2-way sync on Android and Linux (and other operating systems, not sure about iOS)
Obsidian will sync any file up to 200 MB. On the 10 GB and 100 GB tiers you can create up to 10 separate vaults that can be independently synced to your devices, each encrypted with a unique password. Each vault is a native folder on your device.
It’s crazy, a company that added an optional sync service meant to support its local markdown editor is somehow beating every dedicated cloud storage provider in these areas. You’re limited on file size and total storage, but if that’s not a dealbreaker, I think this might be one of the best options available…
I think Peergos is really close and actually open source, but hasn’t been audited since the sync/mobile releases.
it’s an Electron app, so you could try to parse the minified .js ↩︎
Still, I don’t know any other service offering its features:
Notesnook
StandardNotes
Cryptee
It’s crazy, a company that added an optional sync service meant to support its local markdown editor is somehow beating every dedicated cloud storage provider in these areas.
Not really. I find the price pretty expansive if you compare it with other E2EE clouds.
The good thing are the student prices, they are fucking cheap.
I used Notion, Notesnook, Cryptee, and now I use Obsidian.
I would say the only reason why someone would use Obsidian over Notesnook are two reasons:
Customizability: you can go crazy on that its like Hyprland and Linux ricing
bidirectional linking: Through the system and how obsidian works it allows insane things, and you can even build a second brain.
Yes, Obsidian is superior to any other note-taking app, but only if somebody is really really into note-taking and goes into the rabbit hole, until people call him crazy psychopath.
For most people Notesnook or Cryptee will be better.
I’ve used Obsidian and I think it’s a very good application, but it has, in my opinion, 2 problems:
I seem to remember that, although they claim to use E2EE, the Obsidian client could read the notes every time the vault is unlocked, whether it’s on Obsidian’s server or on a third-party cloud.
Its strong point is its high customization, but it depends on many community-created plugins, which significantly increases the attack surface and requires trusting each plugin developer.
I’m pretty much on the same page as you for notes. The feature I’d add to your list is Bases, the competition doesn’t have anything like it. I did spot a Joplin plugin that tries to do something similar, but it’s missing features and could break since it’s a 3rd party plugin. For Bases alone, I’d stick with Obsidian.
Didn’t realize I was in anonymous mode, and my bad for not being clear, but I was talking about using Obsidian Sync as a regular file sync service. Just set up a vault, toss any files you want into the folder, and they’ll sync to all the other devices that have that vault. Apart from Mega and Peergos, I don’t know of any end‑to‑end encrypted cloud services that give you native 2‑way sync on Android, or even 1-way folder sync, and neither of those have been audited (for Peergos, I mean their Android app and syncing).
I haven’t bought the official Obsidian Sync yet since the price feels steep for what you get, but I’m planning to grab it soon after failing to find 2-way sync from other E2EE cloud providers.
Obsidian vaults are regular folders and they don’t encrypt at rest, so that makes sense. Obsidian originally worked entirely offline, and the optional sync feature was added later. The vault remaining readable locally by any program is actually one of its selling points imo.
If someone manages to get into your unencrypted filesystem, all bets are off. I don’t think we should count on an extra encryption layer that will often be unlocked anyway.
Almost anything, really. (Not endorsing the quoted use of the word psychopath, but answering the question of “what does it look like to go down the rabbit hole on Obsidian.”) Obsidian is extremely extensible and has a vast library of community plugins, and also has a fair amount of automation potential within its native functions and core plugins (ie the ones shipped with the official app). Not sure how much detail you’re asking for, but you can add customized metadata to any note in Obsidian that allows you to index your notes in whatever way you want; you can set up automated templates that assign such metadata to different types of notes and apply those templates based on customized keybinds; you can create queries that deliver tables of notes indexed by that metadata organized in a wide variety of ways. You can also drastically customize the appearance and behavior of the UI.
While not entirely the same class, why not just use Syncthing? I imagine it would be suitable for most people’s usecases, plus it is open source and has no subscription.
The official Android release of Syncthing was deprecated, and the main fork was abandoned. Subsequently, the fork’s repository/keys were transferred to a new account under circumstances that were very suspicious. The person who previously handled only the Google Play release of the original fork also maintains a separate fork.
As a notetaking app, it absolutely is not. I would be astonished if anyone who uses both would contest that. (I use Obsidian as my primary task management and notetaking application and use Notesnook’s free E2EE sync to get quick notes easily from my phone to my computer and vice versa. I absolutely could not do on Notesnook a fraction of what I do on Obsidian.)
But I think the original post here is actually not evaluating Obsidian as a notetaking app at all, just suggesting using Obsidian Sync as a way to sync a folder between devices. If I’m understanding correctly the idea is that if Obsidian considers it a “vault”, it will be synced bidirectionally, but that doesn’t bind you to interacting with it exclusively through Obsidian; it’s just a folder of files, which you can now edit from either device in whatever way you want, and sync changes automatically. Is that possible through Notesnook? A genuine question; I haven’t looked much into how Notesnook stores files.
As far as I can see, none of the recommended notetaking apps (Notesnook, Standard Notes, or Joplin) have the same capability. Each stores notes inside Android’s encrypted app storage, whereas Obsidian lets you place your vault in any folder on the device (or in app storage, if you prefer).
With Obsidian, an app can generate daily backups directly into your vault, and those backups can be automatically synced to the cloud and to your other devices without any user input. While you can manually import files and attachments into the other apps, that is not the same.
