Obsidian review: plain files, steep first week

Obsidian is a folder of text files with a good editor on top. That's the pitch and the catch. You own everything, and nobody hands you a template.

Free, including at work

Obsidian's license page (checked Nov 1, 2026) says the app is "free for all purposes, including personal, commercial, and non-profit use." A commercial license exists, at $50 per user per year per the pricing page, but the license page calls it optional. So a company can run it unpaid.

Notion's free tier, by comparison, caps uploads at 5 MB a file; our Notion vs Obsidian comparison goes through both.

Files you can walk away with

The home page says Obsidian "stores your notes locally as plain text Markdown files" and that you can access them quickly "even offline". Move to another editor and your notes come with you. That is the whole argument for it over Evernote, where leaving means an export.

The download page lists apps for iOS, Android, Windows, Mac and Linux. It also lists Web Clipper extensions for Chrome, Safari, Firefox, Edge, Brave, Arc, Orion and Vivaldi.

The first week

The home page promises "thousands of plugins" and offers Canvas, an infinite space to lay out ideas, and Graph view, which visualizes relations between notes. Features are one thing. Habits are another. You decide on folders or links, on daily notes or none, and on which plugins to trust.

That's my opinion of the design, not a test result: an empty vault is a lot of freedom for someone who wanted a place to put lecture notes by Thursday. Readers coming from another app can start with moving Evernote notes to Obsidian.

What Sync costs

Sync is the main paid part; Publish, which puts notes on the web, is another add-on. Sync Standard is 4 USD/mo a month on annual billing or 5 USD/mo billed monthly. Per Obsidian's sync page it includes 1 synced vault, 1 GB total storage, a 5 MB maximum file size and 1 month of version history. Data is secured with AES-256 end-to-end encryption.

Sync Plus is $8 a month on annual billing, or $10 monthly, per Obsidian's pricing and sync pages. It allows 10 vaults, 10 GB (upgradable to 100 GB), 200 MB files and 12 months of history. The Standard 5 MB cap matters if you keep PDFs or slides in the vault. A PDF of lecture slides can pass it.

You can skip Sync and use a cloud folder or Git. That's free, and it's yours to debug.

Verdict

Choose Obsidian for study notes, journals and anything long-lived. For team wikis I would look elsewhere, though that is my opinion of the design. For the field, see offline note apps that keep plain files and the student roundup. Prices on the Obsidian page, checked November 1, 2026.