Goodbye Notion. Hello Obsidian.

I’ve been an avid note taker since May 2018. Writing notes helps me think clearly, and categorising them allows me to connect the dots. My first notes were written and organised using Microsoft’s OneNote, but I switched to Notion approximately 2 years later because I needed their unlimited hierarchy of folders. Now, after more than 2 years, its time to switch notetaking apps yet again.

This is not gonna be a rant about why or if Notion is bad. To be honest, that completely depends on how you use it and what you’re using it for. The main reason I’m leaving is that they’ve set their sight on teams, as confirmed by their recent pricing change. Since my team only consists of me, myself & I, it’s time to part ways.

In search of an alternative, I had a three requirements:

• It needs to be future proof. I don’t want to switch apps again after 2 years.
• It needs to have an offline mode (to tackle the personal frustration of Notion holding off of a proper offline mode for numourous years)
• It needs to be platform agnostic.

Obsidian checks all these boxes.

About Obsidian

Obsidian can best be seen as an note editor, not as an app. With Notion, your notes live somewhere on a Notion server. With Obsidian, your notes are wherever you want them to be, as long as Obsidian can access them. Obsidian notes are just plain Markdown files. This solves a lot of problems for me. The first one being that it’s future proof; my notes are mine, and I can access them even without Obsidian. Also, it has offline mode by default, as all notes are stored locally.

This setup does pose a challenge with synchronisation: I mostly take notes when I’m on my laptop, but also on my phone when I’m on the go. How do I access the notes on my phone, when they’re stored on my laptop? Obsidian thought of this by introducing a sync service for $10/month. But, since I’m planning on using Obsidian exclusively within the Apple ecosystem for now, I can also synchronise my notes between my phone and laptop using iCloud, which I already pay for. This way, I can access my notes even when I’m offline. iCloud will automatically update the file once I’m online again.

Some notes on the migration

The migration process from Notion to Obsidian was less painful than the migration from OneNote to Notion. Notion offers the export as Markdown & CSV feature. I haven’t been using their databases much, so for me those were mainly .md files.

For my Obsidian setup, I’ve chosen to place all metadata, such as tags and the created date in the frontmatter. Because frontmatter is not dependent on the interpretation of specific editor syntax, I think this is the most future-proof way. I’m actually planning on dedicating a post on my Obsidian setup, so stay tuned if you’re interested in that!

One thing I noticed, is that I had to dramatically “flatten” my note structure compared to Notion. Although it was possible to lift & shift, my experience was that it’s a PITA to work with highly-hierarchical folder structures within Obsidian. To tackle this problem, I consolidated “deep” pages to their top-level and I now link related pages together using tags and links, resulting in a pretty graph view that Obsidian is famous for.

To conclude: I only needed a little scripting with Python to convert all Notion exported Markdown files to Obsidian ready Markdown files and was able to migrate within two evenings.

I’m happy with this new setup, which already gave me a productivity boost!