Dave Rupert published this on 20 May 2025. He had used Notion for seven years or more. The block editor, databases, and the feeling of a website suited how he files a life. He tried Obsidian twice, including full weekends on a trial vault, and went back. This third try was a slow month, and he says he has ditched Notion.
The Notion → Obsidian playbook is the export. Dave’s post is the bill, the clipper archive he abandoned, and the editor habits that still annoy him. The Importer is on his plugin list. He does not describe running it.
The bill and the mascot
In March, Notion told him the monthly price was going from $8 to $12, which he calls a 50 percent increase. Over the same stretch Notion pushed AI harder. Sparkle icons, and an animated mascot he nicknames Churny, sat in the corner. He tried the free AI credits and decided an assistant inside a thinking tool was the opposite of what he wanted. He tied the price and the AI push together, and felt he was paying for other people’s AI use.
Obsidian Sync, the piece he pays for, was $4 a month. The rest of the setup is plugins and files. He credits Tyler Sticka’s write-up with making a third try feel possible. I used that link as the post he names. I did not mine it for Tyler’s settings.
He copies most of Tyler’s plugin list. The one that matters for a migration is the Importer. The rest are theme, tables, links, a linter, a kanban (the Projects plugin), and writing tools. He groups them as theme, editor, and process.
How the vault is shaped
PARA in Notion never quite fit. Projects having an end date helped, and Areas were a useful inventory, and the sorting felt like ceremony. He replaced it with a cut-down version of August Bradley’s pipelines, pillars, and vaults. He calls his version Inputs, Outputs, and Tasks.
Inputs are scraps, in folders by type (books, links, quotes, loose notes). Outputs are posts and projects, with a thin process so they leave the vault. Tasks have to be small enough to do. “Get the 1099-R” is a task. “Do taxes” is not. Tasks are checklist lines inside project notes. A Dataview query gathers the open ones under Outputs and hides notes whose status is DEADPOOL or Archived.
The blogging kanban he loved in Notion moved to the Projects plugin. He wants richer filters. He points at dynamic tables on Obsidian’s roadmap and is willing to wait. Longform holds fiction and a failed book pitch. Write Good, which he already ran in VS Code before publish, now runs while he drafts.
What he gave up, and what still rubs
The published sentence says it took a solid month to migrate thousands of documents “to Notion.” The post is the move off Notion, so that reads like a slip. What he does spell out is the bankruptcy on Web Clipper links. He points at a later note about a link aggregator as the replacement. I am not describing that second post.
He also noticed he had over-used databases. A database existed so he could have an editable table. That meant extra clicks and extra documents, like a CMS for a one-page site. Obsidian pushed him toward simpler files. A little YAML goes a long way, in his words.
The gripe after a month is the editor. Reading mode and editing mode swap in a jumpy way. He uses Command-E to flip, and the app remembers the wrong mode, or fails to remember it. He thinks rich text is the underlying oddity. Plugin side panels also do not share a style.
The mobile app is the pleasant surprise. It is fast, it avoids the Mac editor’s fussiness, and his JavaScript plugins run in it. He had assumed they would not.
What I would copy
Write down the price you are actually comparing. His pair was $12 a month for Notion and $4 a month for Obsidian Sync, after a jump from $8. The AI features were a reason he names, and they are not a line item.
Plan a month if the vault is thousands of documents, and decide which inbound pile you will not migrate. His was Web Clipper links.
Put the Importer on the list, then still expect to rebuild kanban and task views. He does not claim the import recreated Notion databases. Projects plus a Dataview task query is the replacement he describes.
Try the editor on your real notes for a week before you delete Notion. Reading mode versus edit mode is the friction he still has, and the mobile app did not have it.