I finally tried Obsidian again and realized why so many people use Notion instead

I want to love Obsidian, I really do. The problem with Obsidian is Obsidian itself, and, after trying it out again, I see why so many people choose to use Notion instead.

Everything in Obsidian requires a plugin

And so many plugins end up abandoned

While there are many markdown editors out there, Obsidian is arguably one of the biggest around . The issue is, Obsidian ships as a fairly barebones experience. The Obsidian team is pretty small, comprising of less than a dozen people, which means that their core focus is on the core experience of Obsidian.

This is actually a problem though. Essentially, if there's something you want to do in Obsidian, the chances are it requires a third-party plugin and isn't a native feature. In fact, if you look at Kepano's X account, he actually tells people to look for plugins at basically every turn.

Because of this philosophy, a lot of Obsidian's best features end up becoming abandonware because it's based on a plugin that was maintained by one person who eventually got too busy to keep maintaining it. I ran into this problem after downloading Obsidian to try and get it set up how I wanted it.

I live and breathe kanban boards for my writing workflow. Each article I write goes through multiple stages, from initial ideation, to outlining, pending approval, writing, and more. I use Notion for writing currently, and the kanban system works great there.

I had heard that Obsidian had a decent kanban plugin, and I was excited to use it—until I saw it hadn't been updated in months and the developer had marked it as archived, but still available. Then, I found another kanban plugin , only to see that it was marked as looking for a new maintainer. The problem is, neither worked all that well with the newer Obsidian version I was running.

I did find another kanban plugin , and that worked okay, but it wasn't the experience I was looking for. I thought about building my own plugin, but that would be plagued by the same issues as using an out-of-date plugin. I really don't have the time or energy to maintain a plugin to make sure it works with future versions, so that played a major role in my decision of whether to continue using Obsidian or not.

Obsidian offers a great writing experience plagued by a not great sync experience

Unless you give Obsidian money or spend a ton of time setting up your own sync server

I absolutely love the writing experience that Obsidian offers. I'm not a huge fan of block-based writing, which is what Notion currently uses. Obsidian just has a much smoother experience and I love how it looks. The problem is, looks can't overcome pain points with ease of use.

Obsidian is designed to be local-first , which is fantastic compared to Notion's cloud-first approach. The problem comes from the sync experience with Obsidian. Obsidian supports syncing with iCloud Drive or Google Drive just fine, but the sync is linked to iCloud Drive or Google Drive, which is not instant .

The only other official sync method provided by Obsidian is paying for their monthly Obsidian Sync service , which is basically instant. I paid for it for a few months but ended up cancelling it because I just couldn't bring myself to continue to pay for it.

I eventually found the open source Obsidian LiveSync plugin , which allows you to self-host your own sync platform. I tried this, and it mostly works, but it is a major pain to set up and keep going. I've got extensive experience with Docker, self-hosting, and Linux server maintenance. Running Obsidian LiveSync is definitely doable, but it's not a quick setup. There's also the Obsidian Git plugin , which is pretty powerful in its own rights, but it's still a plugin and the lone developer could drop support for it at any time.

The syncing experience alone with Obsidian was enough to drive me away from it. It's just too much work, and Obsidian could absolutely have done a better job with it. The Obsidian LiveSync plugin isn't even a first-party tool, it's a third-party feature that someone in the community built, which means it's plagued by the same thing that all the other plugins are—the potential for abandonment.

Notion is simply more capable than Obsidian

I really want to love Obsidian, but it's missing core functionality that it should have

While Obsidian does have an absolute ton of plugins, there are just some core things that really aren't all that possible with it. Databases are much harder to build in Obsidian, different view styles aren't easy to design, and various types of frontmatter, like custom tags or fields, also aren't all that intuitive.

Obsidian really is just designed to be a barebones writing program, and that's entirely fine, but it just doesn't really work for me. I need more capabilities than that for my writing software. In Notion, for example, I track all sorts of fields that are technically possible in Obsidian but they're not used in nearly the same way.

When I have an article due date or scheduled date, I put that into a field in Notion that is used in sorting. I also have various other fields, from categories to file attachments and more. While Obsidian does have support for most of this, the implementation is quite poor.

Again, with a number of plugins, I could probably fix that, but at that point, I'm spending more time building the solution then actually writing, and that becomes a problem. A writing solution should just work for you, and Obsidian makes you work for it.

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Obsidian has such great bones, but the execution leaves a lot to be desired

I want to love Obsidian, I really do. The problem is, Obsidian just doesn't do what I need it to, and I think that's the general consensus of other users too. While Obsidian definitely has a cult following, it really only has about one million users worldwide. Compare that to the 100 million users that Notion has, and it starts to make more sense.

One million users is nothing short of amazing for a fairly indie level project, but it definitely shows. I wish Obsidian the best, and I will probably continue to try out Obsidian every now and then to see what's changed, but, for now, Notion wins out on my daily writing tool, even though I really wish it didn't.