Azan Farooqi published this on 25 April 2025. He had been using Notion, and recommending it, including as a bookmarks app. In April he exported everything and moved the knowledge base to Obsidian.
The Notion → Obsidian playbook is the export and the attachment plan. Azan’s post is short. The useful parts are the HTML export, the databases he fixed by hand, and the sync choice.
Why he left
He does not own the disk the notes live on. He does not trust what Notion does with the data, and he says regulation does not fix that for him.
Databases, buttons, and formulas are powerful, and for basic notes they felt like too much machinery. Large databases were slow. Keeping a database in shape started to crowd out the work. He compares that upkeep to theming a Linux desktop.
He does not give a page count or a price.
HTML, then the Importer
Notion’s export wrote HTML files. The Obsidian Importer turned those into Markdown. The Markdown was not clean. Larger databases took a while to repair by hand. He does not list the broken fields.
He missed database structure immediately. Dataview was the first replacement. Filters felt clumsy, including for someone who writes JavaScript and SQL-like queries. He dropped that structure and used a global query in the Tasks plugin instead.
He notes that Obsidian 1.9.0 added Bases, an official way to build database-style views. That landed as an option, and this post’s working setup is Tasks.
The vault is the site
The vault and the website share one repository. Clippings and readings publish to a library section on the site. Those used to be Notion API calls at build time. The Markdown is in the repo now, and he says build time dropped. He does not say by how much.
Phone and two laptops sync with Syncthing. He says conflicts would hurt if there were a lot of them, and so far it has been fine. He looked at Obsidian Sync and called it too much for this vault’s size. He wants to self-host soon. Off the network, a peer-to-peer sync is stale. That is the limit he names.
The site is Astro, and posts had been MDX. Once the phone had the .mdx files, he converted them to plain Markdown with remark-directive, and says the pages still do the same things.
What is still awkward
Plain Markdown will be a weak index as clippings grow. Obsidian is closed source, and he is willing to suspect it the way he suspected Notion. He names Logseq as another place to look. GitHub, which holds the repo, gets the same side-eye he gave Notion.
What I would copy
Export HTML, import, then open the biggest databases before you trust the tree. That is where his time went.
If Dataview is only there to fake a Notion database, try a narrower plugin first. He kept Tasks and let the database idea go. Bases exists now if you still want views.
Put published notes in the site repo if the site was already calling Notion at build time. His gain is fewer API calls. Sync the same folder with something you will actually run. Syncthing across three devices is his answer, with conflicts and offline drift as the cost.