My first though was: O.K. they really do not have a kind of good-looking website and no proof that this is working. BUT – anyway – loosing my notes OR give it a try?

Long story (made) short: It was the best decision lately!

Markimus gave me a brilliant support and really helped me to get my
45,000 notes running in obsidian.
It took some time to get everything working – because I am not a developer who knows about scripting etc.—but Markimus really took over and did an impressive job.

Now I am truly taking and creating notes again – this is fun stuff.

Everyone to is only thinking about getting away from Notion and working with
Obsidian: give it a try – you will not regret it.

Thanks to @Markimus

1 Like