Why Obsidian Is The Best Among Other Apps

Preface

The word “best”, is subjective. Therefore, this is my take on why Obsidian is the best among its competitors, what it does, and what it stands for.

The following is my opinion based on my experience on using these softwares. It shows how Obsidian compared with other major note taking and productivity apps. And I made sure to covers both pros and cons for both parties.

Why Obsidian is Different

It’s FOSS

No such thing as Obsidian Premium.

FOSS means Free and Open-Source Software. The team behind Obsidian have put their source code on the internet for the public to see. You can comment and give suggestions on features, as well as reporting bugs to them.

In other words, they are not doing anything shady to hide it from you. No data harvesting, profiling, or upselling you anything. So, you can rest assure you can trust it enough to use this free software.

Offline

Unlike Notion, Obsidian is offline-first. It’s like Word, you create a .md file on your device and work on it. The offline nature of this software lets you easily access and edit your notes without the need of internet.

It also means that you actually own your data.

MarkDown

By using .md files for your notes, you can migrate your notes to other software easily. You truly own your data without taking in all the non-sense big techs vendor locking us in.

Community Plugins

Obsidian has a built-in community plugins centre for user to freely download and use to further enrich the user experience on Obsidian. Need Microsoft Planner for Kanban board? Obsidian has a plugin for that. Want To Do Tasks? It has another plugin for that. Wants to journal? Obsidian has a plugin for that. It is so versatile and it can do so much more.

In other words, it is a power horse that offers you endless features to tinker around for your needs. Again, for free.

Comparison

Now, let’s compare the key differences I found between them. This won’t cover all features, but, just enough to irritates me to make me jump ship.

Obsidian VS Notion

Obsidian is offline-first. It built everything based on that value. Notion on the other hand, even though are working on getting offline working, it is still being built on top of the web, and there are limits on how many “offline” document¹ you can view and edit once you lose the internet connection.

Web-first also means more loading time, and internet connectivity is always needed. Once you have a big collection of notes, using a note app on the web will only get slower and slower. Especially when you try to search for a note.

And that’s not how a software notebook should be.

Arguably, Notion offers a lot more than a traditional note taking app. Users can publish their notes like a website at ease, allows other users to make comments on the notes, etc.

But, user experience wise, I still prefer Obsidian for the experience of having an offline software to work on, with the sole focus on writing activity itself.

Obsidian VS OneNote

OneNote is good. I was using it before I tried Obsidian, and before that, AppleNotes. What it excels is in “able to do anything”.

First of all, it is cross-platform. It has decent platform support on all devices and OSs. You can easily sync notes between them, view them, and edit them, for free.

One thing that OneNotes does but Obsidian does not is hand drawing support. Although there are plugins in Obsidian you can use to support drawing in the note using iPad pencil, the experience and features are far more superior and practical on OneNote.

User interface wise, I feel like OneNote is clunky and slow. User can put notes in “books”, but I never liked that rigid setups and I never wrapped my head around it.

All in all, OneNote is especially good at syncing everything at ease using your OneDrive storage natively, while able to do almost everything. But with the catch of being kind of slow, opinionated UI, and ecosystem reliance because you have to have a Microsoft account to use OneNote.

Obsidian, on the other hand, relies on third party plugins to compensate the short coming of native supports on features, for example Excalidraw for drawings on PDFs. And third party plugins just for synchronizing your vault if you are not paying for the official sync service.

So, in order to choose between the two, the questions are: Do you prefer everything is ready for you out-of-the-box, but with a vendor lock? Or, tailor your needs by adding imperfect community plugins but without having a vendor lock?

Another thing I noticed is that OneNote takes quite awhile to load up, and I only had a few notes in it. It never happens to me in Obsidian.

Obsidian VS Apple Notes

First of all, Apple Notes is Apple only. You will be locked into Apple ecosystem once you are heavily invested. So, if you don’t want vendor lock², Apple Notes is a no-go for storing large amount of notes.

However, if you don’t mind the lock in, Apple Notes is also good, in a certain way.

Apple Notes syncs by default, and you can write, draws on it with the best experience possible. You can even lock your notes.

For some reason, I have never liked the writing experience on the Apple Notes app. It feels like it’s a heavy software and only meant for short notes. The folder structure also feels unintuitive to me. But the worst of all, is the vendor locked in and no cross-platform offerings. Although I do use all things Apple, I still prefer the flexibility of having access on other devices and options to choose my hardware.

Obsidian VS Logseq

I have a separate article for this topic. In short, Logseq is lagging behind in what it offers and so far it is only good for journalling. In contrast, Obsidian is way more stable, fast, and overall better experience in everything.

So, What is The Catch?

No Free Official Sync

Apart from the FOSS nature of Obsidian, the team needs to make money to support the project. Syntonization is the only thing they do charge for. If you want a peace of mind, you can opt in to sync your vault.

However, the awesomeness of FOSS lies in community support. So, there are community plugins do just that - to provide the syncing service using major cloud solution provider such as Google Drive, OneDrive, Dropbox, etc. Some of these services are also charged.

The free solution I use is Syncthing. It is FOSS and it is excellent for cross device local synchronization. Briefly saying, to make Obsidian sync, you need to install Syncthing on all the devices you want to have access to Obsidian. Then, select to share and sync the folder where your Obsidian vault is located. Finally, if you want your notes to backup to the cloud, you can simply put the Syncthing folder on your desktop inside your choice of backup service, like Google Drive and OneDrive. More details will be on a separate article later.

Editing PDFs Still not Decent

I doubt Obsidian can ever compete with stock apps with the best device support for drawings and gestures. If you don’t need to edit a lot of PDFs.

That being said, Obsidian main focus is still markdown note taking. It is not a PDF reader. But, developers are working on making it perfect. So, I’m still optimistic about it.

Conclusion

Obsidian is the best in terms of better data ownership, being FOSS, superior writing experience, and versatile toolsets to suit all your needs.

You can also check out how I use Obsidian and the most important plugins I use on a daily basis.

I do hope this write up can help you decide which note-taking app to choose from before you commit. It would be painful to change from one to another after you have a large number of notes and established a workflow based on that. I’ve been there.