Compared
Notula and Obsidian
Obsidian and Notula both keep plain Markdown files on your own disk. They part company on who else is in the folder.
What Obsidian is better at
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It is a far better personal knowledge base
Backlinks, the graph, canvas, daily notes, and years of plugins. Notula has none of that and is not trying to: it opens a repository of documents, not a vault of thoughts.
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Plugins for almost anything
A community ecosystem that has already solved whatever you are about to want. Notula does one job and has no plugin API.
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It is on your phone
iOS and Android, syncing. Notula is macOS and Windows, and Linux is not built yet.
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Years of community behind it
Both are free, so that is not the difference. Obsidian has been free for years, which is long enough to have forums, courses and somebody who has already written down the answer to your question.
What Notula is better at
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Comments are the product, not a plugin
Select a passage, comment, reply, resolve. The threads are committed next to the document as an append-only log with a union merge driver, so they arrive with a clone and two people commenting at once cannot conflict.
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Git without teaching git
Obsidian's git support is a community plugin that surfaces git as git - commits, pulls, and conflict markers. Notula publishes with one sentence about what changed and shows a conflict as a choice between two paragraphs.
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Built for a repository other people are working in
It asks git for the file list rather than walking the disk, so a repository of thousands of source files opens as a clean tree of documents, with .gitignore respected for free.
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Nothing of its own in the folder
No vault configuration directory to gitignore or to fight over. The comment log is a plain file and the schema is published.
Side by side
| Capability | Obsidian | Notula |
|---|---|---|
| Plain Markdown files on your own disk | ||
| Backlinks, graph, daily notes | — | |
| Plugins | — | |
| Mobile apps | — | |
| Comment on a passage, reply, resolve | — | |
| Comment threads committed to the repository | — | |
| Told when a teammate changes a document | — | |
| Usable by someone who has never opened a terminal | Partly | |
| Conflicts as a choice between two paragraphs | — |
Both columns are filled in, including the rows Notula loses. A table where one column is ticks all the way down is an advert, and the first four rows of this one are things the other tool does and Notula does not.
Which one to use
Use Obsidian when
The notes are yours. If what you want is a second brain, install Obsidian and stop reading - Notula would be a downgrade and it is not a competitor for that job.
Use Notula when
The documents are the team's, they live in a repository somebody else also commits to, and the people who need to comment on them are not all engineers.
Try it against a real repository
Free, with no account and no server. Open a repository you already have and the documents in it are a tree in about a second.
Apple silicon and Windows x64 above. Intel and Arm builds, and what to do if macOS calls it damaged.