Hacker News Reader

Comment by mitchitized | Hacker News Reader

I see this as "Joplin, just not nearly as free (speech or beer)." Why would I pay monthly for sync and have no control, when I can already sync to my own s3 buckets and only pay for AWS storage and transfer?

Is there a compelling reason to switch from Joplin to Obsidian? Honest question.

View on HN

I have tried Joplin a little bit and found the UI of Obsidian much friendlier, also the plugin ecosystem is very active. Another main difference is how Obsidian works using the 'bunch of Markdown files' vs. the database approach Joplin uses. Also see this earlier thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27808003.

Joplin stores files as separate markdown files, and the database is just an index for search and metadata.

I'm not a huge fan of Joplin's UX, but not having to pay for sync (and being able to choose the backend for sync) is important enough to me that it is a differentiator greater than the overall UX. I can point all of my Joplin installs to the same S3 bucket and boom done.

I'm hearing that with Obsidian you can use OneDrive/iCloud/Dropbox/etc for sync but that is all based on the sync provider. To me that brings ambiguity about how concurrency and conflict resolution are dealt with, since the app kinda capitulates that to the external storage engine right?

I'm not sure how conflict resolution is done with Obsidian, but i have used both Dropbox and iCloud and with both i never had any sync issues in the last year that i've used Obsidian. Before Obsidian i used NvAlt which gave me sync issues all the time.

I have just setup Obsidian with syncthing and works like magic.

Joplin takes a traditional approach to notes: there's notebooks, pages, then notes. Obsidian is more focused on zettelkasten - creating a network of smaller but refined notes that are all tagged and interconnected, which ends up looking somewhat like a bunch of neurons (hence _second brain_). It's also much more extensible. I've seen Obisidian extensions that add kanban and moodboards to notes, for example.

I'm really struggling to understand how Obsidian isn't free. Maybe I'm simply missing your point.

There is no expectation that you use sync, it's simply an option for those that want it and are likely less tech oriented.

+1. It's pretty easy to setup your own syncing using iCloud, Dropbox or whatever you want.

Sync offers E2E encryption though. Definitely not getting E2E with iCloud (Apple says you do, however iCloud backups aren't E2E encrypted) and I don't believe Dropbox offers E2E either

You can do your own encryption using something like Cryptomator.

> I'm really struggling to understand how Obsidian isn't free. Maybe I'm simply missing your point.

I think they mean free, as in free software. Obsidian is not free neither open source software.

From their licensing: "You need to pay for Obsidian if and only if you use it to contribute, directly or indirectly, to revenue-generating, work-related activities in a company that has two or more people."

I imagine that applies to many of us. How many people are looking to use Obsidian purely for personal use?

$50/user/yr is about $4/mo.

I struggle to understand the mentality that deems that unreasonable. It'd be a bargain at 5x the price.

This is the reason I don't even try it. I would never be able to get my company to pay for a software that's not in our catalog, regardless of the price.

> How many people are looking to use Obsidian purely for personal use?

The overwhelming majority, if the Obsidian message boards are anything to go by.

I wouldn't want to use a product that only now reached v1.0, for a business. It's not Figma, or a Google Docs type app where corporate use cases are very apparent. At best, Obsidian would be good for a knowledgebase, but there are better wiki tools out there for that.

Obsidian does personal knowledge management best, because of its customizability.

That's cool to know. It's definitely not what I expected! I made the assumption a markdown-based tool would primarily be used amongst tech workers for tech-related knowledge. All that being said, the cost for a license is nothing compared to other tools I use daily like JetBrains products.

> Why would I pay monthly for sync and have no control

I'm not sure what you mean by this, I use github to sync across devices, you could technically use any solution you like.

Joplin doesn't use flat files, last I checked (tried it in late 2021).

I just tried Joplin - but found out very quickly that it's just another Electron "app", sluggish performance, heavy resource usage and not security sandboxed.

The paid sync service is only really needed for the mobile app. Otherwise you can sync the vaults however you like.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com