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by photon_garden 296 days ago
I was a big Notion fan for years and am now solidly in the Obsidian camp.

Speed and local-first was originally the main differentiator, but over time Steph Ango's "file over app" philosophy has become my favorite feature.

Yesterday I used Claude Code to automate some Obsidian cleanup and it was trivial because everything's just a file.
3 comments
mxschll 296 days ago
Local-first becomes even better in combination with local LLMs.
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dtkav 296 days ago
yes! So many people are missing out on using claude-code directly on their knowledge base locally. Once you have it all local it seems completely crazy to push all of that context into a locked-in saas platform with mediocre AI tools.
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wahnfrieden 296 days ago
You are not their current market, at all (individual vs team use) and your solution is unsuitable for theirs
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jjfoooo4 296 days ago
People using their free offering for personal use is a critical part of Notion's sales pipeline. It's a hell of a lot easier to sell a piece of software to a company when all it's internal users have already trained themselves how to use it in their personal time. Those users are probably the ones generating the enterprise sales lead in the first place

See also: Google Docs

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wahnfrieden 296 days ago
Yes but users who are satisfied by an alternative (Obsidian) which can't be used with teams aren't their audience. If the user wanted to introduce the tool to their team, they wouldn't be satisfied with Obsidian. Google Docs is one link share away from team-sharing. Obsidian requires ditching Obsidian to share the practice with your team.
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rchaud 296 days ago
Google Docs as a paid enterprise offering wouldn't fly without having Gmail lock-in and having that underpin Google SSO.

That's what Microsoft has that market sewn up with Office 365, despite being several years late to collaborative document editing -- Outlook anchors the whole thing together.

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SpaceManNabs 296 days ago
Never knew people viewed notion and obsidian in the same space.

i usually compare obsidian to joplin... seems like i should be looking more at obsidian because i was considering starting a new wiki in notion.

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