Notion and Obsidian keep showing up in the same "best note-taking app" lists, but six months on from our original comparison the split between them is still fundamentally philosophical, not feature-by-feature. Notion is a cloud-first collaborative workspace that happens to hold notes. Obsidian is a local-first personal knowledge tool that happens to look like a note app. Pricing and a few features have shifted since our last pass, enough to warrant a fresh look.
What Notion actually does
Notion combines wikis, databases, and lightweight project tracking into one block-based editor. The free tier is genuinely usable for individuals: unlimited pages, 10 guest collaborators, and 5MB file uploads, enough to run a personal wiki or reading list without paying anything. Plus runs $10/month per user and adds unlimited guests, 30-day page history, and unlimited file uploads. Business costs $20/month per user and unlocks SAML SSO, 90-day history, private teamspaces, and advanced permissions. Enterprise pricing is custom for organizations needing unlimited page history and SCIM provisioning.
Notion AI remains a paid layer on top of the core plans, included as a trial with Plus but requiring a separate purchase for ongoing full access. It formats meeting notes and suggests structure reasonably well, though the value at the added per-seat cost is genuinely debatable for smaller teams that don't lean on it daily. The database system is still the standout feature: linked views, rollups, formulas, and relations let you build a lightweight CRM or content calendar without leaving the tool.
The core limitation hasn't changed: performance degrades noticeably once a workspace crosses roughly 500 pages, and Notion's search remains measurably worse than Obsidian's, a complaint that shows up constantly in r/Notion threads. All data lives in the cloud with no local backup beyond manual CSV exports, real vendor lock-in for anyone who later wants to leave.
What Obsidian actually does
Obsidian stores every note as a plain Markdown file on your own device, with bidirectional linking and a graph view layered on top. The core app is completely free for personal use, and because everything is local Markdown, there's no account required and no server dependency for basic use. Sync costs $5/month for end-to-end encrypted multi-device syncing with 10GB storage and version history. Publish costs $10/month to turn a vault into a public website with a custom domain. Commercial use requires a $50/user/year license, which trips up freelancers and consultants who don't realize personal use and paid client work fall under different terms.
The plugin ecosystem, now well over 1,000 community plugins, covers task management, kanban boards, spaced repetition, and Dataview queries that let you treat a vault like a lightweight database. Performance stays excellent even past 10,000 notes, since Obsidian is just reading local files rather than querying a remote database. Obsidian has deliberately stayed AI-optional: there's no built-in AI assistant, and the privacy policy states no AI training on user data at all, a direct contrast to Notion AI's expanding footprint. Users who want AI features add a community plugin that connects to their own API key rather than getting a bundled assistant.
The tradeoff for that portability is a real setup investment. There's no built-in real-time collaboration, since Sync handles multi-device access rather than multiplayer editing, and the graph view that looks impressive in demos has more limited practical utility than it first appears for most day-to-day use.
Where the two genuinely diverge
Notion is built for teams that need shared, structured workspaces: wikis, databases, and project tracking that multiple people edit simultaneously. Obsidian is built for individuals who want permanent, portable notes they fully own, with search and linking that outperforms anything cloud-based. Reddit's productivity communities split roughly the same way they did six months ago: Notion for team wikis and documentation, Obsidian for personal knowledge management and long-form writing.
The AI gap has widened since our original comparison. Notion has continued investing in Notion AI as a differentiator, while Obsidian has stayed intentionally minimal on built-in AI, leaving that entirely to the plugin ecosystem. Neither approach is wrong, it depends on whether you want AI baked into the core product or bolted on through a plugin you control.
Real cost for different users
A solo writer building a personal knowledge base with no collaboration need: Obsidian's free Personal tier covers this completely, with Sync at $5/month only necessary once you want the same vault across a phone and a laptop. Notion's free tier works too, but its collaboration features go entirely unused, and searching a growing note archive is measurably slower than in Obsidian.
A five-person startup building shared documentation and a lightweight project tracker: Notion Plus at $10/user/month, $50/month total for the team, covers this well, with the database views handling both docs and task tracking in one place. Obsidian would require a separate collaboration workaround, since it wasn't built for simultaneous multi-user editing.
A consultant maintaining both personal notes and occasional paid client deliverables built in Obsidian: the $50/year commercial license applies once client work is involved, a detail that's easy to miss since the core app shows no license prompt during normal personal use.
Data handling and where your notes live
Notion processes data on US servers via AWS and states workspace content is not used to train its AI models, with per-workspace controls to disable Notion AI entirely. Full GDPR Data Processing Agreements are available, and export supports Markdown, CSV, and PDF formats, though the export is a snapshot rather than the live, always-current file format Obsidian offers. Notion does not sell user data.
Obsidian's privacy story is structurally different rather than just policy-different: notes live as local Markdown files on your device by default, with no cloud dependency and no account required for core use. The optional Sync service uses end-to-end encryption, there's no telemetry on vault content, and no AI training happens on user data since there's no built-in AI touching that data in the first place. For anyone who weighs data ownership heavily, Obsidian's local-first architecture is a structural guarantee rather than a policy promise that could change with a future terms update.
What actually breaks in practice
Notion's failure mode is scale. Workspaces that grow past a few hundred pages start lagging in ways that are hard to reverse without restructuring the whole database architecture, and global search becomes noticeably less reliable exactly when a workspace has enough content to actually need good search.
Obsidian's failure mode is fragmentation. Because everything depends on which community plugins you've installed, a vault built around a specific plugin combination becomes hard to hand off to someone else or migrate cleanly if that plugin stops being maintained. The zero-lock-in promise of plain Markdown files remains true at the content level, but the workflow built around those files can still become genuinely personal and hard to transfer.
Which one to actually pick
Pick Notion if the core need is a shared team workspace: docs, wikis, and lightweight project tracking that multiple people touch regularly, where the $10 to $20/user/month cost buys collaboration Obsidian simply isn't designed for.
Pick Obsidian if the core need is a personal, permanent knowledge base with fast search and zero cloud dependency, and you're comfortable investing setup time into a plugin-driven workflow built around a specific way you think.
For anyone doing both, running Notion for team documentation and Obsidian for personal notes is a completely normal split, and several Reddit threads describe exactly this pattern rather than treating it as a failure to pick one tool.