# Notion vs Obsidian: what people say

https://sociallisteningai.com/samples/notion-vs-obsidian/

| | Notion | Obsidian |
|---|---|---|
| All platforms | 42% positive, 11% negative (531) | 50% positive, 11% negative (620) |
| Instagram | 82% positive, 1% negative (71) | 0% positive, 0% negative (2) |
| X | 19% positive, 7% negative (135) | 57% positive, 10% negative (214) |
| Reddit | 11% positive, 28% negative (72) | 46% positive, 8% negative (76) |
| YouTube | 42% positive, 15% negative (176) | 54% positive, 4% negative (211) |
| TikTok | 73% positive, 4% negative (77) | 35% positive, 27% negative (117) |

## What people like

**Notion**

- Tutorials, courses and templates make Notion feel learnable and are seen as genuinely helpful (44)
- Community templates, planners and workflow tours are inspiring and in high demand (12)
- Notion is loved as a flexible, deeply customizable all-in-one workspace for notes, tasks, planning and organizing life (11)

**Obsidian**

- The CLI is a game changer for power users, making the vault scriptable for agents and automation (38)
- Simple, uncluttered use beats over-engineering, and beginners say tutorials finally make it click (29)
- Obsidian works well as a backend or persistent memory layer for AI agents like Claude and Hermes (24)

## What people complain about

**Notion**

- Notion feels cluttered, overwhelming and too complex for beginners, especially for basic to-do use and ADHD users (14)
- Flexibility becomes a trap: endless dashboard-building and tinkering instead of real productivity (10)
- Data safety fears: workspace suspensions, lost notes, no reliable backup/restore, and AI chat transcripts exposed in a breach (6)

**Obsidian**

- Second-brain setups are called productivity theater or hype that ships nothing real (17)
- A plain folder of markdown plus Claude may be enough; Obsidian adds unnecessary fluff and UI (11)
- AI over a vault is inefficient: bloated context, expensive tokens, poor traversal and arithmetic errors (5)

## What they compare it with

**Notion**

- Obsidian is the most-cited alternative, especially for local/offline notes, owning your data and no-AI setups (25)
- Open-source Notion clones like AppFlowy, AFFiNE and Terminus Notes are pitched as replacements (15)
- New all-in-one tools pitch themselves as replacing Notion alongside Linear, Slack and Discord (3)

**Obsidian**

- Versus Notion: Obsidian is local and simple, Notion just works across devices without paid sync (11)
- Versus a plain markdown folder plus Claude, Obsidian is the human browsing layer (6)
- Versus neovim, Dropbox and other free alternatives (4)