Notion releases offline mode

https://www.notion.com/help/guides/working-offline-in-notion-everything-you-need-to-know

by ericzawo • 11 months ago

242 183 11 months ago

I guess for a lot of users like myself using Notion ship has sailed. Most of them have moved to Obsidian, with the new database feature of Obsidian, and it being free, I do not see why users would choose Notion over Obsidian.

ujkhsjkdhf234• 11 months ago

You need to get out of your bubble. Notion is so much more popular than Obsidian you cannot imagine. My dentist office uses Notion for example. Migrating out of Notion is also very difficult and for most people it isn't worth the hassle. Obsidian not being web based is also a con not a pro to the average person. The number of people leaving Notion for Obsidian is a rounding error.

savolai2• 11 months ago

Yep. Notion databases are also the best implementation seamless of ux I’ve seen for relational databases for end users. It could probably be made even smoother but I cannot imagine obsidian being competitive, having used it. Just too much hassle for things Notion handles smoothly.

I would like to have more of the content available offline automatically though, i.e all text and image content, and big files downloaded on request. Closer to local first than this.

TimorousBestie• 11 months ago

I think the market is big enough for Notion and Obsidian to both exist.

raincole2• 11 months ago

Yeah. I feel like the ratio is probably more than Windows vs Linux. Of course for many users the ship has been sailed and they've switched to Obsidian. But for many many many more users they never even heard of Obsidian.

prox• 11 months ago

Yup. Too little, too late. Hard pass.

meowface• 11 months ago

My only reasons for switching was performance and simplicity. (Okay, I guess now that I write out like that, it seems like a pretty substantial disillusionment.)

Notion was always very sluggish and bulky. If they added a simple way to very quickly load and write simple Markdown notes on desktop and mobile like Obsidian, I might not have switched. Meanwhile their mobile app was taking literally 10+ seconds to even open.

graphememes• 11 months ago

web experience, many users do not use notion in an app

Illniyar• 11 months ago

I've never heard of companies using Obsidian. Notion isn't really marketed or suitable for individuals (even if their free plan says otherwise).

sfennell2• 11 months ago

It is suitable for individuals, I used it for a couple years and was very happy with it. I only decided to move on because I wanted a local database that I could mine as my personal knowledge base.

layman51• 11 months ago

I think you're correct. But I remember back around 2020 when Notion became very popular, it was definitely marketed toward individuals like students, or professionals who wanted to do a lot of planning or organization related to their working/personal lives.

kepano• 11 months ago

That's somewhat true for team collaboration, but not if you consider individuals on teams. There are people at least 10,000 companies using Obsidian, and some large corporate sponsors. See obsidian.md/enterprise

mmargenot3• 11 months ago

I use Notion extensively as an individual, but I spend a lot of time thinking about knowledge management and have accordingly tuned it pretty closely to my typical workflows. Without that initial time investment it can be overwhelming.

fudged71• 11 months ago

Notion is used individually by a lot of students

pavel_lishin2• 11 months ago

Notion works great for me as a store of WYSIWYG documents that I can drag around in a hierarchical set of pages. This means that I can easily use it on my phone, on the go.

But I don't use any of its Database functionality, or any of the other 90% of its features.

kid642• 11 months ago

Apparently Amazon purchased a block of licenses recently. Since the product isn't usable without community extensions, the scale of data exfiltration resulting from this asinine idea will be staggering, and is likely underway.

cschep• 11 months ago

Are they comparable tools in a team context? The ease of linking documents to people and collaborating? Seems like solo, sure. But in a group.. Obsidian doesn't replace Notion at all.

jmetrikat4• 11 months ago

obsidian’s great for solo use, but for team collaboration, anytype is closer to notion-built-in group sync, permissions, and offline support. you don’t need plugins or external services for multi-user editing; it just works across devices

dtkav6• 11 months ago

Have you tried Relay [0]? It makes Obsidian work for groups by adding real-time collaboration features.

(disclaimer: I'm the dev)

[0] https://relay.md

paxys2• 11 months ago

Obsidian is great for solo use, but then so is Apple Notes and a dozen similar options. Where Notion shines is team based sharing and collaboration. There's really nothing else like it with the same feature set.

EGreg• 11 months ago

What feature set exactly? Describe what makes it so amazing. Basically collaboration? Notes has that too.

0xCMP• 11 months ago

Once iOS 26 drops Apple Notes will be much-much more useful with the combination of supported linking between notes and supporting Markdown.

Before it rapidly became untenable as a place to actually store my notes. I use it more as a "temporary note" that will be moved to the proper place later.

baxtr• 11 months ago

One thing I prefer in Notion is the index site, which is something Obsidian lacks.

PS: I’m aware there are plugins that solve this issue, but none of them have worked well enough for me.

s0meON3• 11 months ago

Appflowy is a great alternative

raincole2• 11 months ago

Tech-savvy people indeed do have some very interesting (while out of touch) perspectives.

solardev2• 11 months ago

Who needs SaaS when you can engrave your own punch cards?

tshaddox• 11 months ago

I don't think Obsidian is even a major player in tech-savvy circles. I'd point to Apple Notes instead.

mmargenot3• 11 months ago

I like Obsidian a lot (especially for the ease of plugin development), but my impression is that most people don't use such comparatively heavy applications for managing their personal lives. It's more likely that they use a Google Keep or sticky notes just placed in random places. That leaves mostly enterprise use cases for such knowledge management tools, and Notion is much more full-featured for enterprise than Obsidian is.

tombert2• 11 months ago

Have Obsidian stopped requiring that you pay for a commercial license to use for work? I know it wasn't enforced but I think the free license limited you to personal use.

I bought a commercial license three years ago, and I don't really mind paying it, but then my job for the last year expressly forbid the use of Obsidian [1], and as such I didn't feel compelled to keep paying, though I still used it for personal stuff.

I looked at their website and it looks like the commercial license is optional now?

I don't really mind paying for it, I think it's a pretty decent notes app and I probably get more than $50/year of value out of it.

[1] I'm not 100% sure why, I think it might have been because the people doing the approvals thought that the Sync was an intrinsic to the app and they were afraid of company secrets going out.

j_4• 11 months ago

Yes.

https://obsidian.md/blog/free-for-work/

dragonwriter• 11 months ago

Have Obsidian stopped requiring that you pay for a commercial license to use for work?

I don't know if they ever required that, but they certainly do not now. They encourage purchase of a commercial license, but it explicitly is not required.

From the FAQ on their pricing page:

Do I have to pay for commercial use?

No. You are not required to pay for a commercial license, however if you are using Obsidian for work in an organization we encourage you to purchase a commercial license to keep Obsidian independent and 100% user-supported.

dimal2• 11 months ago

Personally, I use Obsidian. But I can’t imagine using it with a team. There’s too much friction sorting out what extensions to use, making sure everyone knows how to use said extensions. I don’t see how Obsidian is feasible for teams. If anyone has experience making it work well for their team, I’d love to hear about it.

dtkav6• 11 months ago

I've the dev behind Relay [0] (real-time collaboration for teams using Obsidian), and we work with a lot of teams who have switched over to using Obsidian for work. We just hit 10,000 users yesterday.

You don't need a lot of the plugins to be productive in Obsidian, but I think a superpower people are overlooking is that you can build your own plugins for company specific features/workflows quite cheaply.

Combine that with having everything local, and you can use tools like claude code to actually make use of the knowledge/context that you're creating.

I find it crazy that people are pushing data into locked-in systems like Notion only to be limited by their weak-sauce AI tools.

In contrast, we are all in on file-over-app -- keeping the files locally on your computer so you can actually use them. Many of our customers run their Relay Server on-prem for total document privacy.

[0] https://relay.md

themadturk3• 11 months ago

I know a team at my work is using it, though I'm fuzzy on how. I think they have a shared OneDrive folder that they use as a vault. How they deal with locking and such I haven't a clue.

bayindirh3• 11 months ago

I use both.

Obsidian is very powerful for quick entry and working on Markdown knowledge bases, and it's great. I use it to manage my digital garden among other things.

On the other hand, Notion is great for processing data. I use their databases extensively incl. their charts and whatnot. I also host a couple of read-only public pages for friends or family as documentation.

I think they cater to different use cases and doesn't replace each other. I'd certainly won't run my digital garden over Notion, or store the databases I keep in Notion in Obsidian. Obsidian's Bases fill a different need, for now.

Also, Notion slightly pivoted recently. They altered their “single person” oriented Pro plan and made Business their “Entry level, full fledged” plan. They do not cater to individuals anymore. Where obsidian is more geared towards individuals.

mgmobrien2• 11 months ago

For some kinds of data processing having your files in a local folder is a prereq. Every day I have my Obsidian vault open in Zed, and I interact with files via the tool-calling agent panel and via terminal.

I haven't tried Notion AI, maybe it's great. But I can't imagine going back to a world where all my knowledge lives in Notion's house. Notion CEO Ivan Zhao recently said: "If you think about applications, each application is kind of like a mini-prison of computing". (https://www.theverge.com/decoder-podcast-with-nilay-patel/75...) I think he's right. I don't want to be in Notion's prison even if it's big and nice.

Slow_Hand2• 11 months ago

I dunno. I love Obsidian, but it has a huge learning curve and is not currently the type of tool that I see companies adopting when they need to have their employees adopt it’s use. Obsidian is way too overwhelming for the average user, whereas Notion is far more user-friendly and intuitive for people who just need to interact with the system to do their job.

Edit: Not to mention that (last I checked) Obsidian lacks a lot of granularity when it comes to permissions for editing pages. It would be very easy for a beginner user to disrupt the markdown files or the organizational system. Even doing things like applying labels or tags in the YAML is less intuitive and requires a lot of consistency guidelines for users to make it worthwhile. Notion facilitates this kind of thing a lot better.

KetoManx64• 11 months ago

By default Obsidian is a markdown editor with the ability to link to other notes with a pretty graph of your note links. What is overwhelming about that?

richardlblair2• 11 months ago

Notion for my team, Obsidian for myself.

We do everything in Notion. Book time off, HR policies, run books, playbooks, knowledge dumps, project management, sprint management. Search is a lot better so it really opens up the use cases.

Imo, if you're building a company with the goal of selling it you should use Notion. Get your team to use it, and capture everything about your business. When you go to sell it you have the whole business packaged up in a searchable, interactive knowledge base.

wltr4• 11 months ago

And if you not going to sell it from the day one, but rather deliver something you promised to deliver (not necessarily promised to others), you may want to use a set of self-hosted tools. I guess.

mmargenot3• 11 months ago

What has your experience been in recovering information from Notion? Is the search getting you what you need?

Casteil• 11 months ago

Came here to say as much. No proprietary 'lock-in' with Obsidian, just plain .md, and honestly (if I recall correctly - it's been years now) I felt like I struggled using Notion's 'fancier' features. It seemed like copying/pasting out of it was often problematic.

Like others are saying, though, Notion is much more geared for collaboration. I couldn't care much less about that, so here I am with Obsidian, still, years later.

atombender3• 11 months ago

For me, a lot of it is that the "plumbing on the outside" approach of Markdown isn't nice. I don't understand why anyone thinks that seeing and editing format codes all over the place is good UX in 2025.

Maybe Obsidian appeals to a particular type of techie who uses Vim and stores all their files locally, compared to someone who isn't technical and just wants "documents in the cloud".

I should add that I dislike Notion for most things. In particular, the database support (which a lot of people here are singing praises about), tables, lack of diagramming, and the poor search.

But my main problem with Notion and other document systems is that invariably dissolve into the equivalent of a hoarder's house, full of outdated, hard-to-find garbage deeply buried under other garbage.

That's because Notion only has hierarchy. It doesn't have a sense of "cross cutting". So everyone organizes their stuff in completely different ways, and you have to deal with poorly thought-out folder hierarchies. Where I work, any attempt to carefully "garden" pages is futile because there is no discipline enforced by the tool.

Lately I've been using Linear as a replacement for Notion for some things, and it's just a much better designed tool.

danielhep• 11 months ago

Linear the project management software?

to11mtm• 11 months ago

TBH I'd prefer either Sharepoint's forced edit boxes or raw markdown over the hot mess that is editing in confluence. Pick a side and be done with it.

lmm• 11 months ago

I don't understand why anyone thinks that seeing and editing format codes all over the place is good UX in 2025.

Because if you can see them you can fix them when they inevitably get fucked up. (Literally commenting immediately after fixing some formatting that Confluence broke, like I do every day)

rifty• 11 months ago

I don't understand why anyone thinks that seeing and editing format codes all over the place is good UX in 2025

Lightweight markups in most basic usage are essentially punctuation extensions to natural language. It enables the UX in that what feels and looks like punctuation doubles as the effective key command you'd want to know for changing formatting modes anyways. This is why you'll find people like writers who like it.

spankibalt• 11 months ago

"I don't understand why anyone thinks that seeing and editing format codes all over the place is good UX in 2025."

Two neatly separated editing, or one editing plus one preview, mode(s) don't equate to "all over the place".

"But my main problem with Notion and other document systems is that invariably dissolve into the equivalent of a hoarder's house, full of outdated, hard-to-find garbage deeply buried under other garbage."

I have never used Notion. But if said program does support good enough search as well as tagging functionality (an essential of any KM tool to be considered at least decent), then the "hard-to-find and deeply buried" is on the user for being incompetent at managing (meta) data... which is often enough an inherited problem, e. g. through bad company policies or practices.

And if the tool, in 2025, does not support such essential functionality, the user is obviously also (at least partly) at fault: for choosing it.

"That's because Notion only has hierarchy."

Easy to avoid as there have been lots of freeform knowledge management tools out there... since the likes of Lotus Agenda. In my experience their freeform-style makes them unpopular with most people for it takes... some... effort (e. g. discipline) to make proper use of them. Such software obviously has to be adapted for any corporate use, which makes them rather unpopular in that space. See below.

"Where I work, any attempt to carefully "garden" pages is futile because there is no discipline enforced by the tool."

The garden's consistency and associated enforcement ("discipline") is the job of the gardener(s), not the tool.

You don't like Notion's hierarchy-only structure... but then complain about "poorly thought-out folder hierarchies" of the people that use it at your workplace. I mean... whatcha think is gonna happen when you introduce your crowd to powerful freeform KM tools... in a structure that is hierachical (your workplace) and conducts its affairs accordingly? XD

themadturk3• 11 months ago

I don't understand why anyone thinks that seeing and editing format codes all over the place is good UX in 2025.

For the same reason they liked it in the UX of 1985 and 1995...because Markdown gives you the ability to actually see the format codes that create your formatting and fix them if they're not what you want.

Now Obsidian (or any other Markdown editor) certainly isn't WordPerfect, but the one thing that diehard WordPerfect users loved was the ability to hit "reveal codes" and gain exacting control over their formatting...something Microsoft Word has never even tried to do. Markdown is far, far simpler, but the same control is there.

zie• 11 months ago

I switched to silverbullet[0], you get to write lua instead of YAML or whatever these apps are pushing.

0: https://silverbullet.md

bryanhogan• 11 months ago

Notion still has Database feature that Obsidian doesn't, e.g. a good Kanban board.

isodev• 11 months ago

In our small (~12) product studio, we switched to Obsidian for team stuff as well and it’s working really well.

Collaboration on the same notes works just fine, even if there is no “live editing” (which we realised is not really useful for us anyway). The fact that notes are just text files on disk has been transformative though - folks use the Shortcuts app, scripts and what not to manage and lookup things.

wortelefant• 11 months ago

The AI search and multiplayer modes are still a strong differentiator.

demarq• 11 months ago

users like myself

Nerdy devs are a niche.

HN is a tiny tiny bubble. Most users don’t know and wouldn’t care for obsidian or markdown etc.

I think is not a feature to appease the nerd community but for business users who are on the go.

giancarlostoro2• 11 months ago

with the new database feature of Obsidian

What database features?

dtkav6• 11 months ago

https://help.obsidian.md/bases

heihieih• 11 months ago

I have switched to Obsidian and have not used Notion for a long time.

jchw• 11 months ago

Well this is good I suppose, but what I find rather alarming is how bad Notion used to (recently, maybe not after this?) behave when there was a connectivity or server issue. I figured with OTs and CRDTs, collaborative editing of rich text documents with intermittent connectivity was a solved problem. However, with Notion I've actually lost data, sometimes a lot of it. (Once when Notion was having some kind of outage, I silently lost an entire page I was working on.)

Personally, I don't really like Notion very much. Not silently losing data is a low bar to clear for an application that edits rich text. Notion didn't clear it.

9x39• 11 months ago

That's cool. I typically don't use multiple or linked pages too often when I'm mobile, but there was always some kind of local cache for a page I had been reading or working on. This plugs one of the few annoyances I had.

Apparently in contrast to many of you, I think Notion is a better product for what I want, which is collaborative notes++. Personal info repo, shared project pages with people, and I straddle work and personal life using it everywhere. Tinkering with the backend is not a goal of mine, but I wonder if that's what people like about Obsidian.

photon_garden• 11 months ago

I was a big Notion fan for years and am now solidly in the Obsidian camp.

Speed and local-first was originally the main differentiator, but over time Steph Ango's "file over app" philosophy has become my favorite feature.

Yesterday I used Claude Code to automate some Obsidian cleanup and it was trivial because everything's just a file.

mxschll• 11 months ago

Local-first becomes even better in combination with local LLMs.

dtkav6• 11 months ago

yes! So many people are missing out on using claude-code directly on their knowledge base locally. Once you have it all local it seems completely crazy to push all of that context into a locked-in saas platform with mediocre AI tools.

SpaceManNabs• 11 months ago

Never knew people viewed notion and obsidian in the same space.

i usually compare obsidian to joplin... seems like i should be looking more at obsidian because i was considering starting a new wiki in notion.

wahnfrieden2• 11 months ago

You are not their current market, at all (individual vs team use) and your solution is unsuitable for theirs

jjfoooo4• 11 months ago

People using their free offering for personal use is a critical part of Notion's sales pipeline. It's a hell of a lot easier to sell a piece of software to a company when all it's internal users have already trained themselves how to use it in their personal time. Those users are probably the ones generating the enterprise sales lead in the first place

Notion releases offline mode

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