11 ms·

Notion releases offline mode

242 points by ericzawo 1y ago

tequila_shot 1y ago
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.
- graphememes 1y ago
  web experience, many users do not use notion in an app
- ujkhsjkdhf234 1y ago
  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.
  - savolai 1y ago
    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.
    - solardev 1y ago
      > Notion databases are also the best implementation seamless of ux I’ve seen for relational databases for end users. Have you ever tried Airtable? How does Notion compare?
      - savolai 1y ago
        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.
  - TimorousBestie 1y ago
    I think the market is big enough for Notion and Obsidian to both exist.
  - raincole 1y ago
    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.
- prox 1y ago
  Yup. Too little, too late. Hard pass.
  - meowface 1y ago
    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.
- Illniyar 1y ago
  I've never heard of companies using Obsidian. Notion isn't really marketed or suitable for individuals (even if their free plan says otherwise).
  - sfennell 1y ago
    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.
  - layman51 1y ago
    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.
    - numbers 1y ago
      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.
    - cholantesh 1y ago
      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.
    - louisbourgault 1y ago
      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.
- cschep 1y ago
  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.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  - jmetrikat 1y ago
    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
    - jamil7 1y ago
      Anytype responds poorly to feedback and bug reports from users, they send LLM slop back for any feedback or bug reports sent to them.
  - dtkav 1y ago
    Have you tried Relay [0]? It makes Obsidian work for groups by adding real-time collaboration features. (disclaimer: I'm the dev) [0] https://relay.md https://relay.md
- paxys 1y ago
  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.
  - EGreg 1y ago
    What feature set exactly? Describe what makes it so amazing. Basically collaboration? Notes has that too.
    - dzuc 1y ago
      Ever try to use the collaboration feature in Apple Notes? I find it remarkable how unreliable is.
    - rafram 1y ago
      https://www.notion.com/help/intro-to-databases https://www.notion.com/help/intro-to-databases
  - 0xCMP 1y ago
    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.
    - lawgimenez 1y ago
      I have been using Apple Notes' Import to Notes and Import Markdown features a lot in macOS 26 and it has been great so far.
    - wkat4242 1y ago
      It's nice if you're on just Apple but if you use Mac, Linux, Windows, Android, iOS all mixed together it's pretty useless. Like most of apple's stuff.
  - 1y ago
- baxtr 1y ago
  One thing I prefer in Notion is the index site, which is something Obsidian lacks. PS: I’m aware there are plugins that solve this issue, but none of them have worked well enough for me.
- s0meON3 1y ago
  Appflowy is a great alternative
- raincole 1y ago
  Tech-savvy people indeed do have some very interesting (while out of touch) perspectives.
  - solardev 1y ago
    Who needs SaaS when you can engrave your own punch cards?
  - tshaddox 1y ago
    I don't think Obsidian is even a major player in tech-savvy circles. I'd point to Apple Notes instead.
    - mgmobrien 1y ago
      It's a major player for personal notes. Eg > 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 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)
    - 1718627440 1y ago
      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.
- mmargenot 1y ago
  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.
- tombert 1y ago
  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.
  - j_4 1y ago
    Yes. https://obsidian.md/blog/free-for-work/ https://obsidian.md/blog/free-for-work/
    - tombert 1y ago
      Ah, fair enough. That's actually fairly recent.
    - kwanbix 1y ago
      I don't get it. The pricing page only lists paid options. Not a free tier. What am I missing here?
      - Saris 1y ago
        There are no tiers or different features, just their own sync service is a paid service, and the commercial license is paid but optional. Otherwise the free Obsidian has everything, and there are other plugins for self hosted syncing that don't use the paid service.
        kwanbix 1y ago
        but without syncing is basically unusable, or can I access my texts from my pc and my cell for example?
- dimal 1y ago
  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.
  - dtkav 1y ago
    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. [0] https://relay.md https://relay.md
    - dimal 1y ago
      Well damn, this looks fantastic!
      - dtkav 1y ago
        thanks =] Find me on our discord [0] and I'll gift you some free storage. [0] https://discord.system3.md https://discord.system3.md
  - themadturk 1y ago
    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.
- bayindirh 1y ago
  I use both. 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.
  - mgmobrien 1y ago
    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/756736/notion-ceo-ivan-zhao-productivity-software-design-ai-interview 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.
    - bayindirh 1y ago
      > For some kinds of data processing having your files in a local folder is a prereq. Of course. > open in Zed, and I interact with files via the tool-calling agent panel and via terminal. Ah no, I don't use AI for that kind of tasks. I generally use my own formulae and what Notion provides Sans-AI. > I haven't tried Notion AI, maybe it's great. Me neither. I asked for authors and synopsis for a couple of books, that's all. > I can't imagine going back to a world where all my knowledge lives in Notion's house. Before going in, I always check how the Export works. Notion gives your text as Markdown and tables/databases as CSV, which is good enough for me. I don't prefer to use services which I need to move my stuff by hand. If I can make Bases work for me in Obsidian, I might move completely to Obsidian, but I need to test that first. Edit: Looks like the functions Obsidian supports are not enough for me to move over yet.
- Slow_Hand 1y ago
  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.
  - KetoManx64 1y ago
    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?
    - Slow_Hand 1y ago
      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.
- richardlblair 1y ago
  Notion for my team, Obsidian for myself. 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.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  - wltr 1y ago
    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.
    - petralithic 1y ago
      > 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
      - wltr 1y ago
        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.
        richardlblair 1y ago
        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.
- Casteil 1y ago
  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.
- atombender 1y ago
  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.
  - danielhep 1y ago
    Linear the project management software?
    - atombender 1y ago
      Yep!
  - to11mtm 1y ago
    TBH I'd prefer either Sharepoint's forced edit boxes or raw markdown over the hot mess that is editing in confluence. Pick a side and be done with it.
  - lmm 1y ago
    > 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)
- zie 1y ago
  I switched to silverbullet[0], you get to write lua instead of YAML or whatever these apps are pushing. 0: https://silverbullet.md https://silverbullet.md
- bryanhogan 1y ago
  Notion still has Database feature that Obsidian doesn't, e.g. a good Kanban board.
- isodev 1y ago
  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.
- wortelefant 1y ago
  The AI search and multiplayer modes are still a strong differentiator.
- demarq 1y ago
  > users like myself Nerdy devs are a niche. HN is a tiny tiny bubble. Most users don’t know and wouldn’t care for obsidian or markdown etc. I think is not a feature to appease the nerd community but for business users who are on the go.
- giancarlostoro 1y ago
  > with the new database feature of Obsidian What database features?
  - dtkav 1y ago
    https://help.obsidian.md/bases https://help.obsidian.md/bases
    - giancarlostoro 1y ago
      Thank you, I downloaded the Obsidian app for iOS and I'm already sold. It has so many things I've wanted in a crisp clean UI.
      - dtkav 1y ago
        Yeah, Obsidian is great. Enjoy.
- heihieih 1y ago
  I have switched to Obsidian and have not used Notion for a long time.
jchw 1y ago
Well this is good I suppose, but what I find rather alarming is how bad Notion used to (recently, maybe not after this?) behave when there was a connectivity or server issue. I figured with OTs and CRDTs, collaborative editing of rich text documents with intermittent connectivity was a solved problem. However, with Notion I've actually lost data, sometimes a lot of it. (Once when Notion was having some kind of outage, I silently lost an entire page I was working on.) Personally, I don't really like Notion very much. Not silently losing data is a low bar to clear for an application that edits rich text. Notion didn't clear it.
9x39 1y ago
That's cool. I typically don't use multiple or linked pages too often when I'm mobile, but there was always some kind of local cache for a page I had been reading or working on. This plugs one of the few annoyances I had. Apparently in contrast to many of you, I think Notion is a better product for what I want, which is collaborative notes++. Personal info repo, shared project pages with people, and I straddle work and personal life using it everywhere. Tinkering with the backend is not a goal of mine, but I wonder if that's what people like about Obsidian.
photon_garden 1y ago
I was a big Notion fan for years and am now solidly in the Obsidian camp. Speed and local-first was originally the main differentiator, but over time Steph Ango's "file over app" philosophy has become my favorite feature. Yesterday I used Claude Code to automate some Obsidian cleanup and it was trivial because everything's just a file.
- mxschll 1y ago
  Local-first becomes even better in combination with local LLMs.
  - dtkav 1y ago
    yes! So many people are missing out on using claude-code directly on their knowledge base locally. Once you have it all local it seems completely crazy to push all of that context into a locked-in saas platform with mediocre AI tools.
- SpaceManNabs 1y ago
  Never knew people viewed notion and obsidian in the same space. i usually compare obsidian to joplin... seems like i should be looking more at obsidian because i was considering starting a new wiki in notion.
- wahnfrieden 1y ago
  You are not their current market, at all (individual vs team use) and your solution is unsuitable for theirs
  - jjfoooo4 1y ago
    People using their free offering for personal use is a critical part of Notion's sales pipeline. It's a hell of a lot easier to sell a piece of software to a company when all it's internal users have already trained themselves how to use it in their personal time. Those users are probably the ones generating the enterprise sales lead in the first place See also: Google Docs
trentnix 1y ago
I'm a Notion fan but the lack of a native Linux app has me shopping for a replacement. Obsidian seems, from what I've seen, focused on the ability to graph notes, which I don't really care about. I want note-taking, list-making, and markdown friendly. I do want to keep Notion's ability to work in a browser and to maintain a single, accessible store of my notes. What are my options?
- cbdumas 1y ago
  > I want note-taking, list-making, and markdown friendly. I feel like you just described Obsidian. You can do more with tagging and linking but you definitely don't have to
- datadrivenangel 1y ago
  Obsidian is a markdown editor. The graphing is not pushed, and can actually be disabled in the app settings. Very customizable. Worth a try!
- LostMyLogin 1y ago
  Note-taking, list making, and markdown friendly kind of describe obsidian. You can organize the files however you wish.
  - roomey 1y ago
    Zim wiki is brilliant. I've been using it for years. It's very extendable
    - rafram 1y ago
      > Zim handles several types of markup, like headings, bullet lists and of course bold, italic and highlighted. OK, I think this may be a bit less powerful than Notion and Obsidian.
      - roomey 1y ago
        A good bit less powerful yes. But the simplicity is a huge strength when it comes to long term tech. I started using it in 2012 I believe. The most important thing in any note taking app is to use it consistently and use it for years. And bring it with you as you change jobs. Sometimes simple things that work in plain text files that can be exported and imported easily is what you need for long term note taking.
ale 1y ago
Although I’m sure implementing this into a big codebase is a technical headache I hope this encourages other big Electron apps like Figma (or even Tana, a direct competitor) to support an offline mode of sorts.
- jmetrikat 1y ago
  can confirm - even building on crdts from the ground up in anytype was no small feat. adding them later to a cloud-first product like notion must’ve been a massive lift.. it reshapes the whole architecture. seeing this shift with more providers would definitely be welcome - too many apps still treat offline as optional, not essential
- joeriddles 1y ago
  I'm surprised Figma doesn't support offline mode given this blog post about how they built it. https://www.figma.com/blog/how-figmas-multiplayer-technology-works/ https://www.figma.com/blog/how-figmas-multiplayer-technology...
  - rafram 1y ago
    > Figma lets you go offline for an arbitrary amount of time and continue editing. This sounds like they’re trying to support cases where you temporarily lose connection while editing a document. Very different from being able to start up your computer without an internet connection, open a document you’d previously downloaded, edit it, and sync sometime later once you come back online (which is what Notion now supports).
s0m3B0DY 1y ago
[dead]
codingwagie 1y ago
ive wasted so much time fiddling with notion documents
neonnoodle 1y ago
"It's true, we inserted disks into our beige towers and installed desktop software..." "Let's get you to bed, grandma..."
- none_to_remain 1y ago
  We have strayed so far from God's light
DataDaemon 1y ago
when e2ee?
- jmetrikat 1y ago
  anytype has e2ee at its core - and you can verify it, since the code is open. can’t say the same for notion.
- jitl 1y ago
  use anytype instead (i work at notion)
dcreater 1y ago
Just use obsidian instead. Don't trust 3rd parties with your sensitive data if you dont have to - especially ones who've to IPO and delivet returns to investors
- colordrops 1y ago
  And obsidian is not open source either. If you rely on any of the functionality besides just raw text editing, you may lose it one day.
  - static_motion 1y ago
    But everything is stored as .md, which is ubiquitous. You'll still have access to your notes and be able to edit them with your preferred text editor.
    - colordrops 1y ago
      This is always the argument but obsidian does a lot on top of these md files. NASA's mission control software stores data in JSON, it's an open format so I guess the NASA software is easily replaceable huh? If obsidian was such a thin layer then why isn't there a good open source alternative? People build their workflows on top of the obsidian functionality, not just the md data.
      - shepherdjerred 1y ago
        this is only an issue if you use a ton of plugins also, it's not unreasonable to think that a compatible alternative would be easier to build compared to a less standard format
      - dcreater 1y ago
        > but obsidian does a lot on top of these md files What do they do besides the frontmatter (which is fairly trivial to process or ignore in a hypothetical future where one wants to stop using obsidian)?
  - 1y ago
codruterdei 1y ago
Oh, only 2 years after Notion AI. I guess we now know which is harder to create tickets for xD
levmiseri 1y ago
For me one of the biggest issues with Notion (and to a smaller extent with Obsidian as well) is its ever present UI. When I write (or read) something, I don't want to see 20+ buttons scattered around distracting me from the content. IA writer got this right, but it's too local and doesn't have colab or better online sync features. Shameless plug – I'm building https://kraa.io/about https://kraa.io/about that's trying to be a writing app with a minimal, yet feature-rich, UI. (better offline and local-files functionality planned)
- anoojb 1y ago
  You want a focus mode plugin: https://github.com/ryanpcmcquen/obsidian-focus-mode https://github.com/ryanpcmcquen/obsidian-focus-mode This is what differentiates Obsidian from many other note taking apps. Anyone who has an itch can build a plugin and customize it. Unlike a venture-funded SaaS application there's no meaningful commercial incentive or issue with building something that will eventually get sherlock'd b the application vendor in the future.
- jitl 1y ago
  Notion should enter "keyboard mode" as you start to type and fade out the header bar. You'll still need to close the sidebar since it's quite busy and we don't fade it automatically since it has an explicit toggle. I guess if you're building your own there's still too much noise. Good luck!
  - levmiseri 1y ago
    Yeah, that's a nice touch. Though the reading experience is also important. Notion is obviously super powerful and a more cluttered UI is hence probably unavoidable.
- datadrivenangel 1y ago
  In Obsidian you can disable almost all of the UI very easily in settings.
  - levmiseri 1y ago
kevdoran 1y ago
I'm a little confused. They've supported offline for some time. Even published a very cool article last July about all the (considerable) challenges one runs into when going after making wasm-sqlite work: https://www.notion.com/blog/how-we-sped-up-notion-in-the-browser-with-wasm-sqlite https://www.notion.com/blog/how-we-sped-up-notion-in-the-bro...
- jitl 1y ago
  The article you posted doesn't mention "offline" at all. We use SQLite as a cache in the browser when available and in iOS/Android/desktop apps, but we didn't have any guarantee that a page you want offline is actually available offline. It would "mostly work" offline before, but you could have cases where some blocks in a page aged out of the LRU, or they changed online in a way that invalidated the page but new content wasn't downloaded. When that happens we show a "go online to view" error instead of risking you viewing/editing a known-incorrect local snapshot of the page. With "available offline", we now proactively download and keep up-to-date the content you want available offline. It will either work, or show an explicit error if things go wrong in the sync process. No more guesswork.
trn217 1y ago
Just use Anytype. It‘s a free to use application where you actually own your data.
j45 1y ago
Can someone report if it’s real actual offline first mode without some kind of ceremony before doing so. I had to leave Notion far too many years ago and life is elsewhere.
maz1b 1y ago
Offline mode is one of those features that sounds simple enough, but in reality gets pretty complex pretty fast, particularly if you want to do more meaningful capabilities or operations esp at scale.
- superfrank 1y ago
  I'm on a team building offline mode into an enterprise product at work and you are soooooo correct about this. Offline mode is a deceptively hard problem to begin with and it becomes 10x harder if you're trying to add it to a product that wasn't designed with offline mode in mind.
- hrdwdmrbl 1y ago
  I remember Notion talking about adding this YEARS ago. It has literally taken them YEARS to build this. So yes, very complex
- strifey 1y ago
  Maybe it's just me, but nothing sounds simple about offline mode. The changeset resolution necessary to resync after going back online sounds TOUGH to build in a way that doesn't result in user data loss ever without being more cumbersome than it's worth.
- hahn-kev 1y ago
  The best way to do it is right from the start. It's hard enough as is but adding it on after the fact is even harder.
meel-hd 1y ago
https://notesnook.com https://notesnook.com is better than Notion and Obsidian. The cross-platform apps are fast and smooth, and it have sync, which Obsidian requires a subscription for.
- bayindirh 1y ago
  I was a notesnook subscriber. It was a good app riddled with some unpleasant bugs in their publish workflow, so I canceled after three months or so, sadly. OTOH, you don't need to pay for Obsidian sync. You can sync it via any cloud provider or syncthing if you prefer. I have a business related vault under Obsidian. It syncs via office's Nextcloud instance. I also added "Edit history" plugin, so I have unlimited diff and undo on that vault, too.
silentsanctuary 1y ago
The headline made me excited, the article left me disappointed. An offline mode that requires me to individually download the pages and database rows I’m expecting to need beforehand is not the kind of “offline mode” that meets my needs.
gregjw 1y ago
INNOVATION!
jerrygoyal 1y ago
I haven't tried it yet but how do they handle conflicts?
y1zhou 1y ago
Been trying out [SiYuan](https://github.com/siyuan-note/siyuan https://github.com/siyuan-note/siyuan) as a local alternative and love it so far. The files are single-line JSONs so not as ideal as Obsidian .md files, but it seems to be trivial to export to various human-friendly formats.
ashdev 1y ago
This is pretty impressive. A lot of people underestimate the amount of work required to make something available offline. Planning the syncing architecture alone is a monumental task, especially at the scale Notion operates. I built a custom sync solution for my own app, Brisqi (https://brisqi.com https://brisqi.com), and it took me weeks to get it right, albeit with some trade-offs. Kudos to the Notion engineering team for achieving this milestone.
jrm4 1y ago
While we're here; as a long time zim-wiki user, and as someone who dabbled in org-mode for a year; Obsidian never felt compelling enough to switch. For me, this year, Logseq did. The killer concept for me is that it does org-mode hierarchy and outline collapsing, but easier; being able to "zero in" on a block, regardless of whether its its own page is excellent.
- digdugdirk 1y ago
  I don't quite understand what you mean by that, but you seem pretty amped about it - do you have any recommended getting started guides for logseq? I've never heard of it before, and I'm curious about the feature you described.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  - jrm4 1y ago
    It's very odd, I was looking around and none of the guides really clearly explain it, but basically, there are "Pages" (files) and "Blocks." Every page is itself a "Block," but may also contain multiple more blocks as an outline hierarchy. But what logseq seems to do differently is to let you zero in on a single block so that the block is all you see, despite ACTUALLY being merely part of a page.
louisbourgault 1y ago
Finally! The main aspect of this for me that is important is the ping. It seems like Notion hosts all their services in the US, and since i'm in Australia it somewhat annoys me the time it takes for pages to load. Just downloaded the update and it feels amazing.
wltr 1y ago
> Remember to mark your pages as offline across your devices Yeah, thanks, I’m good. Obsidian it is then.
W3zzy 1y ago
A lot of comments on Notion and Obsidian. Does anybody use Siyuan as a Notion alternative? https://github.com/siyuan-note/siyuan https://github.com/siyuan-note/siyuan
solarkraft 1y ago
At last! I remember asking for this almost 10 years ago.
sudhirkhanger 1y ago
How do you guys save Slack messages which you want to either read or follow up at a later stage? 1. I was manually dumping the the link and manually adding the title. 2. Slack lists seems to be okayish but doesn't let me tag easily. Message is not highlighted as much as Later feature does. 3. Trying out Notion but it doesn't show message upfront.
saadn92 1y ago
If anyone is interested in an alternative Notes app for projects, I have my side project over here: https://www.lumifyhub.io https://www.lumifyhub.io

242 points by ericzawo 1y ago

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.

graphememes 1y ago
web experience, many users do not use notion in an app
ujkhsjkdhf234 1y ago
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.
- savolai 1y ago
  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.
  - solardev 1y ago
    > Notion databases are also the best implementation seamless of ux I’ve seen for relational databases for end users. Have you ever tried Airtable? How does Notion compare?
    - savolai 1y ago
      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.
- TimorousBestie 1y ago
  I think the market is big enough for Notion and Obsidian to both exist.
- raincole 1y ago
  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.
prox 1y ago
Yup. Too little, too late. Hard pass.
- meowface 1y ago
  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.
Illniyar 1y ago
I've never heard of companies using Obsidian. Notion isn't really marketed or suitable for individuals (even if their free plan says otherwise).
- sfennell 1y ago
  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.
- layman51 1y ago
  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.
  - numbers 1y ago
    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.
  - cholantesh 1y ago
    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.
  - louisbourgault 1y ago
    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.
cschep 1y ago
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.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- jmetrikat 1y ago
  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
  - jamil7 1y ago
    Anytype responds poorly to feedback and bug reports from users, they send LLM slop back for any feedback or bug reports sent to them.
- dtkav 1y ago
  Have you tried Relay [0]? It makes Obsidian work for groups by adding real-time collaboration features. (disclaimer: I'm the dev) [0] https://relay.md https://relay.md
paxys 1y ago
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.
- EGreg 1y ago
  What feature set exactly? Describe what makes it so amazing. Basically collaboration? Notes has that too.
  - dzuc 1y ago
    Ever try to use the collaboration feature in Apple Notes? I find it remarkable how unreliable is.
  - rafram 1y ago
    https://www.notion.com/help/intro-to-databases https://www.notion.com/help/intro-to-databases
- 0xCMP 1y ago
  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.
  - lawgimenez 1y ago
    I have been using Apple Notes' Import to Notes and Import Markdown features a lot in macOS 26 and it has been great so far.
  - wkat4242 1y ago
    It's nice if you're on just Apple but if you use Mac, Linux, Windows, Android, iOS all mixed together it's pretty useless. Like most of apple's stuff.
- 1y ago
baxtr 1y ago
One thing I prefer in Notion is the index site, which is something Obsidian lacks. PS: I’m aware there are plugins that solve this issue, but none of them have worked well enough for me.
s0meON3 1y ago
Appflowy is a great alternative
raincole 1y ago
Tech-savvy people indeed do have some very interesting (while out of touch) perspectives.
- solardev 1y ago
  Who needs SaaS when you can engrave your own punch cards?
- tshaddox 1y ago
  I don't think Obsidian is even a major player in tech-savvy circles. I'd point to Apple Notes instead.
  - mgmobrien 1y ago
    It's a major player for personal notes. Eg > 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 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)
  - 1718627440 1y ago
    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.
mmargenot 1y ago
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.
tombert 1y ago
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.
- j_4 1y ago
  Yes. https://obsidian.md/blog/free-for-work/ https://obsidian.md/blog/free-for-work/
  - tombert 1y ago
    Ah, fair enough. That's actually fairly recent.
  - kwanbix 1y ago
    I don't get it. The pricing page only lists paid options. Not a free tier. What am I missing here?
    - Saris 1y ago
      There are no tiers or different features, just their own sync service is a paid service, and the commercial license is paid but optional. Otherwise the free Obsidian has everything, and there are other plugins for self hosted syncing that don't use the paid service.
      - kwanbix 1y ago
        but without syncing is basically unusable, or can I access my texts from my pc and my cell for example?
dimal 1y ago
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.
- dtkav 1y ago
  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. [0] https://relay.md https://relay.md
  - dimal 1y ago
    Well damn, this looks fantastic!
    - dtkav 1y ago
      thanks =] Find me on our discord [0] and I'll gift you some free storage. [0] https://discord.system3.md https://discord.system3.md
- themadturk 1y ago
  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.
bayindirh 1y ago
I use both. 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.
- mgmobrien 1y ago
  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/756736/notion-ceo-ivan-zhao-productivity-software-design-ai-interview 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.
  - bayindirh 1y ago
    > For some kinds of data processing having your files in a local folder is a prereq. Of course. > open in Zed, and I interact with files via the tool-calling agent panel and via terminal. Ah no, I don't use AI for that kind of tasks. I generally use my own formulae and what Notion provides Sans-AI. > I haven't tried Notion AI, maybe it's great. Me neither. I asked for authors and synopsis for a couple of books, that's all. > I can't imagine going back to a world where all my knowledge lives in Notion's house. Before going in, I always check how the Export works. Notion gives your text as Markdown and tables/databases as CSV, which is good enough for me. I don't prefer to use services which I need to move my stuff by hand. If I can make Bases work for me in Obsidian, I might move completely to Obsidian, but I need to test that first. Edit: Looks like the functions Obsidian supports are not enough for me to move over yet.
Slow_Hand 1y ago
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.
- KetoManx64 1y ago
  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?
  - Slow_Hand 1y ago
    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.
richardlblair 1y ago
Notion for my team, Obsidian for myself. 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.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- wltr 1y ago
  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.
  - petralithic 1y ago
    > 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
    - wltr 1y ago
      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.
      - richardlblair 1y ago
        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.
Casteil 1y ago
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.
atombender 1y ago
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.
- danielhep 1y ago
  Linear the project management software?
  - atombender 1y ago
    Yep!
- to11mtm 1y ago
  TBH I'd prefer either Sharepoint's forced edit boxes or raw markdown over the hot mess that is editing in confluence. Pick a side and be done with it.
- lmm 1y ago
  > 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)
zie 1y ago
I switched to silverbullet[0], you get to write lua instead of YAML or whatever these apps are pushing. 0: https://silverbullet.md https://silverbullet.md
bryanhogan 1y ago
Notion still has Database feature that Obsidian doesn't, e.g. a good Kanban board.
isodev 1y ago
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.
wortelefant 1y ago
The AI search and multiplayer modes are still a strong differentiator.
demarq 1y ago
> users like myself Nerdy devs are a niche. HN is a tiny tiny bubble. Most users don’t know and wouldn’t care for obsidian or markdown etc. I think is not a feature to appease the nerd community but for business users who are on the go.
giancarlostoro 1y ago
> with the new database feature of Obsidian What database features?
- dtkav 1y ago
  https://help.obsidian.md/bases https://help.obsidian.md/bases
  - giancarlostoro 1y ago
    Thank you, I downloaded the Obsidian app for iOS and I'm already sold. It has so many things I've wanted in a crisp clean UI.
    - dtkav 1y ago
      Yeah, Obsidian is great. Enjoy.
heihieih 1y ago
I have switched to Obsidian and have not used Notion for a long time.

jchw 1y ago

Well this is good I suppose, but what I find rather alarming is how bad Notion used to (recently, maybe not after this?) behave when there was a connectivity or server issue. I figured with OTs and CRDTs, collaborative editing of rich text documents with intermittent connectivity was a solved problem. However, with Notion I've actually lost data, sometimes a lot of it. (Once when Notion was having some kind of outage, I silently lost an entire page I was working on.) Personally, I don't really like Notion very much. Not silently losing data is a low bar to clear for an application that edits rich text. Notion didn't clear it.

9x39 1y ago

That's cool. I typically don't use multiple or linked pages too often when I'm mobile, but there was always some kind of local cache for a page I had been reading or working on. This plugs one of the few annoyances I had. Apparently in contrast to many of you, I think Notion is a better product for what I want, which is collaborative notes++. Personal info repo, shared project pages with people, and I straddle work and personal life using it everywhere. Tinkering with the backend is not a goal of mine, but I wonder if that's what people like about Obsidian.

photon_garden 1y ago

I was a big Notion fan for years and am now solidly in the Obsidian camp. Speed and local-first was originally the main differentiator, but over time Steph Ango's "file over app" philosophy has become my favorite feature. Yesterday I used Claude Code to automate some Obsidian cleanup and it was trivial because everything's just a file.

mxschll 1y ago
Local-first becomes even better in combination with local LLMs.
- dtkav 1y ago
  yes! So many people are missing out on using claude-code directly on their knowledge base locally. Once you have it all local it seems completely crazy to push all of that context into a locked-in saas platform with mediocre AI tools.
SpaceManNabs 1y ago
Never knew people viewed notion and obsidian in the same space. i usually compare obsidian to joplin... seems like i should be looking more at obsidian because i was considering starting a new wiki in notion.
wahnfrieden 1y ago
You are not their current market, at all (individual vs team use) and your solution is unsuitable for theirs
- jjfoooo4 1y ago
  People using their free offering for personal use is a critical part of Notion's sales pipeline. It's a hell of a lot easier to sell a piece of software to a company when all it's internal users have already trained themselves how to use it in their personal time. Those users are probably the ones generating the enterprise sales lead in the first place See also: Google Docs

trentnix 1y ago

I'm a Notion fan but the lack of a native Linux app has me shopping for a replacement. Obsidian seems, from what I've seen, focused on the ability to graph notes, which I don't really care about. I want note-taking, list-making, and markdown friendly. I do want to keep Notion's ability to work in a browser and to maintain a single, accessible store of my notes. What are my options?

cbdumas 1y ago
> I want note-taking, list-making, and markdown friendly. I feel like you just described Obsidian. You can do more with tagging and linking but you definitely don't have to
datadrivenangel 1y ago
Obsidian is a markdown editor. The graphing is not pushed, and can actually be disabled in the app settings. Very customizable. Worth a try!
LostMyLogin 1y ago
Note-taking, list making, and markdown friendly kind of describe obsidian. You can organize the files however you wish.
- roomey 1y ago
  Zim wiki is brilliant. I've been using it for years. It's very extendable
  - rafram 1y ago
    > Zim handles several types of markup, like headings, bullet lists and of course bold, italic and highlighted. OK, I think this may be a bit less powerful than Notion and Obsidian.
    - roomey 1y ago
      A good bit less powerful yes. But the simplicity is a huge strength when it comes to long term tech. I started using it in 2012 I believe. The most important thing in any note taking app is to use it consistently and use it for years. And bring it with you as you change jobs. Sometimes simple things that work in plain text files that can be exported and imported easily is what you need for long term note taking.

ale 1y ago

Although I’m sure implementing this into a big codebase is a technical headache I hope this encourages other big Electron apps like Figma (or even Tana, a direct competitor) to support an offline mode of sorts.

jmetrikat 1y ago
can confirm - even building on crdts from the ground up in anytype was no small feat. adding them later to a cloud-first product like notion must’ve been a massive lift.. it reshapes the whole architecture. seeing this shift with more providers would definitely be welcome - too many apps still treat offline as optional, not essential
joeriddles 1y ago
I'm surprised Figma doesn't support offline mode given this blog post about how they built it. https://www.figma.com/blog/how-figmas-multiplayer-technology-works/ https://www.figma.com/blog/how-figmas-multiplayer-technology...
- rafram 1y ago
  > Figma lets you go offline for an arbitrary amount of time and continue editing. This sounds like they’re trying to support cases where you temporarily lose connection while editing a document. Very different from being able to start up your computer without an internet connection, open a document you’d previously downloaded, edit it, and sync sometime later once you come back online (which is what Notion now supports).

s0m3B0DY 1y ago

[dead]

codingwagie 1y ago

ive wasted so much time fiddling with notion documents

neonnoodle 1y ago

"It's true, we inserted disks into our beige towers and installed desktop software..." "Let's get you to bed, grandma..."

none_to_remain 1y ago
We have strayed so far from God's light

DataDaemon 1y ago

when e2ee?

jmetrikat 1y ago
anytype has e2ee at its core - and you can verify it, since the code is open. can’t say the same for notion.
jitl 1y ago
use anytype instead (i work at notion)

dcreater 1y ago

Just use obsidian instead. Don't trust 3rd parties with your sensitive data if you dont have to - especially ones who've to IPO and delivet returns to investors

colordrops 1y ago
And obsidian is not open source either. If you rely on any of the functionality besides just raw text editing, you may lose it one day.
- static_motion 1y ago
  But everything is stored as .md, which is ubiquitous. You'll still have access to your notes and be able to edit them with your preferred text editor.
  - colordrops 1y ago
    This is always the argument but obsidian does a lot on top of these md files. NASA's mission control software stores data in JSON, it's an open format so I guess the NASA software is easily replaceable huh? If obsidian was such a thin layer then why isn't there a good open source alternative? People build their workflows on top of the obsidian functionality, not just the md data.
    - shepherdjerred 1y ago
      this is only an issue if you use a ton of plugins also, it's not unreasonable to think that a compatible alternative would be easier to build compared to a less standard format
    - dcreater 1y ago
      > but obsidian does a lot on top of these md files What do they do besides the frontmatter (which is fairly trivial to process or ignore in a hypothetical future where one wants to stop using obsidian)?
- 1y ago

codruterdei 1y ago

Oh, only 2 years after Notion AI. I guess we now know which is harder to create tickets for xD

levmiseri 1y ago

For me one of the biggest issues with Notion (and to a smaller extent with Obsidian as well) is its ever present UI. When I write (or read) something, I don't want to see 20+ buttons scattered around distracting me from the content. IA writer got this right, but it's too local and doesn't have colab or better online sync features. Shameless plug – I'm building https://kraa.io/about https://kraa.io/about that's trying to be a writing app with a minimal, yet feature-rich, UI. (better offline and local-files functionality planned)

anoojb 1y ago
You want a focus mode plugin: https://github.com/ryanpcmcquen/obsidian-focus-mode https://github.com/ryanpcmcquen/obsidian-focus-mode This is what differentiates Obsidian from many other note taking apps. Anyone who has an itch can build a plugin and customize it. Unlike a venture-funded SaaS application there's no meaningful commercial incentive or issue with building something that will eventually get sherlock'd b the application vendor in the future.
jitl 1y ago
Notion should enter "keyboard mode" as you start to type and fade out the header bar. You'll still need to close the sidebar since it's quite busy and we don't fade it automatically since it has an explicit toggle. I guess if you're building your own there's still too much noise. Good luck!
- levmiseri 1y ago
  Yeah, that's a nice touch. Though the reading experience is also important. Notion is obviously super powerful and a more cluttered UI is hence probably unavoidable.
datadrivenangel 1y ago
In Obsidian you can disable almost all of the UI very easily in settings.
- levmiseri 1y ago

kevdoran 1y ago

I'm a little confused. They've supported offline for some time. Even published a very cool article last July about all the (considerable) challenges one runs into when going after making wasm-sqlite work: https://www.notion.com/blog/how-we-sped-up-notion-in-the-browser-with-wasm-sqlite https://www.notion.com/blog/how-we-sped-up-notion-in-the-bro...

jitl 1y ago
The article you posted doesn't mention "offline" at all. We use SQLite as a cache in the browser when available and in iOS/Android/desktop apps, but we didn't have any guarantee that a page you want offline is actually available offline. It would "mostly work" offline before, but you could have cases where some blocks in a page aged out of the LRU, or they changed online in a way that invalidated the page but new content wasn't downloaded. When that happens we show a "go online to view" error instead of risking you viewing/editing a known-incorrect local snapshot of the page. With "available offline", we now proactively download and keep up-to-date the content you want available offline. It will either work, or show an explicit error if things go wrong in the sync process. No more guesswork.

trn217 1y ago

Just use Anytype. It‘s a free to use application where you actually own your data.

j45 1y ago

Can someone report if it’s real actual offline first mode without some kind of ceremony before doing so. I had to leave Notion far too many years ago and life is elsewhere.

maz1b 1y ago

Offline mode is one of those features that sounds simple enough, but in reality gets pretty complex pretty fast, particularly if you want to do more meaningful capabilities or operations esp at scale.

superfrank 1y ago
I'm on a team building offline mode into an enterprise product at work and you are soooooo correct about this. Offline mode is a deceptively hard problem to begin with and it becomes 10x harder if you're trying to add it to a product that wasn't designed with offline mode in mind.
hrdwdmrbl 1y ago
I remember Notion talking about adding this YEARS ago. It has literally taken them YEARS to build this. So yes, very complex
strifey 1y ago
Maybe it's just me, but nothing sounds simple about offline mode. The changeset resolution necessary to resync after going back online sounds TOUGH to build in a way that doesn't result in user data loss ever without being more cumbersome than it's worth.
hahn-kev 1y ago
The best way to do it is right from the start. It's hard enough as is but adding it on after the fact is even harder.

meel-hd 1y ago

https://notesnook.com https://notesnook.com is better than Notion and Obsidian. The cross-platform apps are fast and smooth, and it have sync, which Obsidian requires a subscription for.

bayindirh 1y ago
I was a notesnook subscriber. It was a good app riddled with some unpleasant bugs in their publish workflow, so I canceled after three months or so, sadly. OTOH, you don't need to pay for Obsidian sync. You can sync it via any cloud provider or syncthing if you prefer. I have a business related vault under Obsidian. It syncs via office's Nextcloud instance. I also added "Edit history" plugin, so I have unlimited diff and undo on that vault, too.

silentsanctuary 1y ago

The headline made me excited, the article left me disappointed. An offline mode that requires me to individually download the pages and database rows I’m expecting to need beforehand is not the kind of “offline mode” that meets my needs.

gregjw 1y ago

INNOVATION!

jerrygoyal 1y ago

I haven't tried it yet but how do they handle conflicts?

y1zhou 1y ago

Been trying out [SiYuan](https://github.com/siyuan-note/siyuan https://github.com/siyuan-note/siyuan) as a local alternative and love it so far. The files are single-line JSONs so not as ideal as Obsidian .md files, but it seems to be trivial to export to various human-friendly formats.

ashdev 1y ago

This is pretty impressive. A lot of people underestimate the amount of work required to make something available offline. Planning the syncing architecture alone is a monumental task, especially at the scale Notion operates. I built a custom sync solution for my own app, Brisqi (https://brisqi.com https://brisqi.com), and it took me weeks to get it right, albeit with some trade-offs. Kudos to the Notion engineering team for achieving this milestone.

jrm4 1y ago

While we're here; as a long time zim-wiki user, and as someone who dabbled in org-mode for a year; Obsidian never felt compelling enough to switch. For me, this year, Logseq did. The killer concept for me is that it does org-mode hierarchy and outline collapsing, but easier; being able to "zero in" on a block, regardless of whether its its own page is excellent.

digdugdirk 1y ago
I don't quite understand what you mean by that, but you seem pretty amped about it - do you have any recommended getting started guides for logseq? I've never heard of it before, and I'm curious about the feature you described.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- jrm4 1y ago
  It's very odd, I was looking around and none of the guides really clearly explain it, but basically, there are "Pages" (files) and "Blocks." Every page is itself a "Block," but may also contain multiple more blocks as an outline hierarchy. But what logseq seems to do differently is to let you zero in on a single block so that the block is all you see, despite ACTUALLY being merely part of a page.

louisbourgault 1y ago

Finally! The main aspect of this for me that is important is the ping. It seems like Notion hosts all their services in the US, and since i'm in Australia it somewhat annoys me the time it takes for pages to load. Just downloaded the update and it feels amazing.

wltr 1y ago

> Remember to mark your pages as offline across your devices Yeah, thanks, I’m good. Obsidian it is then.

W3zzy 1y ago

A lot of comments on Notion and Obsidian. Does anybody use Siyuan as a Notion alternative? https://github.com/siyuan-note/siyuan https://github.com/siyuan-note/siyuan

solarkraft 1y ago

At last! I remember asking for this almost 10 years ago.

sudhirkhanger 1y ago

How do you guys save Slack messages which you want to either read or follow up at a later stage? 1. I was manually dumping the the link and manually adding the title. 2. Slack lists seems to be okayish but doesn't let me tag easily. Message is not highlighted as much as Later feature does. 3. Trying out Notion but it doesn't show message upfront.

saadn92 1y ago

If anyone is interested in an alternative Notes app for projects, I have my side project over here: https://www.lumifyhub.io https://www.lumifyhub.io