I built templates and systems in Notion, and even sold a template pack on Gumroad. Then I moved everything to Obsidian over about a year. The reason wasn’t features. It was ownership.
Once you start self-hosting things and caring about where your data lives, cloud lock-in looks different. My Notion notes were Notion’s problem to store, search, and display. My Obsidian notes are markdown files on my machine. I can version them with Git, run AI tools against them locally, grep through them from the terminal. Working notes stay local. No privacy concerns, no third-party server seeing what I’m thinking through. They’re just files, and that turns out to matter more than I expected.
The Notion pain points built up gradually. Load times got worse. Content I’d written months ago became hard to surface. The database-everything model that made Notion flexible also made it hard to just find things. Then Notion started pushing Notion AI hard: upsells inside the product, a pricing tier that stopped making sense once I wasn’t a student anymore. None of this was dramatic. It was slow friction accumulating.
Obsidian did immediately click with me. I went into the plugin rabbit hole for a while: too much tinkering, obsessively taking notes and refactoring. What simplified it was the amazing Notebook Navigator plugin, which gave me the folder-based overview I actually wanted. I also built Vault Lens, a browser extension that surfaces vault notes alongside search results, which tightened the research workflow considerably. Obsidian recently shipped a CLI too, and that fits cleanly into how I work now.
The local AI story is genuinely good. With a vault as a folder of markdown files, you can point any tool at it like agents, custom scripts, whatever. Compared to Notion AI inside a walled product, there’s no contest.
The honest counterargument: real-time collaboration. Obsidian doesn’t have it, and probably won’t. For shared documents I still use Notion, it’s better for that. Anything that really needs another persons collaboration gets a Notion page; everything personal stays in Obsidian. The split works fine.
If you’re deep in Notion with a tight team and lots of shared work, the switch probably isn’t worth it. If most of your notes are personal and no one else touches them, the friction of moving is a one-time cost.
