Notion has dominated my note-taking life for long, it is present in all my devices and I almost use it to write down everything, from personal journals to dev notes, with all sorts of templates created.

When Obsidian first came out, I didn’t think it as efficient enough to compare with Notion, as it is just a markdown editor in my mind.

But sometimes I think, simple markdown is just good enough for many purposes, without too much formatting or emoji distraction, writing plain markdown may be more efficient, all the technical documentations are in markdown.

After using Obsidian, I feel great to always have copies locally.

Then I step back to look at Notion again, and I realize when everything is stored on someone else’s servers, or somewhere in the cloud, I get no control of my own things, because I can’t even have a copy on my own local device. This is the same issue of all cloud based platforms, the safety of our own data is totally depending on the cloud provider. Data breach is just a matter of time, or potential server down due to alien attacks.

I still think Notion is a great personal wiki, or a second brain, its way to plan out everything is not achievable with Obsidian. I will continue using Notion to create any kanban board, to track my own process, to organize many different topics. However, if now I want to write some notes when learning a new subject, or to create my own awesome lists, I will start from my local device, open it as the Obsidian vault to edit, then back up to a private Github repo. I can still achieve the sync capability, if ever I need them in another place, I will git clone to another workstation and continue my editing, then git push. It may not sound as fast as cloud sync, it take some steps and requires my own discipline. However as a developer, I find this detour is just like another daily dev habit.

If I ask myself why I choose Obsidian + git repo, it’s just more reliable.

The security issue or the fact that someone may sniff on my notes are not my biggest concerns, as I don’t keep sensitive data there. What I really want is taking back my own control on my own thoughts.