Notion vs Obsidian: Prices, Offline Use, AI and Privacy Compared

Notion and Obsidian solve the same problem from opposite ends. Obsidian is a free app that keeps your notes as files on your own device and charges only for optional add-ons such as Sync ($4 a month billed yearly) and Publish ($8 a month). Notion is a cloud workspace with a free plan for individuals and paid tiers at $10 and $20 per member per month on yearly billing, with its newest AI agent features reserved for the Business plan. Which one fits depends on whether you care more about owning your files or about sharing a workspace with other people.

Notion vs Obsidian: the short answer

Choose Obsidian if you want a private, fast, offline-first notebook for your own thinking, writing or research, and you are happy to add features with plugins. Choose Notion if you need to share pages and databases with a team, build lightweight project trackers, publish sites or use built-in AI agents across your workspace. Plenty of people use both: Obsidian for personal notes, Notion for shared work.

How much do Notion and Obsidian cost?

The pricing models are very different. Obsidian’s official pricing page describes the app as “free without limits. No sign-up required,” and sells optional services on top. Notion’s pricing page charges per member for its paid workspace plans. Notion’s listed prices below are for yearly billing, which it says saves up to 20% compared with paying monthly.

Two discounts are worth knowing. Obsidian gives students, faculty and nonprofit employees 40% off Sync and Publish. Notion says its Plus plan is free for students and educators who sign up with a school email address, limited to one member.

For a single person who only needs notes on two or three devices, Obsidian with Sync Standard costs $48 a year on annual billing. Notion’s Free plan is enough for many individuals, but anyone who needs larger uploads or longer page history moves to Plus at $120 a year on annual billing.

Where your notes live: local files vs the cloud

This is the biggest philosophical difference. Obsidian’s homepage says it “stores notes privately on your device, so you can access them quickly, even offline,” and that it “uses open file formats, so you’re never locked in.” A vault is simply a folder of Markdown files you can open in any text editor, back up however you like, or move to another app later. Obsidian also says its apps do not collect telemetry.

Notion stores your workspace on its servers and syncs it to each device. That makes real-time collaboration and sharing straightforward, but it means your data lives in Notion’s cloud. Notion does let you export an entire workspace as HTML, Markdown and CSV files, so leaving is possible.

Can you use Notion and Obsidian offline?

Obsidian is offline by design: the files are on your disk, so everything works without a connection, and Sync merges changes when you reconnect.

Notion added offline support, with limits. According to Notion’s offline guide, all users can view, edit and create pages offline in the desktop and mobile apps, but you have to mark each page as Available offline, and that setting is per device. On Business and Enterprise plans, Notion also downloads recent and favourited pages automatically. For databases, only the first 50 rows download automatically; more rows have to be downloaded individually.

Sync, security and privacy

Obsidian Sync encrypts notes end to end with AES-256, according to Obsidian, which means the company cannot read synced notes. It adds version history, selective sync for images, audio, video and PDFs, and shared vaults for collaboration. You do not have to use Obsidian Sync at all; because vaults are ordinary folders, some people sync them with other tools instead.

Notion’s security features scale with the plan: SAML single sign-on, domain verification and granular database permissions arrive on Business, while SCIM user provisioning, audit logs and security and compliance connections for DLP and SIEM tools are Enterprise features. On AI, Notion says it does not use customer data to train models unless you opt in, and that Enterprise workspaces get zero data retention with its AI providers, while other plans list 30-day retention.

Collaboration and team features

Notion was built for teams, and it shows. Teamspaces, permission groups, guest access, comments, database automations, forms, charts and published sites are all part of the product. The Free plan allows 10 external guests; paid plans remove the limit. Notion’s API, webhooks and integrations with tools such as Slack, GitHub and Jira make it a hub for team knowledge.

Obsidian’s collaboration story is newer and narrower. Shared vaults through Obsidian Sync let a team edit the same files, updated in real time across devices, and Obsidian sells a $50-per-user-per-year commercial licence for organisations that want to support development. But there are no workspace-level permissions, databases shared with guests or built-in project dashboards in the way Notion offers them.

Publishing notes to the web

Both apps can turn notes into a public website, and on price they end up surprisingly close.

• Obsidian Publish costs $8 per site per month on yearly billing or $10 monthly. Obsidian says it needs no technical knowledge and includes a customisable theme, the graph view and full-text search on the published site.
• Notion Sites are included on every plan: the Free plan can publish pages with basic sites and one notion.site domain, while paid plans get five notion.site domains, custom headers, favicons and advanced search-engine settings. Connecting your own domain and removing Notion branding costs $8 per month per domain billed annually, or $10 per month billed monthly.

In other words, a personal site on your own domain costs roughly the same with either service. The difference is in the output: Obsidian Publish suits interlinked notes, digital gardens and documentation, while Notion Sites are better for landing pages, wikis and public databases that non-technical colleagues can edit.

AI features in Notion and Obsidian

AI is where the two diverge most in 2026. Notion’s release notes show version 3.7, released September 15, 2026, adding “Agent skills,” reusable instructions that teach Notion AI how a team works. Notion says skills can be run from a Notion Agent chat, set to run automatically, and downloaded as a SKILL.md file for use with external coding agents. The same release lets Business and Enterprise users connect tools such as GitHub and Amplitude through a custom MCP connection, in beta.

On pricing, Notion AI is only a limited trial on Free and Plus. The full Notion Agent, AI Meeting Notes and Enterprise Search come with Business and Enterprise, and Custom Agents are billed separately at $10 per 1,000 Notion credits after a free trial.

Obsidian’s pricing page lists no AI add-on. Its approach is extensibility: “thousands of plugins and themes” and an open API, which community developers use to add features. If AI in your notes matters, Notion offers it built in; with Obsidian you would rely on third-party plugins or keep AI in a separate tool. Running models locally is another route; our guide to running AI models on your own PC with Ollama covers that setup.

Platforms and recent updates

Obsidian’s changelog shows the 1.14 series in early access for Catalyst supporters. Version 1.14.2 lets desktop users open files from outside a vault, adds Obsidian to the operating system’s “Open with” menu so it can be the default Markdown app, and on iOS 27 adds extra-large Quick Capture and View Note widgets. The most recent public desktop release listed is 1.13.7 from August 12.

Which should you choose?

Pick Obsidian if…

• You want your notes as plain files you own, readable without any particular app.
• You work offline a lot, or need a Linux desktop app.
• You prefer to pay nothing, or only a few dollars a month for encrypted sync.
• You like building your own system with links, a graph view, Canvas and plugins.

Pick Notion if…

• You share documents, wikis and project boards with colleagues or clients.
• You want databases, forms, charts and automations without installing plugins.
• You want AI agents, meeting notes and search across connected apps, and your organisation can pay for Business.
• You need a web app you can open from any browser.

Use both if…

• Your employer runs on Notion but you want a private notebook that never touches a work account.
• You draft long-form writing or research offline in Obsidian and publish finished pages to a shared Notion wiki.
• You want Obsidian’s free local app for personal notes while keeping team projects, forms and databases in Notion’s Free or Plus plan.

Bottom line

For personal knowledge management, Obsidian is hard to beat on price and ownership: the whole app is free, the files are yours, and optional encrypted Sync starts at $4 a month on annual billing. For teams, Notion’s collaboration, permissions and fast-moving AI features make it the more complete workspace, although the most useful AI tools require the $20-per-member Business plan. Because Notion exports to Markdown and Obsidian reads Markdown natively, trying one and moving to the other later is less painful than it looks.

Written byFelix Moreau

Felix Moreau writes Pandromeda's software coverage and how-to guides. He covers Windows, macOS and Linux updates, the apps people rely on, emulators and developer tools, and turns official documentation into clear, numbered steps that work on the current version.

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