Why I'm Moving my Personal Notes from Notion to Obsidian as a Software Engineer

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I've been a Notion user for years, recommending it to friends and family for personal notes. It really helped me organize all of my documents and build a "second brain".

But I've also considered other apps along the way. I take a ton of notes and while I loved Notion's editing experience and cross-platform capabilities, I didn't always love its default behavior, organization, or latencies.

I decided to try out Obsidian a couple weeks ago and really vibed with the mission, experience, and capabilities. I've now decided to move all my personal notes from Notion to Obsidian and in this post wanted to give some of the reasons I decided to make the jump and first impressions comparing the two note taking apps.

Benefits of Obsidian

First some benefits Obsidian has over Notion.

Obsidian is local and lightweight

Obsidian is local-first. It's basically just a wrapper on Markdown docs which gives you local latency (fast) and ease of access (it's all just folders and files on your system).

When I thought about what I wanted in a note taking app - I really just wanted docs, folders, and some lightweight views on them for organization. Notion does all these things but it also does a ton of other ones, perhaps too many.

The downfall of many apps is that they try to do too many things which leads to increasing complexity and slower, more expensive services often decreasing the usability of the main thing they were good at. I'm not saying Notion is bad but I am saying I increasingly felt frustrated with using it for the main thing I wanted - taking and organizing my notes.

Notes opened slowly
Search was hit or miss
I often lost docs because I used databases instead of folders for organization

I've found the speed and simplicity of Obsidian's editing / organizing experience to be refreshing. It's similar to how I write these blog posts - fast with minimal distractions.

Obsidian allows you to control your own data

Obsidian is just a wrapper on Markdown files that live on your system.

This means that you can view them, edit them, sync them however you want - whether it's with Obsidian or another tool. This lower level of abstraction gives me confidence that even if Obsidian and its devs were to abandon the project tomorrow, I'd still have all my notes and could reasonably use them with a standard IDE or migrate them to some other platform.

I can't say the same about Notion. They could have an incident where they wipe all the data or they could go out of business and the data could be inaccessible.

For many things this is a fine tradeoff - convenience for a small possibility of unrecoverable data loss. But I've been thinking my notes are a bit more valuable than that and worth a bit of extra effort to keep them around long-term.

Obsidian is highly customizable

Obsidian is basically a web view on a Markdown editor.

This makes it highly customizable with relatively little complexity.

You can customize appearance with CSS.
You can build Javascript plugins to customize the behavior.
You can port your favorite IDE themes over to Obsidian (I'm using a heavily-customized dark mode version of One Dark Pro).

As a software engineer I find this customization useful, freeing, and not too intimidating. The markup has decent CSS classes and there are many configurable vars for specific elements if you don't want to change everything.

If I'm going to use a note taking app long term, I should be able to make it exactly as I want it.

I'll note this level of customization does have some downsides, particularly for folks who don't want to mess with CSS, which we'll talk about later.

Downsides of Obsidian

Some downsides of Obsidian where Notion wins out.

Notion is good out of the box, Obsidian requires customization

Notion is good out of the box - it's got good defaults for colors, editing experience, and syncs.

Obsidian is okay out of the box but takes some tweaking to get it to a good place and more to a great place.

I had to mess around with several themes before I found one I liked and ended up heavily customizing it to get the colors I wanted. I also installed a few plugins to get the editing experience I wanted like Creases to auto fold some sections and one that lets me paste urls directly into the markdown.

I prefer this customization because I'm able to get exactly what I want out of my note taking app but if you want something that just works out of the box, Obsidian might not be for you.

Notion has better collaboration features

Obsidian is great because it runs on markdown files. But it's also just markdown files. In order to get collaboration features, another layer needs to be added.

I've heard that there are some decent plugins for collaboration but if I'm being honest, Notion or GDocs is probably a better bet if you will be collaborating on docs with other people.

Obsidian's sync is not perfect

The built-in sync does well but it's not as fast across devices as Notion is.

This doesn't bother me too much as I feel Obsidian makes up for it in the speed of opening and editing files on device but it is something to keep in mind if you'll be editing docs across multiple devices frequently.

Personally I only really need my daily notes to sync frequently across devices and my other docs are seldom accessed on different devices right after each other so it works for me.

If you want to use something other than Obsidian's official sync, you will need to do some further customization to get it to work, especially if you want it to sync to mobile. So something to keep in mind depending on your workflow.

Overall I think Obsidian provides a faster, simpler note taking experience than Notion did. But that came at the expense of more complicated and necessary customization for me to get it set up the way I wanted.

If you just want a note app that works, syncs across your devices, and requires low maintenance -> Notion
If you want to collaborate with others on these docs -> Notion
If you want control of your data and high customization of your editor -> Obsidian
If you just want an editor to organize your markdown files -> Obsidian or even a standard IDE

I chose Obsidian because I wanted a thin layer on top of my markdown files and folders, was okay with the up-front customization costs, and didn't care about collaboration. But if you're intimidated by CSS / Javascript, want to collaborate with others, or don't care so much about a couple seconds of load time, Notion may be a better bet.

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