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Comment by drvortex | Hacker News Reader

I think it is just that Obsidian has a nerd vibe. Like Obsidian is to Notion what Neovim is to VSCode. It isn’t immediately obvious why it is better, but one of them is more l33t hax0r.

I used Obsidian for 2 years. But I ditched it because it was local only. And it’s sync capabilities (without storage) cost more than an entire office site + cloud storage subscription package. Ridiculou that they expect 8 Euro per month just to sync (not even store) my data.

I now use UpNote. Which has cloud sync, works cross platform and has a one time purchase option that is less than 50 bucks

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You can sync Obsidian with whatever solution you want to. It’s just flat text files on your filesystem. I store my notes in OneCloud and it syncs fine. Heck, there is even a free plugin to sync your notes using Git.

The subscription is a convenience but in no way required.

Yeah, hearing the complaints about Sync is just confusing. I didn't have the money to pay for yet another subscription but i wanted to have the same notes on my phone as my computer, and have some backup somewhere. I just googled it and within 30 minutes i have a completely free git syncing plugin working on my laptop and phone installations with a private repository that backs up and holds the complete history.

It was very easy and immediately discoverable. Some day when my savings account starts going up again I'll pay for sync but it was trivial to get "Obsidian Git" plugin working in the meantime

But is there a way to do that with my iPhone and windows pc that doesn’t take <1-2 hours ?

You can use git to backup Obsidian for free, it works on every device, even iOS.

And that's where Obsidian is "obviously better" than notion, it has plugins that anyone can develop.

Another reason why it's better, which is also why it can be so easily backed-up to git, is that it uses simple markdown files with 1 file = 1 note. If Obsidian stops working one day for.. reasons? You still have all your notes and can use any markdown editor to use them.

> It isn’t immediately obvious why it is better

It's pretty obvious. It's an open format with local files and has plugins. It sucks all over the place, but it has a solid enough foundation for people to tinker it to death. Something they can't really do with most other tools in that space.

I think you'd want notes to last a long time, I personally am skeptical to Notion for this reason.

But I also found obsidian to be a bit brittle (especially if you don't pay for sync).

I've just reverted back to a note book for my journal and then files in ~/notes that I grep.

I hear what you're saying - though I've had good luck (i.e. haven't had to give it a thought in two years) with Syncthing pumping my vaults (and all business files for that matter) to phone, laptop, and backup nas.

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