I’m comparing Notion, Obsidian, and other note-taking apps for organizing notes, projects, and personal knowledge. Each has useful features, but I’m struggling to choose one for long-term use. Which app did you settle on, and what made it the best fit?
Don’t choose based on the longest feature list, because the real cost is maintaining the system. Obsidian is the safer long-term pick if you value local files, portability, and linking ideas. Notion makes more sense if projects, databases, and collaboration matter more than file ownership. For basic notes, Apple Notes or OneNote may be the better choice simply because they require less setup.
Pick the app you’ll actually open on your phone. Obsidian is great at a desk, but if quick mobile capture feels clunky to you, its long-term advantages won’t matter; test each option for a week using real notes before migrating anything.
Don’t build a setup that depends on plugins staying maintained forever. I’d choose Obsidian for portable Markdown files, Notion for shared projects, and a simpler app like Apple Notes if low maintenance matters most.
Take ten real notes and sort them into two piles: information you want to keep for years, and work that needs to get done this month. Those usually belong in different tools.
I’d use Obsidian as the long-term knowledge archive, then keep tasks and active projects in a dedicated task app or a small Notion workspace. Forcing project management and permanent notes into the same system tends to create clutter.
@xhiddensignalx is right about mobile capture, but the capture app does not have to be the archive. A basic phone notes app can serve as an inbox, with anything valuable moved later.
The best setup may be two boring tools with clear jobs rather than one impressive app handling everything.
Expect some mess no matter which app you choose. The bigger question is how you usually look for information later. If you remember a phrase or topic and prefer browsing connected notes, Obsidian fits. If you think in tables, statuses, and filtered views, Notion is easier. If you mostly remember where something sat on a page, OneNote may suit you better than either.
I’d settle on Obsidian for personal knowledge, but keep it fairly plain. Folders, links, tags, and very few plugins. Not because it can do everything, but because the basic notes remain useful even if the setup changes.
I slightly disagree with splitting capture, projects, and notes across several apps unless you’re disciplined about processing them. @codeminer9255’s approach is clean in theory, but an inbox you never empty becomes another place to search. I’d start with one app, tolerate its weaker areas for a month, and only add a second tool when a recurring annoyance makes the reason obvious.
Notion turns into a slideshow the second your connection gets flaky, and on a phone with weak signal that stops being a minor annoyance fast. People compare feature lists and forget that half of Notion’s speed depends on someone else’s servers being reachable. Worth knowing before you pour a year of notes into it.
@hackai9 is right that you should start with one app and live with its weak spots for a while. I’d go further though. The thing that actually decides this isn’t how you search, it’s how easily you can leave. Obsidian wins there by default because your notes are just Markdown files sitting in a folder you control. Notion’s export exists, but it comes out as a pile of folders with mangled links and renamed files, and untangling that later is genuinely miserable. If ownership matters to you at all, that difference outweighs most of the feature talk.
Where I’d push back a little on @codeminer9255: the two-pile idea is sensible, but for a lot of people the second tool never earns its keep. You end up context-switching between apps for no real gain. If your ‘projects this month’ are mostly checklists, a plain note with checkboxes in whatever archive app you already use will do the job without a whole second system to maintain.
One practical thing nobody flagged: Obsidian’s mobile sync isn’t free unless you set it up yourself. The official sync is a paid add-on, and the DIY routes through iCloud or a git repo work but can be fiddly and occasionally conflict-happy. Not a dealbreaker, just budget for either a little money or a little patience.
My honest take, keep it plain. One app, folders and links, almost no plugins. Add a second tool only when a specific pain keeps repeating, not because a setup video made it look neat.
Sync is not a backup.
That matters more to me than whether the app technically stores notes as Markdown. An Obsidian vault sitting in a synced folder can still lose files through accidental deletion, corruption, or a bad merge. Markdown does not emit a protective force field around your notes. If I chose Obsidian, I’d want automatic, versioned backups of the entire vault, including images, PDFs, and other attachments, stored somewhere separate from the sync service.
My pick would still be Obsidian for long-term personal notes, but only in a deliberately plain setup. Basic Markdown, ordinary folders, a few links, and no critical workflow that collapses when a community plugin stops working. People sometimes say Obsidian has no lock-in because the text files are portable. That is mostly true, but plugin-specific fields, custom queries, canvases, and elaborate templates can quietly create their own kind of lock-in. You can open the files elsewhere, sure. Whether the system still makes sense is another question.
I think @techstream5829 is a little too dismissive of Notion’s export problem, though. A messy export is annoying, but daily friction for five years is worse than a hypothetical migration weekend. If someone genuinely works better with database views, shared pages, project statuses, and structured records, choosing Obsidian solely because leaving it would be easier feels backward. You spend far more time using a system than escaping from it.
So I’d choose based on the main workload, then set up an exit and recovery plan immediately. For Obsidian, that means proper backups and limiting plugin dependence. For Notion, that means regular exports of anything important and avoiding needlessly complicated databases. For OneNote, Apple Notes, or another simpler app, it means checking that attachments and important notes can be copied out in a usable form.
The winning app is not the one with the cleanest demo vault. It is the one you can keep boring, recover after a mistake, and still understand two years after you stop obsessing over note-taking videos.