Guides / Comparisons

Notion vs Obsidian: Which Note App Should You Use in 2026?

Notion vs Obsidian compared: pricing as of October 2026, offline and privacy, collaboration, AI and who each suits. Pick the right note app for you.

Mythex Team · 2026-10-22 · 7 min read

Pick Obsidian if you want a private, personal notes app that works offline, keeps your notes as plain files you own, and costs nothing for the core app. Pick Notion if you work with other people and want shared pages, databases, comments and permissions in one workspace. Obsidian is the stronger tool for thinking and writing on your own. Notion is the stronger tool for running a team's docs, wikis and lightweight project tracking. As of October 2026 Obsidian is free with paid add-ons from $4 a month, and Notion is free for individuals with team plans from $10 per member a month.

Notion vs Obsidian at a glance

Sources: Notion pricing, Obsidian pricing and Obsidian Sync plans, checked October 2026.

How we compared

We compared the plans, limits and features each company publishes on its own pricing and help pages, as of October 2026. We did not run timed tests or benchmarks. Where a page didn't state a number, such as Notion's exact yearly per-seat prices, we left it out rather than guess. Prices are in US dollars and may vary by country and tax.

We looked at five things: where your notes are stored, what it costs for one person and for a team, collaboration, AI, and how easy it is to leave.

The core difference: cloud workspace vs local files

Notion is a cloud workspace. Everything is a page made of blocks, and any page can hold a database you can view as a table, board, calendar or list. That's what makes it good for team wikis, content calendars, simple CRMs and project trackers. The trade-off is that your content lives on Notion's servers and in Notion's format.

Obsidian is a folder of Markdown files with a very good editor on top. Obsidian's site says it "stores your notes locally as plain text Markdown files", on your device. You link notes together with [[double brackets]], see the connections in a graph, and extend the app with what Obsidian describes as thousands of community plugins and themes. Because the files are plain text, you can open them in any editor, back them up however you like, and keep them if you ever stop using Obsidian.

This one difference drives most of the others. If you care about owning your files and working offline, Obsidian wins. If you care about sharing and structured data with a team, Notion wins.

Pricing as of October 2026

Notion

• Free: $0. Unlimited blocks for individuals, but a block limit once a workspace has two or more members. File uploads up to 5 MB, up to 10 external guests, and 7 days of page history.
• Plus: $10 per member a month. Unlimited blocks and uploads, unlimited guests, 30 days of page history.
• Business: $20 per member a month. 90 days of page history and full Notion AI, including the Notion Agent, AI Meeting Notes and Enterprise Search (in beta).
• Enterprise: custom pricing, unlimited page history, and zero data retention with AI model providers.
• Yearly billing: Notion says it saves up to 20%.
• Custom Agents: free to try, then $10 per 1,000 monthly Notion credits.
• Education: Notion's FAQ says the Plus plan for one member is free for students and educators.

See Notion pricing.

Obsidian

• Core app: free, no sign-up required. A commercial licence ($50 per user a year) is optional; Obsidian encourages organisations to buy one but doesn't require it.
• Sync: $4 per user a month billed annually, or $5 monthly. Obsidian's help pages list two Sync tiers: Standard with 1 GB of storage, 1 synced vault, a 5 MB maximum file size and 1 month of version history; and Plus with 10 GB (expandable to 100 GB), 10 vaults, 200 MB files and 12 months of history. Sync is end-to-end encrypted.
• Publish: $8 per site a month billed annually, or $10 monthly.
• Discounts: 40% off Sync and Publish for students, faculty and nonprofit employees.

See Obsidian pricing and Sync plans.

What that means in practice: one person can use Obsidian for free forever if they sync files another way, or for about $48 a year with official Sync. One person can also use Notion free. A team of five on Notion Business is $100 a month before any yearly discount.

Collaboration

This is where Notion is clearly ahead. Notion is built for many people in one workspace: shared pages, comments, mentions, page permissions, guests and team spaces. A company wiki, onboarding docs and a shared roadmap all fit naturally.

Obsidian supports shared vaults through Sync, so a small group can work in the same set of notes. But it's still a notes app at heart. There's no built-in permission model for "this team sees these pages", and real-time co-editing isn't what it's designed around. For team documentation, see also our Notion vs Confluence comparison.

Databases and structure

Notion's databases are one of its biggest strengths. You can build a reading list, a content calendar or a client tracker with properties, filters, relations between databases and several views of the same data.

Obsidian is free-form by default. You can add properties to notes and view them as tables with Obsidian's Bases feature, and community plugins add more ways to query them. It works well for power users, but it takes more setup than Notion's ready-made database views. If your notes need to behave like rows in a table, Notion (or a database tool like Airtable) is the simpler choice. Our Airtable vs Notion guide covers where a real database starts to make more sense.

AI features

Notion bundles AI into its Business and Enterprise plans as of October 2026: the Notion Agent, AI Meeting Notes and Enterprise Search. Free and Plus get a limited trial. If you want AI to search and summarise your team's workspace, Notion has it built in.

Obsidian's pricing doesn't include a built-in AI assistant. Community plugins connect it to AI models, often with your own API key, which gives you control but also more setup and responsibility for where your notes are sent.

Privacy and lock-in

Obsidian's pitch is privacy: notes stay on your device, and Obsidian says no one else can read them, "not even us". Sync adds end-to-end encryption. Leaving is easy because your notes are already plain files.

Notion stores your workspace in the cloud. That's what makes sharing easy, and Enterprise adds controls like zero data retention for AI providers. You can export your content, but databases and their relations don't translate cleanly to plain files. Obsidian's Notion importer brings databases across as Bases, but only each database's primary view.

Who should pick which

• Solo writer, researcher or student building a "second brain": Obsidian.
• You need it to work offline, on a plane, or with sensitive notes: Obsidian.
• Small team that needs a shared wiki and project pages: Notion.
• You want databases, boards and calendars without a separate tool: Notion.
• You want AI over your team's docs with no setup: Notion Business.
• Both: plenty of people keep personal notes in Obsidian and work docs in Notion. That's a reasonable setup, not a failure to choose.

If you're weighing other options too, our Notion alternatives guide covers more tools.

When a custom tool makes more sense

Sometimes a Notion workspace slowly turns into an app: a client tracker with strict fields, a request form that feeds a database, approval steps, and people outside your team who need to log in and see only their own records. At that point, page permissions and database views start to strain.

That's when building a small custom tool can be the better answer. With Mythex you describe the tool in chat, the AI builds it with a live preview, and it can add a database, sign-in and file storage when the app needs them, then publish to a URL in one click. The Free plan gives you 5 credits a day; Pro starts at $25 a month and adds code export and GitHub.

Be honest about the trade-off, though: for notes, writing and a team wiki, Notion or Obsidian will serve you better than anything custom. A custom app only makes sense when the thing you're managing has stopped being documents and become a process. Our guide on how to build a knowledge base covers that middle ground.

Verdict

Obsidian is the best choice for a private, personal knowledge base that you fully own, and it's free unless you want official Sync or Publish. Notion is the best choice for teams that want docs, wikis and databases in one shared place, with AI built in on Business. Choose by where your notes need to live and who needs to see them, not by feature lists.