Obsidian costs nothing until two people at one company open it

83 puts Obsidian in our Strong band and top of note-taking, ahead of Logseq and Joplin at 81 and well clear of Standard Notes at 65. It also matches its rank 1 on our category list, which is not something we can say about most tools on this site.

Feature depth at 92 is the pillar carrying it, and the plugin library is the reason. Backlinks, graph view and canvas are all free, and the community plugin catalogue runs past a thousand entries, which means most feature requests you would file against a hosted note app have already been solved by somebody else for nothing.

Freedom at 88 is the interesting one, because Obsidian is closed source and still scores that high. Our reasoning is that the licence question is answered by the file format rather than by the code: your notes are ordinary Markdown files in a folder you chose, so a pricing change cannot reach them. If it matters to you that the application itself is open source, Logseq and SiYuan are the alternatives, and both score lower overall.

Sentiment at 60 rests on G2 4.0, Trustpilot 3.5 and Capterra 4.5 (checked 24 July 2026), none of it split by tier.

Nothing about your notes is capped. No note limit, no vault limit, no device limit, no feature held back (as of July 2026). The limits are elsewhere, and there are four.

The commercial licence is the one people miss. Personal use is free. A company of two or more people using Obsidian for work needs a $50 per user per year licence. That is easy to walk past and it is real money at scale, so check whether your use counts before you roll it out to a team.

Sync is a service, not a feature. Obsidian Sync is $4 per user per month billed annually ($5 monthly) for 1 GB of storage and 1 month of version history. Sync Plus is $8 billed annually ($10 monthly) for 10 GB, upgradable to 100 GB, and 12 months of history.

There is no real-time collaboration at any price. Obsidian is a single-player app with sync attached. A shared vault is not co-editing a document, and no plan changes that.

It is not open source. The plugin API, the documentation and many community plugins are, and the core editor is not, so you cannot self-host or fork it.

The free workaround for sync is genuine and worth stating clearly, because it is the whole reason the free plan works: a vault is a folder, so iCloud Drive, Dropbox, OneDrive, Syncthing or a Git repository all sync it at no cost. What the paid service adds is end-to-end encryption, per-note version history, and handling of the mobile file-sync conflicts that those tools handle badly. That last point is not marketing. Mobile conflicts are the most common complaint we see from people running the free route.

Obsidian charges in three unrelated places rather than running a plan ladder, which makes it easy to overpay by assuming they stack. They do not.

Sync is the one most personal users consider. Standard at $4 per user per month billed annually covers 1 GB and a month of history; Plus at $8 billed annually covers 10 GB and a year. Publish, at $8 per site per month billed annually, turns a vault into a public website and is irrelevant unless you want that. The commercial licence at $50 per user per year is not a plan at all, it is a condition on how you use the free app.

Students, faculty and nonprofit employees get 40 percent off Sync and Publish, which is worth claiming if it applies.

The single thing most people pay for is Sync, and the honest framing is that you are buying reliability on mobile rather than a capability. Dropbox will move your files. It will also, sooner or later, leave you with two copies of a note called "Meeting notes (conflicted copy)". Whether that is worth $48 a year is a question about how much you write on your phone.

Yes. The entire application is free for personal use with no cap on anything, and the sync problem that defines this category has a free solution built into how Obsidian stores data: your vault is a folder, so any file-sync tool you already use will move it.

Who lives on free permanently: anyone building a personal knowledge base, writers and researchers who want notes in files rather than in a vendor's database, students, and anyone who has been burned by a note app repricing itself. Who cannot: a company of two or more using it for work, which needs the $50 per user per year commercial licence, and any team that needs to edit the same note at the same time, which Obsidian does not do at any price.

If the closed source part is a dealbreaker rather than a preference, Logseq's free plan is AGPL-3.0 with the same local Markdown promise. For the Evernote workflow with a clipper instead, see Joplin's free plan. Free Notion alternatives and best free note-taking and docs tools cover the wider comparison.