Notion vs. Obsidian - Which one is better for you?

hi my name is Philip welcome back to my Channel today we are comparing notion and obsidian which one is the better productivity tool which one is better for your purposes um let's start with notion it's the Superstar among productivity tools at the moment uh currently about 30 million people are using notion and if 30 million is a too abstract number for you um imagine 30 million people that's the entire population of Argentina and notion is also at $10 billion uh so it's a real unicorn company what makes notion so special notion is often referred to as Lego or digital Lego um why is that the case so the smallest unit in notion is a block like in Lego in Lego you have the plastic blocks and with the blocks if you can arrange them and build build basically everything you can imagine it's the same with notion just in a digital way so you have blocks and blocks can be for example texts uh videos uh databases uh and much more and you can arrange those blocks in no on a notion page as you wish so in this way you can create your own workspace that is tailored to your personal needs this makes notion highly flexible and suitable for a wide range of challenges whether you're using it for task management project management or simply not taking notion is a true allrounder and can basically handle all those things moreover it's not just a tool for solo players it's also well suited for team collaboration what I most laugh about notion are the following things first the pages and databases users can create pages and then can create Pages inside those pages or lists tables boards and all kind of databases and this allows the nesting of pages and that makes it a great tool for building for example um internal wikipedias templates notion provides templates for all kind of purposes and there's also a huge community of notion users who are creating templates for users I am one of them so if you're interested in checking out my templates or buying them with a discount click on the link below users can simply copy and utilize the templates but they are also able to customize them to their needs and among notion templates you can find Everything You Wish For disband from simple to-do lists to Second brains to Garden or plant management so there's the right notion template for everybody so as you can see and as I've mentioned before notion strength lies in its versatility integration is another feature of notion I love this makes notion even more versatile because now you can connect notion with tons of other apps gather data from them and store or process that data inside of notion Mobility is sometimes s to be a feature of notion you can sync your notion workspace across several devices but to be honest I'm not a huge fan of the Notions uh mobile app because uh it's a bit celome to use it um I prefer notion on the desktop and um that's actually a huge difference to obsidian because obsidian I'm using on my phone as well and that's a good transition to obsidian it's kind of the new cool kit on the Block and um yeah while all the notion competitors try to more or less imitate notion at the moment obsidian stands apart because it's totally different it's working totally different from notion it's not trying to be a project management app or task manage manager or a habit track or something like that no no at its core obsidian is a note taking app it's enabling you to link your notes together in a decentralized way so with obsidian you could use folders but you actually don't need to use folders because you can connect your notes with uh links and tags if that sounds a bit like the tle cast method I have shown in a previous video you totally right obsidan is at the moment I think the best app for implementing at s custom because it allows you to easily uh connect notes and tag them and build your knowledge web overall obsidian is much simpler than notion it's not based on blocks you cannot customize it so much as notion in the core version you simply write down your text on a obsidian page in markdown language and in Next Step you link together your pages with hyperlinks or tags here are some of the main features I love about obsidian first the linking the way you can link nodes and connect them with each other that helps you to establish a knowledge Network that kind of resembles the way the human brain is working and it is much more flexible and powerful than traditional folder based systems like you will find in everan note of course you could also link your pages in notion but it's not as elegant and fast as it is working in obsidian obsidian is also markdown supported first it's it makes it really easy to format your obsidian notes if you know markdown and it's easy to learn the language and uh it allows you to export your notes to other apps um why should you do it if you're using obsidian well you can never be sure how long any app will be around maybe in 10 years there will not be an notion or an obsidian but maybe then you will have the next cool note taking app in that case you want of course to export your knowledge of the last 10 years to the new app and um with most systems even with notion it's really cumbersome to export data with obsidian is pretty easy because you simply have to export markdown documents in obsidian your data is stored locally unlike cloud-based services like notion that uh lead to obsidian being really fast compared to notion so notion um is sometimes pretty um it's sometimes a bit slow when you're loading a page but any page or any node in obsidium will load immediately because it's stored locally but obsidian allows a cloud option one issue with that is that you have to pay for that and it's not so cheap to do that so if you want to share your obsidian data across different devices you have to pay for that and it's not really cheap for the service you're getting in my opinion that is one disadvantage of obsidian of course in many cases you don't need to share it across different devices because for example like if you're doing it using it like me you're mainly using it on your desktop the graphical representation of notes that's one of obsidian's Most Fascinating features um but the graph view of your notes uh it's visualizing all the connections in your knowledge Network and it's really impressive to see how your knowledge how your notes are connected with each other and you see how you building a huge Web of Knowledge my only issue with that is that is totally useless I think I have so far I've not encountered any use cases where I really profited from seeing my data visualized but yeah it's nice to look at essential strength of obsidian are the plugins uh obsidian offers plugins but also the community the obsidian Community is offering plugins so you have plugins from almost any use case you can imagine from uh space repetitions to uh creating foodnotes to even task management but task management is not something I would personally do in obsidian so now as a conclusion which tool is better for your needs well I would say while notion is much better as a task and project manager and of course it is uh much better for the team collaboration because uh it enables life uh live editing of pages obsidian is the better tool for Knowledge Management first it's faster it's loading faster I never encountered any any speed problem or if notion I once had a really huge database in my tle cast and then um yeah I always encountered issues with loading that database so it's working well if you have a small knowledge web but the large it gets um yeah the more problems you will encounter I never had that with obsidian logically because it's um not cloud-based but uh the notes are loading from your device or from your computer I would say obsidian is best for individual knowledge workers who want to save the knowledge locally and don't want to share it with a cloud of course there's no need to choose between notion or obsidian for example you could use both Tools in tandem um I'm doing it for example I'm using notion at the moment mainly as my habit tracker and task manager and project management tool and on the side I'm using obsidian more and more as my Knowledge Management tool and I'm in the process of importing uh nodes from notion to obsidian because I think the future of my knowledge management will be obsid CDN but of course uh in the end it depends on your use case and I hope that my short video could um show you a bit the strengths and weaknesses of both tools and could help you in deciding which tool to use if you're using notion and obsidian already yeah please let me know in the comments what do you think which tool is better uh for task management project management notet taking what is your preference um yeah I can't wait to read your comments and that's it for today thank and that's it for today thank you very much for tuning in and see you next time

Channel: Productivity with Philipp

Views: 4,625

Keywords: Notion, Obsidian, Productivity, Note-Taking, Zettelkasten, Notion vs Obsidian, Review

Id: o14VTIQ1kIU

Length: 10min 38sec (638 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 09 2023