[ j p ]

migrating from Notion to Obsidian

Earlier this year, Notion's flaws had frustrated me enough to get me to spend days moving all my stuff to a new notes application called Obsidian. Unlike Notion, Obsidian is a notes system that operates on top of a simple folder of notes - notes are stored as plain .md files, organized in regular folders. All notes and attachments are local and can be regularly accessed with a file explorer. .md files can always be opened in a plain text editor as well. The rest - cross-linking, graphs, organizing tags, etc. - is handled within Obsidian and doesn't interfere with your actual notes.

If you have used Notion you may understand the appeal of this as it makes the bold decision of, well, actually giving you access to your valuable notes offline and outside the app.

Below are my notes on my experience of the pros and cons of both Notion and Obsidian, my experience transferring Notion data to Obsidian, and some screenshots of how I worked within both. Overall, while I miss some stuff about Notion, I also definitely don't miss some other parts. Obsidian is more basic but ultimately is designed around a different agenda, and so far I enjoy it more. If you've been thinking of escaping Notion I hope this helps.

TLDR / pros and cons

Notion (as of late 2020)

Pros

Cons

Obsidian

Pros

Cons

migrating my notes to obsidian

These notes are really rough, sorry. If you have any other questions check the Obsidian forums or send me a message.

packing for the move

Notion's export options are a bit messy as the way everything is either a Page or a database of Pages doesn't perfectly translate to any common file format. There are a handful of discussions on the Obsidian forums on how to clean your Notion export as much as possible for Obsidian, but I mostly just skimmed through them and did the basics without trying to match organization perfectly. I chose the .CSV + .MD export, which is recommended as it translates your notes directly to Markdown and pretty much keeps them intact except for any included databases or internal links to other pages which won't really be usable. As far as I remember, the .CSVs don't matter too much in terms of content storage as all the Pages stored in a certain table are collected in a folder as .MD files. If you had some tables where you just stored a value or text in each cell (eg. bookmarks), however, you'll have to get it from the .CSV

Notion dump of my bookmarks to .csv Notion dump of my bookmarks to .csv

structure of notion workspace

map of how my notion stuff was structured map of how my notion stuff was structured

translating tables and pages to folders and docs

tags and mentions

Bookmarks

  1. from notion backup used .csv of Bookmarks table
  2. formatted cells into a link format + tags my notion bookmarks page my obsidian bookmarks page looking at the two side-by-side makes me miss Notion more than usual. I liked having the "Date Created" attribute tell me when I added a bookmark.

Library

similar to bookmarks save PDFs in Library Files folder and reference

notes

imported apple notes to markdown with Exporter
trimmed current note titles + formatting with Notion to Obsidian Converter

site updates

formatted into a list of links

work applications

formatted into a list of links separated by headers

resume

merged MD from notion and my website

learning + projects

finally... main

stripped down to just the immediate todo list; i have a directory of all my stuff right here

Other things to consider

what about synchronization?

I recently bought Obsidian Sync and it works well for syncing with my phone and iPad.
Before buying it I set up a crontab job that automatically commits and pushes the notes folder on my mac; here's my note on how to get it done bc it can be a bit frustrating:

automating git with crontab for mac

#git #cron #obsidian #mac
for mac:
make sure cron has path to your scripts
GIT PUSH DOESNT WORK, you have to generate a SSH key on mac then add it to github
https://askubuntu.com/questions/117978/script-doesnt-run-via-crontab-but-works-fine-standalone
https://superuser.com/questions/564829/git-push-to-github-via-cron-on-mac

mobile app

It just came out so I haven't used it much. It's definitely a little different from the desktop app and it feels like it works best with a connected keyboard, but it seems to include everything including themes and custom plugins. For touch control you either swipe from the edges for the gray menus to navigate files, outlines, etc. or from swipe down to reveal the command palette from the top edge. I'm still getting used to it but its a clever way to find your way towards essential actions. I think the iPad version needs some formatting adjustment so the gray menus don't take up so much space when opened. on Obsidian mobile, my "home" workspace with my main to-do and bookmarks.
my "home" workspace with my main to-do and bookmarks. on Obsidian mobile, swipe for the menu. swipe for the menu. on Obsidian mobile, editing view with keyboard. editing view with keyboard. on Obsidian mobile, full-page editing view. full-page editing view. on Obsidian mobile, full-page reading view. full-page reading view.

more screenshots

I was going to describe my Obsidian and Notion workflows and compare them, but it's been difficult trying to put the experience into words. When revisiting my Notion workspace to take screenshots I remembered that one thing I realized when switching to Obsidian was just how over-engineered I made everything in Notion; I re-organized the Skills section of my resume into a table just so I could have it sync in both my Skills page and Resume page, and for what? I have to admit that most of my interest in Notion was spending hours reorganizing my notes to use fancy new features when I should have been doing work. Obsidian made me flatten everything down into plain Markdown, headings, tags, and cross-linking which has been sufficient.

So, instead of describing my workflow I will show you some of the main pages I used in Notion as well as the workspace layouts I currently use in Obsidian.

Notion screenshots

the directory of my Notion system.
the directory of my Notion system. my main Notion page where I would link to important stuff and to-do. my main Notion page where I would link to important stuff and to-do. The top quote block would usually have the most important thing I had to do that day. Notion page for managing classes. Notion page for managing classes. Notion page for managing resume. Notion page for managing resume.

Obsidian screenshots

typical layout. current writing in the center, and bookmarks and my main to-do pinned to the right. typical layout. current writing in the center, and bookmarks and my main to-do pinned to the right. If I need to open something else I split panels horizontally and Cmd+O what I'm looking for. "bookmarks + main" layout. When I'm web browsing or not doing anything I have this layout open. "bookmarks + main" layout. When I'm web browsing or not doing anything I have this layout open. One of the biggest differences I've had to adjust to in Obsidian was when importing my bookmarks; you might have noticed that a lot of them remain uncategorized. In Notion, categorizing was pretty easy as I could search for the right tag and then have the bookmarks table sort by topic. I could also have multiple topics tagged for each without hassle. Since there's no such thing in stock Obsidian, I've opted for a plain-Markdown list organized by headers. This lead to a dilemma: do I have to pick just one category for each? do I add extra tags? Since I can't re-sort a plaintext list easily, I just chose to put bookmarks under one header by their most relevant topic. This has taken a bit more effort so currently I have 200 or so bookmarks just listed under "to file". Also, Obsidian's tags don't really work for this since searching through tags means going one by one through each mention of the tag instead of something like a filtered list of what you want. I think tags were designed with the assumption that you are tagging the page, not specific content. Been looking at the dataview plugin to maybe make a better bookmarks thing; reach out if you have a solution of your own. save and load different "workspaces" which are saved panel configurations.
save and load different "workspaces" which are saved panel configurations. unlabeled graph view of all my notes. unlabeled graph view of all my notes. yellow dots represent tags present in the notes (gray) they are connected to. bigger gray dots are notes with more text. connections between gray dots mean one note is hyperlinked to the other. Unlike the world wide web, you can see the "backlinks" of each note, or every instance of that note being hyperlinked in another note, letting you backtrack to see the context around that note.

Ultimately, Notion and Obsidian become very different beasts if you want to use them as more than a basic place to write and store your notes. For a note-taker who needs something for school, I can wholeheartedly recommend Obsidian. The context and search features help you revisit and re-contextualize your notes when it's time to review them, and otherwise it functions as a minimalist note-taking app suited for someone who, for example, might have had issues or hit roadblocks with Apple Notes or Evernote. I can only recommend Notion if you are willing to compromise basic necessities like offline access for a more complex platform that can more broadly manage various parts of your life beyond note-taking.

I really miss that aspect of Notion where it has really gone beyond note-taking - once you discover its powers you can kind of map out your entire life on it, like a "life system" that surpasses the typical system of using your OS Desktop as a space to stuff random docs, spreadsheets, screenshots, notes, etc. I don't know how to convey the satisfaction of mapping out my mental lists of movies, books, video games, bookmarks, study areas, and more onto tables where I can store what I know, how I feel, and what I want to explore, all with very little friction. It's a shame that this amazing software had to manifest as a web-based lagfest that keeps all its data in a black box that I lose access to when my wi-fi cuts out.

Notion's flaws have created a demand for something similar built on saner foundations. The most hyped platform I have seen so far is Anytype.io, which seems to be more self-aware about being an operating environment for people whose lives revolve around files and data. They promise an open-source platform that runs completely locally like Obsidian while providing the flexibility to essentially make your own apps and workflows like Notion, among many more promised features like using IPFS protocol and encrypted peer-to-peer data exchange/sync.

Until then, I am sticking with Obsidian. I used Obsidian to write most of the stuff for this website and it's worked well for that as the Markdown transfers to Zola; I just have to redo all the image links. If you're deciding between platforms for school, work, research, anything like that I hope this helped.