Notion is one of the most popular note-taking tools in the world, growing to dominate the face of productivity software today.
But I don’t use Notion, I use Obsidian.
I know there will be some people reading this that use Notion but are wondering whether Obsidian is better…
How do I know? Because I’ve been there. I used to use Notion. It’s great, with:
- Online project management, wikis and templates for every need,
- Databases that add properties to and display your notes in an organised way,
- Collaboration with others on your workspaces,
- Full-featured editor, with slash commands for different blocks,
But I’m happier on Obsidian. It fits my use case better, and I’m sure you’ll benefit from switching as well. If you want these perks:
- Offline markdown files — you own your data,
- Responsive app on mobile and on desktop (I always found Notion a little slow, Obsidian’s certainly not),
- Extendable with plugins for every need,
Then consider switching over to Obsidian. The best part is, because Obsidian is so fluid and extensible, with a huge plugin library, you can turn it into an app with all the benefits that I just listed, with the same features that you can find in Notion.
This is what I’m going to be covering in this article. I’ll cover how to replicate each of the above Notion features in Obsidian, so that you can create the familiar features that you can’t live without. At the same time, you’ll be benefitting from the additional customizability that Obsidian offers.
Let’s get started…
Collaboration
If I’m honest, this is one place that Obsidian most falls down in comparison to Notion, so I thought that I’d cover it first.
Notion is online, so your pages update in the cloud automatically. Obsidian is offline-first, so you aren’t sharing by default.
Despite this, there’s the option to sync your vault with other people using cloud services such as iCloud or Dropbox. Edits would synchronise fairly rapidly with the cloud, and other people could see them not long after you’ve made the changes.
Another service I used whilst I owned an android phone was Syncthing. This was a great free service for synchronising my vault between my laptop and Samsung phone. Moving to iPhone, I turned to Obsidian Sync to mirror my vault from my phone to my laptop, because Syncthing doesn’t run in the background on iOS.
That I know of, there’s unfortunately no way to edit the same document with someone collaboratively in Obsidian. This would just throw up sync conflicts. So if this is an absolute necessity for you, this is one of the few scenarios where Obsidian can’t offer support for your use case.
If you can work around it by using one of the other options that I listed here, that’s how you’re going to create the collaborative experience of Notion inside Obsidian. Now let’s move on to the features that Obsidian can replicate a little more effectively…
Databases
Notion’s databases are a core aspect of the software, allowing you to create views of your notes that set out your data in just the way you want to see them.
You need to understand YAML metadata — you define a property on a line enclosed by two line breaks (made by three hyphens) right at the top of your note.
So how do you turn this metadata into database views? There are a few Obsidian plugin options that I recommend for this:
Projects — this brings the power of Notion-like project management to Obsidian.
Use this plugin to generate different views of your notes, using the YAML metadata in the notes to define what properties the view displays. You can create a table view, gallery view, calendar view or a board view, useful for different categories of notes that need to be viewed in different formats. Unfortunately, it doesn’t support a Gantt chart view, but who uses Gantt charts in PKM, anyway?
DB Folder — this plugin brings the Notion database functionality to Obsidian. You can create table views of your notes, add columns that show properties (values of which are drawn from the metadata of your notes). Editing the properties in the database view updates the YAML in the notes as well.
On top of this, you can change the property type in the database when using this plugin, which isn’t a feature yet in Projects. Like in Notion, the options include:
- Text
- Number
- Select
- Tags
- Checkbox
- Calendar (Date)
- Relation
- Formula
This all the options found in Notion databases to your Obsidian databases, creating different ways of defining the values of the properties of your notes. It’s worth noting that this requires the plugin Dataview in order to function, but you don’t have to understand how Dataview works.
Full Calendar — this takes the place of the calendar view for your databases and is more advanced than the calendar view option in the Projects plugin. This creates a full-featured calendar view that you link to a directory of folders, creating events creates notes with start times, end-times, dates and a variable to define whether they’re all-day events.
There are a lot of different options for viewing databases in Obsidian, similar to how you do so in Notion. Perhaps they aren’t as integrated or as clean as Notion yet, but they’re more customisable, using the power of YAML metadata.
Templates
Notion has great templates, with a lot of community collaboration. But I’ve always preached that you should build your own system because your use case is unique — nobody knows exactly how you work.
So how do you create your own templates in Obsidian?
First, install the plugin Templater — this plugin gives many extra functions to the templating feature in Obsidian. These features mainly consist of internal functions that allow you to add variables to your templates. It adds these variables accurately as and when you call a template to be inserted into the note you’re working on.
Create a folder in your vault. The notes in this folder are going to act as templates for other notes you want to create repeatedly in the future. When it’s time to create them, you simply call the command ‘Templater: Open insert template modal’ (power users have this assigned to a hotkey), select the template you want to use in that note, and press Enter.
Templates can speed up your workflow by being a quick way to add the same content to many notes, not just in Notion and in Obsidian, but most note-taking apps.
Widgets
The Notion mobile apps come with widgets, both on iOS and on Android. Obsidian’s mobile apps do not. Fortunately, there are workarounds that work very well on both platforms:
How I’ve always done this is by using the Advanced URI plugin in Obsidian. This allows you to create a link to access any file or call any command in the app. All that’s left to run your command or open your file is to integrate this link using one method from below, depending upon which platform you’re on:
iOS — The Shortcuts app allows you to call any link from a widget or from the home screen.
Android — Using the free MacroDroid app, you can add a Send Intent action that’s activated by a large selection of configurable triggers.
Intuitive Editor
Obsidian runs on markdown files — the syntax used in these files can be a little complicated to learn. As well as this, there are two views in Obsidian — editing view and reading view. One displays the source version of the markdown (editing view), littered with symbols representing the syntax, and the other shows the rendered form (reading view).
You don’t have to learn the syntax, thankfully. Obsidian has a slash editor setting you can activate which allows you to search for what you want to insert, typing the correct syntax automatically when selected.
If you want a more Notion-like page view in the editor, I recommend the plugin MAKE.md. This allows you to add a cover image to your notes, as well as an icon, like found in Notion, and its own version of a slash editor. You can also edit metadata properties in a more natural way with this plugin.
Conclusion
This may seem like a lot of workarounds to make Obsidian replicate an app that you can just use without bothering with this setup, but it’s worth remembering that you can extend Obsidian to perform a lot more functions than Notion can.
I use Obsidian for generating reports and essays for university, integrating AI into macros that I execute on my notes to save time when outlining content and writing flashcards.
As well as these functions, Obsidian has the Canvas feature, allowing you completely free reign to create maps and diagrams, and has a recently updated their PDF viewer for a more integrated experience with PDFs. There are nearly 1000 community plugins, so if there’s something you think ‘I wish Notion could do that’ about, it’s more than likely you’ll find a workaround if you switch to Obsidian.
I know this is quite an extreme article, with a lot of different moving parts to keep track of. It’s quite unlikely that there’s anyone reading this who actually has the desire to create a completely Notion-like system within Obsidian (because what’s the point?), but there are a lot of functional applications that I’ve described…
Perhaps you’ve seen one or two things here you’ve liked the look of, and want to try them out in your own system. This article is as much for the Obsidian users looking for an alternative to their favourite Notion feature as it is for Notion users longing for something more than their current tool.
I hope I’ve given you some value in this article. Consider clapping or following to show your support, and thanks for reading!