Obsidian alternatives

12 tools that do a similar job, and what makes each one different.

What Obsidian is

Obsidian is a note-taking app that keeps notes as plain text Markdown files on your own device rather than on a vendor's server. It uses open file formats, so the notes are not locked into the app that made them. The base app is free to use and needs no sign-up, and it is free for personal, commercial and non-profit use alike. A commercial licence at 50 USD per user per year is optional rather than required. A one-off Catalyst supporter licence at 25 USD grants early access to beta builds. Desktop builds cover Windows, Mac and Linux, with the Linux version packaged as AppImage, ARM64 AppImage, Snap, Deb and Flatpak. Mobile versions are distributed through the iOS App Store and Google Play, with a direct Android APK for anyone avoiding the store. A browser clipper extension is published on the Chrome Web Store, the Safari App Store, Firefox Add-ons and Microsoft Edge Add-ons. Canvas is included at no extra cost and gives you a surface for arranging material visually rather than as a list. A single canvas can hold text cards, embedded Markdown notes, images, video, audio, PDFs, web pages and other canvases. Canvas files are saved in the open JSON Canvas format. Two paid services sit on top of the free app. Sync costs 4 USD per user per month billed annually or 5 USD billed monthly, and encrypts vault contents end to end with AES-256. The Standard tier covers one synced vault, 1 GB of total storage, a 5 MB maximum file size and one month of version history. Sync Plus, at 8 USD per user per month billed annually, raises that to ten synced vaults, 10 GB of storage that can be increased up to 100 GB, a 200 MB maximum file size and twelve months of version history. Sync runs on Mac, Windows, Linux, iOS and Android and supports a headless server deployment, and shared vaults let more than one person work inside the same synced vault. Publish turns a vault into a website. It costs 8 USD per site per month billed annually or 10 USD billed monthly, hosts up to 4 GB of content and carries a seven day refund guarantee. Published sites support custom domains, password protection, backlinks, graph view and full text search, and they can be excluded from search engine indexing when the site is meant for a limited audience rather than the open web.

Raycast

A launcher that replaces Spotlight and then absorbs half the menu bar: window management, clipboard history, snippets, calculations, and extensions for the tools you already run. Everything is keyboard-driven and consistent, so muscle memory transfers between extensions. macOS only. The free tier covers most individual use.

Freemium

Notion

Documents, databases and wikis in one workspace that bends to whatever shape a team wants, which is both the appeal and the risk. The same primitives make a meeting note, a project tracker, a CRM or a public site. Teams that agree on structure get a system of record; teams that do not get a sprawl nobody maintains.

Freemium

Todoist

A task list that survives daily use for a decade, the harder test for this category. Natural-language input parses dates and recurrence as you type, projects and labels organise without ceremony, and it runs on essentially every platform. Deliberately unopinionated about method, so it fits GTD or a plain list equally.

Freemium

Linear

Issue tracking fast enough that people keep it up to date, which is the only property that matters in a tracker. Keyboard-first, opinionated about cycles and projects, and deliberately short on configuration. Popular with product teams who found the alternatives slow and over-configurable. If your process needs heavy customisation, that opinionation is a poor fit.

Freemium

Superhuman

Email rebuilt around keyboard shortcuts, speed and getting to an empty inbox. Split inboxes triage automatically, snippets handle repeated replies, and reminders bring back threads that went quiet. Sits on top of Gmail or Outlook rather than replacing them. Priced well above the alternatives, and sold on the hours it returns.

Paid

PostHog

Product analytics, session replay, feature flags, experiments and surveys in one open-source stack, which removes the usual problem of four tools that disagree about who a user is. Generous free tier, self-hostable, and SQL access to the underlying events. Broad enough that teams grow into it rather than out of it.

Freemium

Sentry

Catches errors in production and tells you what you need to fix them: the stack trace with source maps applied, the release that introduced it, the browser or runtime, and how many users hit it. Groups duplicates so one bug is one issue. Performance monitoring and session replay sit alongside. Most teams install it after the outage that made the case for it.

Freemium

Supabase

Postgres with the things an application needs bolted on: authentication, row-level security, file storage, realtime subscriptions and auto-generated APIs. It is a real Postgres database, so `pg_dump` and any Postgres client work and leaving is a migration rather than a rewrite. Popular as a Firebase replacement for teams that would rather own SQL than a proprietary document store.

Freemium

Ollama

Open source, unlike Obsidian

Open source

Plausible

Web analytics with no cookies, no consent banner and a script under a kilobyte. One page shows what most people actually check: visitors, sources, pages, countries, devices, goals. Open source and self-hostable, EU-hosted, GDPR-friendly by design. The trade-off is deliberate, no user-level tracking, so no per-person funnels.

Paid

LottieFiles

The ecosystem around Lottie, the format that ships vector animation as JSON. Animations stay sharp at any size, weigh a fraction of a GIF or video, and can be recoloured or controlled at runtime. The platform hosts a large library, converts from After Effects, and provides players for web and mobile.

Freemium

Warp

A terminal that treats each command and its output as a block you can navigate, copy and share, rather than an endless scroll. Input behaves like a text editor, history is searchable, and an assistant can read a failing command and suggest the fix. Workflows save parameterised commands for a team. Some of it requires an account, which is the objection people raise most.

Freemium