Before implementing my entire productivity system and journaling in Obsidian, I experimented with several other tools. One of the most notable ones is Notion, an impressive and highly customizable tool. However, today I will explore why I believe it is not the best option for productivity systems or things like a second brain.
π‘ Organization of ideas and thoughts
Since I was in school, I always had difficulties taking notes because I felt that the way we think is not well aligned with how we often take notes. When you study a topic in school, a concept is often related to other things you probably already know. So, if you looked at my notes, you would always see many arrows crossing the page because, for me, it was very important to know that concept 1 is related to or connected with concept A. That is why, for me, Obsidian is one of the tools I like the most, because the idea of linking concepts is part of its philosophy. And I think this is the aspect that makes it stand out the most compared to other note-taking apps like Notion. While in Notion, you can also link things, it is a fact that it is not as straightforward as in Obsidian. Moreover, the philosophy of Notion is not geared toward creating relationships between notes. Thatβs fine, but, at least for my purposes, it was not what I wanted. For this reason, I think Notion does not perform well when it comes to creating knowledge bases.
π Data ownership
One of the greatest advantages of Obsidian is that you are the owner of your information. Even though there are services like Sync to synchronize your data across devices, all the knowledge, ideas, projects, etc., that you have in Obsidian are stored as files on your device. This means that if Obsidian decides to change its business model tomorrow and becomes a paid service, you would not need to worry about migrating your information since you already have it stored as Markdown files on your device.
This gives you a lot of flexibility to try other tools that follow the same philosophy. It also provides peace of mind regarding the use of your information since, unless you use Obsidian Sync or something similar, the information never leaves your computer.
π¨βπ¨ Format of the information
As I already mentioned, not only are you the owner of the information, but your notes are also in an open format that many other tools can use, often without requiring any adjustments. Additionally, by itself, it is already a human-readable format. Itβs not like having your notes in json
or yml
.
π Extensibility for developers
One of the aspects I love the most about Obsidian is its excellent plugin system, which allows the community to create extensions to address things that Obsidian does not completely solve. This gives you tremendous power to adapt Obsidian to your way of thinking or working. It offers much more freedom to decide how you want to structure your content. If you are a developer like me, it will be much easier to implement systems that help you keep records organized, extract information, etc. The possibilities are endless, but I believe it is much easier to achieve these kinds of systems with Obsidian than with Notion.
π« Collaboration
Although I have focused on the advantages of Obsidian, I believe this is a point where it definitely falls short, as it is not even integrated into its philosophy.
If you want to share information with your team or have something that can be collaborative, it is very likely, at least from my point of view, that you will need to explore other possibilities. This is because it clashes with the nature of Obsidian, where files are stored on your computer. If you try to use it as a collaborative solution, you will face issues like overlaps in changes. For such cases, I think Notion shines. If you want to have a CMS or a kanban board for your team, that is where I would recommend using Notion.
π Conclusion
In summary, both Obsidian and Notion have their strengths and weaknesses depending on the use case. Obsidian excels due to its philosophy centered on linking concepts, data ownership, and developer extensibility. However, it lacks robust features for team collaboration. On the other hand, Notion is better suited for collaborative environments, such as team boards and CMS-like systems. For this reason, my choice between the two depends on the context and the specific needs of the project or system I want to implement.
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