I started using Notion a while ago but it never felt right. I watched videos where people assembled these seriously function packed homepages, templates and wikis yet It never clicked for me. Then I found Obsidian.md and I realized imposing limits can spark creativity.
What I’m Looking for
I never valued organization as a teenager or young adult, as I got older I was gradually keeping better track of things, but I basically just skated by on a combination of notebooks full of handwritten notes, alarms and half remembered obligations until I realized I had too much input and I needed to start using a tool to manage my organization.
What I wanted was a place where I could quickly jot down idea fragments as they came to me throughout the day, to later develop those ideas, to structure project design, planning and development, and a place to keep track of goals and tasks, and most importantly I wanted to use all of this from multiple computers and my phone if possible.
Notion
Notion was my first stop when trying to organize my life and projects, It more than meets all of my requirements and it includes some very powerful features like “databases” or easily filterable spreadsheets with user added columns for tags, notes, checkboxes etc where each row in the “database” is openable as as a whole page in it’s own right.
Notion is available as a Windows or MacOS app for computers it can be installed on linux too, as well as Android and IOS apps from their respective app stores. It has a clean, easy to use interface as well as a block/markdown based document creation with a hint of WordPress Gutenberg.
In addition Notion provides unparalleled collaboration among teams with multi user work-spaces which I can imagine would work wonders for organizations or teams in on-boarding or project and task management. Overall in my experience Notion feels heavy for an individual user, I felt weighed down by tons of unused features that have a very valid use case in other situations.
what I like
My favorite aspect of notion is the default page header image selection.
One of my favorite aspects of Notion is the free built in sync. I used notion for a year and a half across a laptop, desktop and cellphone and I never had to do anything to keep everything in sync, I never once ran into conflicting content during a sync or any lost documents. I could add images to a document and know they would be available on my other devices.
Notion had everything I wanted; cross platform apps and sync, I could make a page for random notes, I could build complex project planning documents with sub-documents of all kinds including kanban boards and task check lists but something always felt off.
what I don’t like
Though notion is overall a very good app I began to identify a few issues for my use case, for one, I like to write and post articles online. Writing articles in Notion was nice, I could create a structure for planning and fleshing out the content as well as add images etc, I tried to use Notion’s export feature to more easily transfer the article I had in Notion to the Editor in Medium and It never worked properly, I always end up copy and pasting from Notion to the browser.
My next problem was that the editor felt overweight and hindering. I understand this is highly subjective but I felt more like I was building a WordPress page than transferring my ideas somewhere I could develop them. One aspect of the Notion editor I felt contributed to this feeling was the number of available elements and templates always left me feeling like I was under-utilizing the features and I never felt like I had created a “Good” document.
My next issue is only half an issue but I would still categorize it as such: customization and expansions. Notion has a minimum of customization some of which I feel is good like being able to pick serif or sans-serif rather than font, and some I think are bad like only being able to pick light or dark mode and no themes. It is jarring to go from a solarized vscode to an overly bright or overly dark Notion.
Obsidian.md
I found out about Obsidian 2 weeks ago (at the time of writing) and I haven’t looked back. I heard about Obsidian in a series of lectures called [Tools For The Mind.] () Obsidian is a nearly bare-bones Markdown based note-taking & Hypertext creation and management program.
what I like
Obsidian uses pretty run of the mill markdown syntax which I already understand well and used on a weekly basis with the addition of a few value adding features like linking between notes with a simple double brackets [[name of page]] syntax and adding tags with #hashtag syntax allowing you to easily reference notes or ideas and create functional structures.
In addition to being easy to use obsidian is open for customization and extension. Opening the settings you can install and select different themes and plugins that provide various added features. In addition to downloading the existing community plugins Obsidian provides documentation for creating your own plugins and they even have an example plugin on github for experimentation.
Plugins aren’t the only way one can customize their obsidian experience, the app it’s self is an electron app and is completely customizable using devtools and the css files in the “vault” directory.
One thing I appreciate about Obsidian is the lack of “magic” you just install the app and create a folder called a “vault” which then represents a workspace and contains all markdown and configuration files. You can have as many vaults as you want and each vault can be completely different with different styles or themes.
Obsidian offers a syncing service for $4 per month which will sync your vaults across multiple devices (including mobile). This service is readily offered yet it is not pushed or required by any means, you can download the plugin “Obsidian Git” from the settings page and use github to sync your vaults in less than five minutes. Alternatively you can also use google drive to sync your vaults across computers and phones, requiring only one additional free app on mobile to sync the phone vault with google drive
Obsidian allows you to create really powerful templates with timestamps, generated sub-documents and more for example my writing framework:
Hands down though my favorite feature of Obsidian is the graph view, which allows you to view your vault as a graph, visualizing the interconnectivity of your ideas, notes and documents.
Overall I greatly prefer Obsidian to Notion though it actually ticks off less of my requirements than Notion: Though I can use Obsidian on my phone I haven’t set that up yet which is an additional step compared to Notion, and I have shifted to using Todoist for task tracking and goal management as the scheduling feature is fantastic.
what I don’t like
So far the biggest thing I miss about Notion is the “database” I have recently started a job search and I was enjoying organizing the companies with columns for who I contacted and when, etc. I feel this is a problem that should be solved with Google Sheets or Excel rather than Notion or Obsidian. One thing I have to fault Obsidian on is the phone sync, though it is possible via either paying $4 per month to Obsidian or setting up 3rd party folder syncing apps on your phone it is technically harder to achieve than in Notion.
In addition to the aforementioned half complaints, Obsidian is a young product and what little roughness exists around the edges is there none-the-less though I do find it endearing.
thoughts
Overall I cannot deny the power of Notion and I didn’t set out to do so, however equally I cannot deny the superiority of Obsidian for my usage. In retrospect I believe my requirements were really too much for any one app to do well. I’m moving forward with the philosophy of “if obsidian can’t do it, it deserves it’s own app”
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