Obsidian vs Todoist
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 Todoist is
Todoist is a task manager for keeping personal and shared to-do lists. Tasks go in through Quick Add, which reads natural language to set due dates, recurring dates and reminders, so a line of plain text becomes a scheduled task. Projects can be viewed as a list, a board or a calendar, and completed tasks are scored through a points system called Todoist Karma. A paid plan is tied to the account rather than to a single device, and there are more than 80 integrations with other software. The free Beginner plan allows 5 personal projects with up to 5 people in each, 3 custom filters, file uploads up to 5 MB, 4 themes and 7 days of activity history. Those limits are what a paid plan lifts. Pro raises personal projects to 300, custom filters to 150 and themes to 8, and keeps full activity history rather than seven days of it. For UK customers it costs 7 GBP a month or 60 GBP a year, with the same numbers in euros, and 7 USD a month or 60 USD a year in dollars, which works out at 5 USD a month on the annual plan. A 7-day free trial is available. Business is the team plan. It costs 10 USD per user a month billed monthly or 8 USD per user a month billed yearly, which is 96 USD per user per year; euro customers pay 10 EUR monthly or 96 EUR a year. It allows up to 500 team projects, 1,000 project folders, up to 250 people in a single team project and file uploads up to 100 MB, with room for 1,000 team members and 1,000 guests. The trial runs 14 days. Payment is by Visa, Mastercard or Amex card, through App Store or Google Play billing, or by SEPA in Europe on request. Yearly plans are refundable within 30 days of purchase or renewal, monthly subscriptions are not.
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