Notion vs Obsidian
Notion and Obsidian are both note-taking software. Notion is a commercial product from Notion Labs. Obsidian is a commercial product from Dynalist Inc.
Which to pick
- Pick Notion when
- A small or mid-size team wants one flexible tool for docs, wiki and light project tracking.
- Pick Obsidian when
- You want notes as plain files you own, work offline, and are happy to tune your setup with plugins.
Side by side
A workspace of pages and databases for notes, wikis, project tracking and docs, with AI search and agents built in.
A note-taking app that stores notes as Markdown files in a local folder, with linking, a graph view and a large plugin ecosystem.
Cloud only, slow on large workspaces, offline support is limited, and its flexibility leads to messy structures.
Closed source, sync and publishing are paid add-ons, and team collaboration is weak.
Production-ready (both)
Cloud service, desktop app and mobile app
Desktop app and mobile app
Not published
Electron and Markdown
Closed source, sold by Notion Labs
Closed source, sold by Dynalist Inc.
Closed source: you use it under the maker's terms and cannot change or resell the code. (both)
4.1k Wikipedia readers a month on phones
6.2k Wikipedia readers a month on phones
Other comparisons
More note-taking apps
Both sides were judged on 2026-11-03 from makers' descriptions, Wikipedia, READMEs and GitHub data. License, age and popularity lines are worked out directly.