PS: I’m aware there are plugins that solve this issue, but none of them have worked well enough for me.

I bought a commercial license three years ago, and I don't really mind paying it, but then my job for the last year expressly forbid the use of Obsidian [1], and as such I didn't feel compelled to keep paying, though I still used it for personal stuff.

I looked at their website and it looks like the commercial license is optional now?

I don't really mind paying for it, I think it's a pretty decent notes app and I probably get more than $50/year of value out of it.

[1] I'm not 100% sure why, I think it might have been because the people doing the approvals thought that the Sync was an intrinsic to the app and they were afraid of company secrets going out.

Obsidian is very powerful for quick entry and working on Markdown knowledge bases, and it's great. I use it to manage my digital garden among other things.

On the other hand, Notion is great for processing data. I use their databases extensively incl. their charts and whatnot. I also host a couple of read-only public pages for friends or family as documentation.

I think they cater to different use cases and doesn't replace each other. I'd certainly won't run my digital garden over Notion, or store the databases I keep in Notion in Obsidian. Obsidian's Bases fill a different need, for now.

Also, Notion slightly pivoted recently. They altered their “single person” oriented Pro plan and made Business their “Entry level, full fledged” plan. They do not cater to individuals anymore. Where obsidian is more geared towards individuals.

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.

You can disable the graph feature and never link any notes.

I feel like you just described Obsidian. You can do more with tagging and linking but you definitely don't have to

The only downside for me is the inability to use it from a web browser. This isn't a major issue for my workflows.

My biggest gripe is that the OSS project is very oriented around a hosted product rather than the self hosted - so things like AI configuration is tricky at best and ive had to manually manipulate my account in the db to remove "free" user limitations.

https://github.com/silverbulletmd/silverbullet

https://www.figma.com/blog/how-figmas-multiplayer-technology...

https://github.com/ryanpcmcquen/obsidian-focus-mode

This is what differentiates Obsidian from many other note taking apps. Anyone who has an itch can build a plugin and customize it.

Unlike a venture-funded SaaS application there's no meaningful commercial incentive or issue with building something that will eventually get sherlock'd b the application vendor in the future.

It would "mostly work" offline before, but you could have cases where some blocks in a page aged out of the LRU, or they changed online in a way that invalidated the page but new content wasn't downloaded. When that happens we show a "go online to view" error instead of risking you viewing/editing a known-incorrect local snapshot of the page.

With "available offline", we now proactively download and keep up-to-date the content you want available offline. It will either work, or show an explicit error if things go wrong in the sync process. No more guesswork.

OTOH, you don't need to pay for Obsidian sync. You can sync it via any cloud provider or syncthing if you prefer.

I have a business related vault under Obsidian. It syncs via office's Nextcloud instance. I also added "Edit history" plugin, so I have unlimited diff and undo on that vault, too.