Obsidian vs Raycast
Both are productivity tools. Here is what separates them.
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.
What Raycast is
Raycast is a keyboard-driven launcher that bundles productivity commands and accepts third-party extensions. The commands that ship with it cover clipboard history, snippets, quicklinks, window management, a calculator, file search and an emoji picker. Applications are published for macOS, Windows and iOS, with the Windows build requiring Windows 10 version 21H2 or later, or Windows 11. Extensions that contain no native code run on Windows and macOS without modification. Raycast AI sits behind a paid subscription and is not part of the Free plan. It exposes models from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Mistral, Perplexity, DeepSeek and xAI through a single interface, and it can also run local models through Ollama or use your own API key for OpenAI, Anthropic and Google. Quick AI answers a query in a floating window opened by one hotkey and can search the web as part of the answer. AI Extensions go further, letting a natural language instruction drive third-party applications such as Linear and Slack. The Free plan allows up to 30 shared snippets, 30 shared quicklinks and 5 shared commands, keeps clipboard history for three months and caps Raycast Notes at five notes. Pro costs $10 per month billed monthly, or $8 billed annually, a 20 percent reduction. It removes both the clipboard history retention limit and the Notes limit, and adds cloud sync, dictation, custom themes, a translator and custom window management commands. An Advanced AI add-on costs a further $8 per month. For teams, the free tier costs nothing per user and places no cap on the number of members. Teams Pro is $12 per user per month billed annually, or $15 billed monthly, lifts the caps on shared snippets, quicklinks and commands, and adds custom extensions along with developer tooling. The Advanced AI add-on is $8 per user per month on top of that. Enterprise is quoted rather than list priced and adds SAML, SCIM, domain capture, two factor enforcement, an extension allow list and an IP allow list, plus an AI control centre with an organisation-wide AI toggle, an AI provider allow list and support for a custom AI provider.
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