Obsidian: The Most Secure Notion Alternative (not sponsored)

so as i mentioned in last week's video i spent a good amount of the past month trying my absolute best to switch from notion to obsidian and as you may know i am a big fan of notion and i spent what is it the past one and a half years optimizing notion to work for me but because of my masochistic tendencies and concerns about notion security and speed i've been a lot more open about trying to find a better replacement and i know a lot of you share similar concerns about notion and have been asking me to check out obsidian for a while but i finally got to it so in today's video i want to introduce obsidian talk about what i was looking for in this app and how i set it up for myself and just generally lay out the pros and cons to help you determine whether it's worth giving this app a shot um i can't think of any obsidian puns so let's just get to it now obscene was just built by two people shida and erica and that itself is mind-blowing to me especially as an engineer given how powerful and well-built obsidian already is and on top of that obsidian was first released in just march of 2020 and that's crazy right well it's possible because before obsidian the same team built this dynalist so really obsidian was years in the making which is why it's come so far in so little time and we can actually learn a lot about obsidian from their three founding principles local first and plain text at its core obsidian is a super powered markdown editor with minimal formatting and a few bells and whistles and you do have a lot of control over how things look so you can configure your own text styling or shortcuts or window arrangements and it's local first so instead of being stored on the cloud your notes are stored locally on your device this means there are far fewer security risks because our notes are not in the hand of some third party and it means we're responsible for keeping our notes safe and secure at least in the free model and it also means that obsidian always works offline making it far faster than apps like notion or evernote links are first class citizens like rome obsidian is designed to use the subtle casting method powered by ample use of links so to optimally use obsidian instead of organizing things from the top down you build up ideas from the bottom up by using these links to connect disparate thoughts which are then visualized in a knowledge graph which can really look like anything from this to this third is super extensible now for those tech folks obsidian will remind you of an ide something like vs code or um sublime sublime text yeah so just like vs code it allows for plugins and custom css so you can really morph this into what works for you and it has a huge community that's there to share tips and hacks to make this easier so yeah that is obsidian and there's really nothing quite like it from what i've seen at least it's super customizable it's really secure and it's free but that being said it's definitely made for power users who will actually use all of these features and who don't mind the additional setup [Music] now before i'd always hop onto every single new app's bandwagon without clearly establishing what i'm actually looking for and whether that new app will actually solve my problems instead of introducing new ones now my use case is pretty narrow since i'm looking to replace notion and because there are already a lot of things that i like that i want to keep specifically since i do a lot of writing i've grown accustomed to notions rich text formatting customizability and templating features and almost every board i use in notion is built upon a database that makes it really easy to see all of my notes but of course there are a lot of things that i don't like about notion that hopefully obsidian can fix first since notion is not end to encrypted i actually worry a lot about the security of my notes and second because notion lacks offline support it can get pretty slow and this can be disastrous when it's 2pm i'm finally done scrolling through instagram but uh i can't get to work and lastly it's kind of clunky there are a lot of things in notion that i don't really use anymore like all of these sections and the emojis so i'd actually like something a bit more minimal so given all those factors obsidian seem pretty promising but i knew heading into this experiment that i had to spend a bit of time modifying obsidian to recreate that content calendar that i'm so used to in notion so while this took an embarrassing amount of time to complete i am pretty satisfied with my obsidian setup and it only took five key steps to create so hot take i actually don't like dark themes so obsidian has some really nice customizable themes the first thing i did was toggle the light mode but because that wasn't enough i also played with the community themes like atom and groov box there are also a lot of other settings that you can play with my favorites were the translucent window this outline feature and the collapsible headings and bullet points to spice things up further obsidian's community has developed so many different css plugins which you can find in this repo or on the obsidian forums now surprisingly the templates that i know and love in notion are surprisingly easy to replicate here so first you just have to enable templates in settings and choose where you want to store them and once you make the template itself save for to-do list you pick a keyboard shortcut to trigger it like command-t and finally whenever you make a fresh note or want to add a little snippet of something you just use the shortcut and voila now one of the biggest struggles when switching productivity apps is figuring out how the heck to transfer your notes luckily i found this somewhat helpful script that made things a lot easier however if you use databases or nested pages in notion things are not going to look exactly the same so you will have to spend a bit of time just reordering things for you now it is great that obsidian is fully local but that can be kind of nerve-wracking especially if you're like me and are constantly losing or breaking things and for me probably the most reliable least hands-on solution was github with its version history and unlimited storage and this uses cron jobs to work so it is kind of complicated to set up so i'll just link the instructions down below if you're curious so yeah after doing all of the setup i was actually pretty impressed with obsidian it was nice it addressed a lot of the concerns that i had with notion and actually with rome as well which i tested many many months ago now unless we're just tracking our movie or kdrama watch list our notes are probably going to have a lot of personal information that we don't want accidentally leaked and the great thing is that'll never be a risk with obsidian and if you don't want to set up github and still want to back up your notes there are paid models that allow for end to end encrypted backups and with the markdown editor and templating i actually really enjoyed the writing experience on obsidian i never found myself getting that distracted here because i could hide all of those sidebars and buttons and actually focus on the act of writing obsidian is also highly customizable now for some people this might be a disadvantage even for me i'm not really sure where i fall on it but i do like having the option to make things more minimal or functional for me and if you consider both the insanely active online community and the fact that this app is still in its early stages i really think it has a lot of potential to even become the next notion now as you may suspect like many of the other apps that i try i was not able to stick with obsidian but here that's not really because of any faults with the app but rather because i am not really an ideal user for it now the biggest downside for me is that this is not built off of databases like notion but instead it's built off of the settle casting system and while i did try to make use of the backlinks to build my own knowledge graph it's just not something that i'm looking for and in fact i would say it was kind of distracting but a lot of people like ali abdull and thiago forte swear by this methodology so it has a lot of benefits and is worth at least considering and besides that as we saw setting up this app is quite tedious and while i do like some customization if there are too many options i will definitely get carried away and will end up spending all of my time playing with different themes instead of actually working but again this is probably more of a me problem instead of the app [Music] so as i mentioned before the purpose of this video is to share my experience using obsidian but also give you all the information to determine whether you would be a good fit for this app or rather whether this app would be a good fit for you and given what i saw of this app i would say don't get it if you want something simple no fuss where you can just download the app and get started or if you need some more advanced organizational tools like databases or kanban boards or anything that's just more visual or structured in nature or if you actually want your notes stored on the cloud or at least accessible on your phone since this is still just a desktop app that being said upsiding is one of the most impressive apps that i've seen in a long time so i would say it's worth giving a shot if you do a lot of writing like maybe you're a student writing essays or taking notes or maybe you're writing a book or maybe you're a journalist not just because of the writing experience but because this will actually allow you to use those backlinks to your favor or maybe you want to build a second brain knowledge base and those backlinks will be critical to tying all of your different ideas together or try this out if you value privacy at all cost and for you having things stored locally is the most optimal solution and finally if you're really particular about how your apps are set up and you have a lot of time on your hands to tailor everything to your liking you'll probably like obsidian [Music] so yeah that's it for today's video now i know you guys have been asking for a very very long time to try out obsidian so i'm sorry for the delay but i hope you found this video helpful i'm also going to try out more of those secure notion alternatives like standard notes and joplin so keep an eye out for those but otherwise i hope you like this video if you did please give it a big like and subscribe follow me on social media if you haven't already and i'll see you in the next one [Music] that um [Music] up city up you

Channel: harshibar

Views: 303,620

Keywords: harshibar, harshibar notion, harshibar obsidian, notion alternatives, secure notion alternatives, obsidian, obsidian app, obsidian.md, obsidian roam, roam research, roam vs obsidian, obsidian vs notion, notion vs obsidian, zettelkasten, notion roam obsidian, obsidian review, obsidian app review, secure, notion is down, notion alternative, notion, how to ues obsidian app, obsidian for beginners, obsidian app notes, how to organize notes in obsidian, notes, best notion alternative

Id: ms4cWMsOITs

Length: 11min 31sec (691 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 09 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/darrag_h]

Switched from Roam 2 months ago.. best decision

[u/ISayAboot]

That was a great video, but I was surprised 10 mins in when you said you don't use it and didn't stick with it.

[u/Manedblackwolf]

You might be interested in Anytype.io, it is still under development, but it's quite similar to Notion and it's offline.

[u/Devilstorment]

I have tried obsidian on a few occasions but I end up back with Notion every time. Perhaps I haven’t given it long enough but I find the more graphical nature of Notion more pleasing and easier to use.

[u/obelixuspl]

I really like your videos! Subscribed some time ago

[u/w1zm8]

good to see a new member of obsidian community!

[u/GreatAndRandom]

I am doing the same!

[u/arunavigation]

I love obsidian!, great Video!