Obsidian vs Notion, Priced By What You Get

Notion will sync your notes to every device you own on the free plan. Obsidian charges four dollars a month for that.

Which is the fact I'd lead an Obsidian vs Notion comparison with, and nobody does, because it inverts the story everyone tells about which of these two is the generous one.

Short version before the detail. Obsidian is free without limits and keeps plain-text Markdown files on your own disk, so it's the better bet if you want notes that outlive the company. Notion's free plan does more out of the box for one person, sync included, and Plus is $10 per member a month. Everything below came off obsidian.md and notion.com on 28 July 2026, and a couple of the numbers contradict what the ranking pages say.

The Fifty Dollar Licence Two Ranking Pages Got Wrong

Start with the claim I went looking to confirm and couldn't.

Two of the comparisons currently ranking for this term state that commercial use of Obsidian requires a licence at $50 per user per year. One of them defines commercial as revenue-generating or work-related activity inside a for-profit organisation with two or more employees. Read that and you'd reasonably conclude that using Obsidian at a small company is a paid arrangement.

Obsidian's own licence overview lists commercial use under what the free version permits, sitting in the same list as non-profits, educational institutions and government departments. Their help page for teams goes further and says Obsidian is 100% free to use and there's no minimum seat count purchase required, then describes organisations as being able to choose to support Obsidian by buying Commercial licences. The pricing page does show $50 USD per user per year, and what it promises in return is supporting development and becoming a featured organisation.

So the $50 reads as a tip jar rather than a toll, at least on the pages I loaded today. I'd still get someone to check the actual terms of service before betting a company on my reading of a marketing page, and terms move, so don't treat this paragraph as legal advice from a person who writes blog posts. It's just that two pages in the top ten are telling you a requirement exists and the vendor's own site isn't backing them up.

The Sync Tiers Nobody Prints

Every comparison quotes Obsidian Sync at four dollars. None of them mention that there are two tiers and the cheap one is quite small.

One gigabyte and a five megabyte per-file ceiling is fine for text and not fine for a vault where you drop in screenshots and PDFs, which is what most people's vaults turn into by month six, and the upgrade that fixes it is double the price everyone quotes.

The version history row is the one I'd actually weigh. A month of history on Standard against twelve on Plus is the difference between recovering a note you mangled last week and recovering one you mangled last spring.

For contrast, Notion's free plan keeps 7 days of page history and caps individual file uploads at 5 MB. Same 5 MB number, different reason, and Notion lifts it to unlimited uploads on Plus at $10 per member a month.

Who Charges For What

Here's the table I wanted while I was reading the top ten and never found. Not a feature grid. A map of which capability is bundled and which one has a price tag on it, per vendor, because that's the actual decision.

Look down the middle column and the shape is obvious. Obsidian gives away the thing that costs it nothing, which is software running on your hardware against your files, and charges for the thing that costs it money, which is servers. Notion's costs are servers all the way down, so its free tier is a customer acquisition decision rather than an engineering one, and that's why it can afford to be generous with sync and stingy with history.

Neither approach is charity. They're just different businesses wearing the same category name.

A Community Plugin Can Read Every File On Your Machine

Not one page in the top ten mentions this, and Obsidian documents it plainly on their own site, which I found slightly surprising in both directions.

Their plugin security page states that community plugins can access files on your computer, can connect to the internet, and can install additional programs. The reason is architectural rather than negligent. In their words, due to technical limitations, Obsidian cannot reliably restrict plugins to specific permissions or access levels, which means plugins inherit Obsidian's access levels, and Obsidian's access level is your user account.

To be fair about the mitigations, they're real. Obsidian automatically scans every plugin version for security vulnerabilities, code quality issues and malware, publishes the result as a safety scorecard on each plugin's directory page, and keeps doing manual reviews for popular, featured and flagged plugins. The app ships in Restricted Mode, so third-party code doesn't run until you go and turn it on. And their own recommendation, quoted, is that if you're working with sensitive data and want to install a community plugin, you should perform an independent security audit on it first.

I don't think that's a reason to avoid Obsidian. I think it's a reason to stop treating "thousands of plugins" as a pure win in a comparison table, since the plugin count and the attack surface are the same number counted twice. Notion's integrations run on Notion's servers under Notion's permissions model, which is its own set of tradeoffs, and I couldn't find a comparable warning because the situation isn't comparable.

What Actually Comes Out Of A Notion Export

I went through Notion's export documentation looking for the boring parts, since the export formats themselves get repeated everywhere and the restrictions don't.

You get PDF, HTML, and Markdown with CSV. Fine. Then the details. You can't export a Form view of a database at all, in their words, at this time. When you export a database you only get to choose between the current view and the default view, so if you built six views you're exporting one. Callout blocks come out as HTML sitting inside your Markdown, because Markdown has no callout. Custom emojis don't survive to PDF. Download links expire after seven days.

And on Windows, files fail if the nested folder path runs past 260 characters, which will happen to anyone with deeply nested pages and long titles, and it's the sort of failure that shows up as a partial export rather than an error you'd notice.

Obsidian's version of this section is short because there isn't one. The files were Markdown in a folder the whole time. That's the entire argument for it, and the productivity apps breakdown has the wider version of that math, including what the rest of a subscription stack costs you a year.

The Bias I Should Declare

I built a privacy-first desktop app for organising your life, no accounts, data sitting in a folder on your own machine. So when I read Obsidian's pitch I'm reading my own argument back at myself, and you should discount my enthusiasm accordingly.

The honest limit of my experience is that I've never run a Notion workspace for a team, so I can't tell you what month eighteen of that feels like when four people have built conflicting databases and nobody remembers why. Plenty of people can. I'm not one of them.

What I do run is a pile of projects in one repository, with notes as Markdown files sitting next to whatever they're about, opened in whatever editor was already in front of me. It's not a system. It's the absence of one, which turns out to be portable in a way systems aren't, and the only reason I can say that with any confidence is that I've moved machines twice and the notes came along without me thinking about it.

Questions People Ask About These Two

Which one is better for a second brain? Obsidian, if the phrase means linked notes you'll still have in ten years. Notion, if it means a place where notes, tasks and a project database live together and other people can see them. The phrase covers two different products, which is why the arguments about it never resolve.

Can I actually move from Notion to Obsidian? Yes, and it's lossy in specific ways rather than broadly. Markdown and CSV export is supported, so the text arrives. Databases arrive as CSV in whichever single view you picked. Callouts arrive as HTML. Plan on a cleanup pass rather than a clean import.

Is Obsidian genuinely free, or is that a trial? Genuinely free, per their own wording, free without limits with no sign-up required. What costs money is Sync, Publish, and the optional Commercial licence. Nothing about the app itself is metered.

Does Notion work offline? I'm not going to give you a confident answer. Notion's pricing page doesn't address offline behaviour and one of the ranking comparisons describes offline as a recent addition, which I couldn't verify against Notion's own documentation in the time I spent looking. Obsidian's homepage does say notes stay on your device and stay accessible offline.

Which for a small team? Notion, on balance, and the reason is boring. Its free plan caps external guests at 10 and starts limiting blocks once a workspace has two or more members, which pushes you to Plus at ten a head, and ten a head buys a shared editing surface that Obsidian's model wasn't built for. Obsidian's collaboration lives inside a shared vault on a Sync subscription, which works, but it's file sync rather than co-editing.

What about the other note apps? This pair gets treated as the whole category and it isn't. There's a wider rundown in the digital note taking app comparison, the AI note taking app piece covers the transcription and summary end of it, and if what you actually want is a document and spreadsheet bundle rather than a note system, that's the productivity suite question instead.

How I'd Decide

Ask what you want to be true in five years, then pick the one whose failure mode you can live with.

If the answer is that the notes should still open with the company gone, that's Obsidian, and you should budget four to eight dollars a month for Sync rather than pretending the free tier includes it. If the answer is that other people need to be in there with you, that's Notion, and you should do a Markdown and CSV export once a quarter so the exit stays cheap.

Both of those are fine answers. What I'd avoid is picking on plugin counts or template galleries, which is where most of the comparison writing lives and which stops mattering about a fortnight in.