Obsidian vs Superhuman
Both are productivity tools. Here is what separates them.
| Obsidian | Superhuman | |
|---|---|---|
| Category | Productivity | Productivity |
| Pricing model | freemium | paid |
| Price from | Freemium | Paid |
| Upvotes | 12 | 4 |
| What it does | Local markdown notes that link to each other and outlive any company. | Email and documents in one workspace, with an AI assistant called Go. |
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 Superhuman is
Superhuman is a suite of AI work software covering email, documents and an assistant that runs across other applications. It began in 2014 as Superhuman Mail, an email client, and the founding team includes Rahul Vohra. The current line-up grew out of a group of products that originally included Coda and Grammarly, and both of those lineages are visible in what it now sells. Superhuman Docs is the document and project side. Documents hold text, tables, formulas and buttons, and AI can assemble them. Beyond static pages it runs workflows: approval processes, dashboards built and customised for data visualisation, and knowledge hubs that update themselves so the information in them stays accurate. Collaboration features include voting, reactions and charts, and templates cover common team set-ups. Anyone using it is classed as either a Doc Maker or an Editor. Docs AI, the assistant inside it, is in beta for Doc Makers. Document size is unlimited on Pro and above. There are more than 800 integrations, including Jira, Salesforce and Asana, and it works in real time alongside assistants such as ChatGPT, Claude and Cursor. Go is the AI assistant, described as proactive and available in every app rather than only inside Superhuman's own. Grammarly is included with the Pro and Business plans, with a limited trial on the free plan. Elsewhere the suite connects to Gmail, Slack, Google Calendar, Jira and Salesforce. Superhuman puts the scale of the whole thing at more than 40 million people and over 50,000 organisations, and says it analyses 200 billion words a day. Pricing starts with a free plan at $0. Pro is $12 a month billed annually, or $15 billed monthly. Business is $33 a month billed annually, or $40 monthly. Enterprise is quoted individually. None of it is open source. The figure the company attaches to all this is four hours saved per person per week, which is a vendor claim rather than an independent measurement. The more useful point for anyone arriving on the strength of the keyboard-driven inbox is that email is now one component of a wider set. Documents, workflows and an assistant that follows you into other applications carry a substantial share of what is being sold, and the pricing covers the suite rather than the mail client alone.
We are not affiliated with either product. Upvote counts come from the published formula and neither position was paid for.