Notion vs Obsidian: which one won't make your ADHD brain explode

I've tried 47 different note-taking apps. I counted. That number includes three apps I downloaded, opened once, felt immediately overwhelmed, and deleted within four minutes, illustrating the notion vs obsidian dynamic in practice. It also includes one app I subscribed to for an entire year and used exactly twice, a reminder in the notion vs obsidian debate.

If you've found yourself in the Notion vs Obsidian debate, I suspect you're somewhere on a similar journey, Notion alternate. You've probably watched YouTube videos featuring elaborate dashboards with colour-coded databases and thought, in the notion vs obsidian debate, "Yes, that's the system that will finally fix my brain." best note-taking app for ADHD. You've seen screenshots of beautiful graph views connecting thousands of notes and imagined yourself as the sort of person who maintains such a thing in the notion vs obsidian discussion second brain app.

I have bad news and good news. The bad news: neither tool will fix your brain. The good news: one of them best second brain app for memory and focus might actually work with your brain, which is significantly more useful in the notion vs obsidian context.

Most comparisons you'll find online list features side by side as if choosing a note-taking app were like choosing a washing machine in the notion vs obsidian context. Here are the specifications in the notion vs obsidian terms: pick the one with the features you want a guide to personal knowledge management. But these aren't appliances. They're fundamentally different philosophies about how humans think, organise, and create in the notion vs obsidian sense.

I have ADHD, and in the notion vs obsidian debate, the best note-taking app for ADHD shapes my approach. I mention this not for sympathy but because, in notion vs obsidian thinking, it matters. When you have a brain that generates seventeen ideas before breakfast but struggles to remember where you put any of them by lunch, the choice between these tools isn't academic in the notion vs obsidian context Best second brain app for memory and focus. It's the difference between a system you'll actually use and an elaborate monument to good intentions gathering digital dust in the notion vs obsidian terms.

What follows isn't another feature checklist. It's what I learned spending three months with both tools in the notion vs obsidian context, burning approximately 40 hours configuring systems I never used, and eventually admitting I was solving the wrong problem entirely. By the end, you'll know which tool fits your brain, or whether, in notion vs obsidian terms, you need something different altogether.

The fundamental difference nobody talks about

Here's what every comparison misses in the notion vs obsidian debate: A guide to personal knowledge management for messy thinkers. Notion and Obsidian aren't competing products. They're competing philosophies about how thinking works A guide to personal knowledge management for messy thinkers.

Notion is structure-first. In the notion vs obsidian framework, you build the system, design the databases, create the templates, establish the workflow, and then, theoretically, you capture thoughts within that pristine architecture. It's beautiful. It's logical. In notion vs obsidian thinking, it assumes you know what categories your future thoughts will fit into before you have them.

Obsidian is capture-first. You write. You create notes. You link them together as connections emerge. In the notion vs obsidian view, structure develops organically from the content rather than preceding it. In the notion vs obsidian context, the system grows from your actual thinking rather than from your idealised vision of how you should think.

In the notion vs obsidian comparison, I spent three weeks building a Notion system, and Obsidian alternative was among the options I considered. Twenty-one days of databases, templates, relations, rollups, and views. My content calendar had seven different database views. My project tracker connected to my client database which connected to my task list which connected to my meeting notes. It was magnificent.

In the notion vs obsidian equation, I used it for actual work exactly four times before abandoning it entirely.

The problem wasn't the system. The problem was me. In the notion vs obsidian debate, with ADHD, the promise of 'once I have the perfect system, everything will be organised' is intoxicating. Structure sounds like salvation. But building structure is a different activity than using structure, and my brain finds the former far more appealing than the latter.

There's a quote I found on Reddit that captures this perfectly: "Notion is where I work, Obsidian is where I think." It's become something of a cliche in productivity circles, but cliches become cliches because they're true. In the notion vs obsidian comparison, Notion excels at structured work, collaborative projects, databases of things. Obsidian excels at messy thinking, personal exploration, ideas that don't fit into predefined categories.

The paradox I discovered: I need organisation precisely when I'm least capable of maintaining it. When things are calm, I can maintain elaborate systems. When things are chaotic and I actually need the system to save me, I'm incapable of following its rules. I needed a tool that worked during the chaos, not just in the calm.

Local-first vs cloud: privacy, speed, and peace of mind

Let's talk about where your notes actually live, because this matters more than most comparisons acknowledge.

Obsidian stores everything locally. Your notes are Markdown files sitting in folders on your computer. No cloud by default. No account required. No company servers involved. If Obsidian disappeared tomorrow, you'd still have your files, readable in any text editor. This isn't just a technical detail. It's a philosophy about data ownership.

The privacy implications are significant. According to DuckDuckGo research, 45.3% of people store sensitive information in note-taking apps. Passwords, financial details, health information, private thoughts. Most note apps don't encrypt this information by default. When your notes live on someone else's servers, you're trusting that company, their employees, their security practices, and every government jurisdiction they operate in.

Obsidian's claim is straightforward: "All data is saved locally on your device and is never sent to our servers." If you want sync across devices, you can pay for Obsidian Sync at $4 per month, or use your own solution like iCloud, Dropbox, or Git. The point is, you choose.

Notion takes the opposite approach. Everything lives in the cloud. Your notes sync automatically across all your devices. You can access them from any browser. Collaboration happens in real time. It's seamless and convenient and means you're trusting Notion with everything you write.

I'm not neutral here. Years ago, Evernote held my notes hostage during a pricing change. They reduced the free tier dramatically, and suddenly notes I'd written for years were locked behind a paywall. I could export them, sure, but the friction was intentional. That experience made local-first storage deeply appealing.

For ADHD brains, there's another angle: local storage means one less login to forget, one less subscription to track, one less account in the pile of accounts my password manager barely keeps organised. Obsidian just works. Open the app, your files are there, no authentication dance required.

The trade-off is real, though. Notion's cloud approach means truly effortless sync. I've watched colleagues start a note on their phone, continue on their laptop, and finish on a tablet without a single thought about how the sync happened. With Obsidian, you need to set that up yourself.

If data privacy and ownership matter to you, Obsidian wins decisively. If seamless cloud sync matters more and you trust the cloud, Notion is genuinely excellent. There's no objectively correct answer here, just different priorities.

The feature comparison everyone does (but faster)

You're probably expecting a detailed feature breakdown. Every other article does one, so here's mine, compressed because you don't need another 4,000 words of feature descriptions.

Pricing: Obsidian is free for personal use. Commercial use costs $50 per user per year. Obsidian Sync adds $4 per month if you want their cloud sync. Obsidian Publish for creating a website from your notes costs $8 per month.

Notion offers a generous free tier with some limitations. The Plus plan costs $10 per user per month for individuals wanting more features. Team plans scale up from there.

Interface and learning curve: Obsidian uses Markdown. If you don't know Markdown, there's a learning curve. If you do know Markdown, or use tools like GitHub, you'll feel at home immediately. It's essentially a text editor with superpowers.

Notion uses blocks. Everything is a block that you can rearrange, convert, and nest. It's more visual and arguably more intuitive for people who've never touched a text file, but the block system has its own learning curve once you want anything complex.

Organisation: Obsidian uses vaults (which are just folders) containing notes (which are just files). You can nest folders, link notes, and create your own structure. It's flexible and familiar if you've ever organised files on a computer.

Notion uses pages that can contain other pages, databases, and various content blocks. The hierarchy can go infinitely deep. You can create sophisticated information architectures, but you can also create mazes that even you can't navigate.

Linking and visualisation: Obsidian's backlinks and graph view let you see connections between notes. It's visually striking and genuinely useful for some workflows. More on this later, because the reality is more complex than the screenshots suggest.

Notion uses database relations to connect items. You can create linked databases, rollups, and views that pull information across your workspace. It's powerful for structured data but different from Obsidian's "everything links to everything" approach.

Collaboration: Notion wins this category entirely. Real-time editing, comments, permissions, sharing, team spaces. It's genuinely excellent for collaborative work.

Obsidian's collaboration requires workarounds. Shared folders, Git repositories, or Obsidian Sync with sharing features. It works but wasn't designed as a collaboration tool.

Extensibility: Obsidian has over 2,000 community plugins and 160+ themes. You can customise it into almost anything. The community is remarkably active.

Notion has 117-150+ integrations with other tools, plus a growing template ecosystem with over 30,000 templates available. It integrates well with the broader software ecosystem but doesn't have the same plugin depth.

Mobile: Both have mobile apps. Notion's sync is seamless. Obsidian's mobile sync depends on your sync solution but works well with Obsidian Sync or iCloud.

That's the comparison most people need. If you want to dive deeper into specific features, both tools have excellent documentation. But features aren't the real story here.

Notion's database superpower (and why it's also its curse)

Notion's databases are genuinely incredible. I'm not being sarcastic. If you need to manage structured information, track projects, build a CRM, or create a content calendar, Notion's databases can do things that would require expensive specialised software elsewhere.

You can create relational databases that connect clients to projects to tasks to documents. You can build multiple views of the same data: Kanban boards, calendars, timelines, galleries, lists. You can use formulas to calculate values, rollups to aggregate data from related items, and filters to slice your information in any dimension.

The template ecosystem is vast. Over 30,000 templates available, covering everything from personal habit trackers to startup investor databases. Whatever system you want to build, someone's probably built a version of it already.

Here's the problem: databases scale awkwardly. One reviewer tested Notion extensively and noted loading times of 3-5 seconds per page once databases exceeded 5,000 records. That's fine for personal use, less fine if you're building serious business infrastructure.

But the bigger problem isn't technical. It's psychological.

I built an elaborate content calendar. It had views for planning, writing, editing, publishing, and promotion. It connected to my client database and my topic research database. It had templates for different content types. It took me about twelve hours to build.

I used it twice.

The problem was that every time I had an idea for content, I'd open Notion and face the system. Which database does this go in? Should I create a new view? Does this idea connect to the existing topic cluster? Wait, should I update my topic clusters first? By the time I'd navigated the decision tree, the idea had evaporated and I was reorganising database properties instead.

This is the ADHD trap in its purest form. More features means more decisions. More decisions means more paralysis. More paralysis means nothing actually gets captured.

Notion wins if you're managing a team, running structured projects, or genuinely need relational data. It's legitimately powerful for those use cases. It doesn't win if you just want to capture thoughts and think clearly. For that, the power becomes a liability.

Obsidian's graph view and the "thinking in connections" dream

I wanted to be a graph view person. I really did.

The screenshots are intoxicating. Thousands of notes, interconnected in beautiful webs, clusters of related ideas visually apparent, the structure of someone's entire mental universe laid out in gorgeous network diagrams. I imagined zooming around my second brain, discovering unexpected connections, having insights emerge from the visual patterns.

My actual graph view looked like three disconnected clusters floating in empty space.

The reality of graph view is more complicated than the marketing suggests. Most people's graphs are either too sparse to be useful or too dense to read. Unless you're genuinely linking notes constantly and have hundreds or thousands of them, the graph view doesn't show you much you didn't already know.

The community knows this. In Obsidian forums, you'll find discussions with titles like "What's the point of the graph view?" and debates about whether it's actually useful or just visually satisfying. Some users swear by it. Many more admit they never look at it.

Advanced plugins can help. InfraNodus adds network science metrics like betweenness centrality and community detection, turning the graph from a pretty picture into actual analysis. The Graph Analysis plugin helps identify important nodes and structural gaps. But these require effort to set up and understand.

When graph view works: if you're a researcher tracking connections across hundreds of sources, a writer building complex fictional worlds, or someone who genuinely thinks in networks and has the note volume to make it meaningful.

When it doesn't work: if you're forcing connections because you think you "should" use the graph, or if you have fewer than a hundred notes, or if you're building a system for the person you wish you were rather than the person you actually are.

I kept trying to make graph view useful. I created more links, tagged things more aggressively, added notes I didn't actually need just to make the graph look better. Eventually I realised I was maintaining the graph instead of using my notes. The tool was using me.

The collaboration divide (and why it matters less than you think)

Let me save you some decision-making: if you need collaboration, choose Notion. It's not close.

Notion's collaboration is seamless. Multiple people editing the same document in real time. Comments and discussions attached to specific blocks. Granular permissions controlling who can view, comment, or edit. Team spaces with shared databases. Guest access for clients or collaborators. It works beautifully, and it's been working beautifully for years.

Obsidian was never designed for collaboration. You can make it work with shared folders, Git repositories, or Obsidian Sync with its sharing features. But it's a workaround, not a core feature. The tool is fundamentally personal.

Here's what took me embarrassingly long to realise: I don't actually need collaboration features for my notes.

I thought I did. I imagined sharing notebooks with colleagues, building shared knowledge bases, collaborating on documentation. I kept choosing tools with "excellent collaboration" because it seemed important.

In three years, I've shared exactly two notes. Both times could have been handled by sending someone a text file.

Most personal knowledge management is actually personal. The clue is in the name. Your thinking, your notes, your second brain, these aren't collaborative activities. The pressure to share notes actually hurts the practice, because shared notes need to be tidy, polished, and comprehensible to others. Private notes can be messy, abbreviated, and half-formed.

The ADHD angle matters here too. Knowing someone else might see my notes adds cognitive overhead. Should I clean this up? Is this embarrassing? Will they judge my chaotic process? That pressure, however slight, reduces the likelihood of capturing anything at all.

If you're building a team wiki, managing collaborative projects, or creating shared documentation, Notion's collaboration is worth paying for. If you're building a personal system for thinking and notes, collaboration features are a distraction from what actually matters.

The real cost nobody mentions: time spent configuring vs using

Let's do some uncomfortable mathematics.

The elaborate Notion dashboards you see on YouTube, the ones with aesthetic colour schemes and perfectly organised databases, how long do you think those took to build? I've watched the creators admit to dozens of hours. Some took weeks of iteration.

The Obsidian setups with custom CSS, twenty integrated plugins, and workflows that handle everything automatically, same story. Hours and hours of configuration, troubleshooting, and refinement.

I calculated my own numbers. Forty hours configuring Notion before I admitted I was procrastinating. Another fifteen hours trying different Obsidian plugins before my setup felt "right." That's fifty-five hours, more than a full working week, spent on systems instead of work.

Configuration feels productive. That's the trap. You're making decisions, solving problems, seeing visible progress. Your workspace looks better. You've "invested in your productivity." But you haven't actually produced anything. You haven't captured a thought, written a paragraph, or done the creative work that ostensibly justifies having a notes system in the first place.

For ADHD brains, this trap is particularly dangerous. Setup is structured and clear. You know what success looks like: the system works. Actual creative work is ambiguous and vulnerable. You might fail, produce something mediocre, or face the uncomfortable reality that you don't know what you're doing.

Given the choice between guaranteed success (my system now has seven database views!) and potential failure (I should probably write that article), guess which one my brain prefers?

Ask yourself honestly: have you spent more time configuring your notes system this month or actually using it? If the answer is configuring, you might be building elaborate procrastination rather than a productivity system.

When extensive setup is worth it: you're building infrastructure for a team, creating a system that multiple people will use, or genuinely need complex automation for a specific workflow.

When it's not worth it: you're a single person who just wants to capture thoughts and occasionally find them again.

What ADHD taught me about choosing tools

Traditional productivity advice assumes a neurotypical brain. "Just be more organised!" they say, as if organisation were a simple choice rather than a neurological capacity that varies between individuals.

Here's what I've learned about my brain and tools: if the tool requires organisation to use it, I'm already doomed.

Both Notion and Obsidian, despite their differences, share a fundamental assumption. They assume you can make decisions about where to put things at the moment you're trying to capture them. Which workspace? Which folder? Which database? Which page? What tags?

For my brain, the capture moment is precious and fleeting. A thought exists for seconds before something else demands attention. In that window, I need to get the thought out of my head and into a trusted system. Any friction, any decision, any "where does this go?" question, and the thought is gone. Lost forever. Replaced by whatever distraction grabbed my attention next.

Neither Notion nor Obsidian is built for "capture now, organise later." Obsidian comes closer with its quick capture features, but you still need to choose a vault and often a folder. Notion requires navigating to the right page or database before you can create an entry.

Decision paralysis in the capture moment doesn't just slow you down. It kills the habit entirely. If capturing a thought requires decisions, you'll capture fewer thoughts. Eventually, you'll stop trying.

This is why I built Ultrathink. I needed capture speed without friction. A thought hits, I capture it instantly with a browser extension or desktop widget, and AI handles the organisation later. No decisions at capture time. No choosing folders or databases or tags. Just get the thought out before it disappears.

I'm not saying Notion and Obsidian are bad tools. They're excellent tools for many people. I'm saying they weren't built for brains like mine, and if you've been struggling with either one, the problem might not be your willpower or your system design. The problem might be that the tool assumes cognitive capabilities that not everyone has.

So which one should you actually choose?

After all that, here's the practical guidance.

Choose Notion if:

• You need team collaboration features that actually work
• You're managing structured data like CRMs, project trackers, or databases
• You prefer guided structure to blank canvas freedom
• You don't mind your notes living on someone else's servers
• You're willing to invest significant setup time for long-term systems
• You need robust mobile access with automatic, seamless sync

Choose Obsidian if:

• You want complete data ownership and privacy
• You prefer writing in Markdown or are willing to learn
• You think in connections and want graph visualisation
• You're comfortable with plugins and technical customisation
• You need offline access to your notes
• You're building a long-term second brain for research or writing

Choose neither if:

• Capture speed matters more than features
• Decision paralysis kills your note-taking habits
• You want modern AI features without complexity
• You're tired of configuring systems instead of using them
• Both feel like too much tool for the actual problem

The uncomfortable truth: for most people, a simpler tool with faster capture beats an elaborate system that never gets used. The best note-taking app is the one you actually open. The best system is the one that matches your actual behaviour, not your aspirational behaviour.

I tried both extensively. Notion overwhelmed me with possibilities. Every feature was another decision, another potential optimisation, another reason to fiddle with the system instead of using it. Obsidian required too much manual maintenance. The connections I wanted to emerge organically required deliberate effort I couldn't sustain.

I built Ultrathink for people like me. Fast capture, AI organisation, no decisions at the moment that matters. But your brain might work differently. Notion or Obsidian might be perfect for you. The point isn't that my solution is universally correct. The point is that you should choose based on how you actually work, not how productivity YouTubers work.

The hybrid approach (using both)

Some people successfully use both tools. It's worth mentioning because it's a legitimate strategy.

The typical split: Obsidian for personal thinking and notes, Notion for team work and collaboration. Or Notion for structured project management and Obsidian for freeform research and writing. Two tools, two purposes, clear boundaries.

When this works: you have genuinely separate use cases that don't overlap. Your work life and personal life have different requirements. You're disciplined enough to maintain two systems without cross-contamination.

When this doesn't work: you're just delaying the decision about which tool to commit to. You're maintaining two systems because you couldn't decide on one. Your "boundaries" are fuzzy and you spend time moving things between tools.

The cognitive load of maintaining two systems is real. Every thought requires a meta-decision: which system does this belong in? That's friction at capture time, which we've established is the enemy.

My honest take: if you're considering using both, you might be overcomplicating things. The people who successfully run hybrid setups usually have clear professional reasons, like a company mandating Notion for collaboration while they prefer Obsidian personally. If you're a solo user considering both, you're probably overthinking it.

Pick one. Use it for three months. Then decide if you actually need the other.

There is no perfect tool

I've spent over 6,000 words comparing these tools, and here's what I actually believe: the choice matters far less than the using.

The best note-taking app is the one you actually use. Not the one with the best features. Not the one with the prettiest interface. Not the one that YouTubers recommend. The one you open regularly and put thoughts into.

All these features, the databases, the graph views, the plugins, the integrations, mean nothing if the tool doesn't match how your brain works. A simple text file you actually use beats an elaborate system gathering dust.

Stop optimising and start capturing. The real work is thinking, writing, creating. Not perfecting your system. Not trying new tools. Not watching another "my Notion setup" video. The actual creative work that the tools are supposedly supporting.

I wasted months tool-hopping. I convinced myself that each new tool would be the one that finally made me organised. That's magical thinking. The tool doesn't make you organised. The tool just holds whatever you put in it. If you're not putting things in, no feature will save you.

Whatever you choose, commit to it for at least three months before switching. Three months is enough time to actually learn the tool, build real habits, and discover whether the friction you're experiencing is the tool's fault or just the normal difficulty of building a new practice.

And if neither Notion nor Obsidian feels right, if you've tried both and found yourself frustrated by the same patterns I described, maybe the problem isn't your willpower or your system design. Maybe you need something built for a different kind of brain. That's why I built Ultrathink. But that's a story for another post.

For now, pick a tool, commit to it, and start capturing thoughts. The perfect system is the enemy of the working system. Done is better than perfect. And a messy note you actually took is infinitely more valuable than an organised system you never use.