What Breaks When You Use Obsidian and Notion as a Student

1. Choosing between block content and markdown structure is not trivial

I bounced between Notion and Obsidian for almost a full semester. The premise was simple: I wanted a space to take class notes, track assignments, and draft outlines without feeling like I was formatting my life every four minutes. Notion seemed visually perfect until I had to copy-paste anything into an email.

In Notion, the block model looks structured, especially with toggles and callouts, but those aren’t real markdown. When I pasted notes from a Notion toggle list into a professor’s shared Google Doc, it came out as a jumbled blob with line breaks in weird mid-sentence spots. That’s when I realized: Notion is beautiful until you need raw text. Obsidian, on the other hand, is raw text from the start. What you see is what you copy. It wins if you’re living in Markdown and constantly moving files through Git, VS Code, or email drafts.

Still, Notion’s blocks win when you’re collaborating. You can drag things around, share links with previews, and leave comments. Students working on group presentations or peer reviews often prefer Notion because it feels less nerdy. But you sacrifice structural portability for visual polish.

2. Obsidian sync gets fast but has no idea about teams

The first thing I hit after moving mid-semester fully into Obsidian was a sync problem. I had been using the iCloud folder method because it was free, and it mostly worked — until I started editing notes while offline in class. Those changes got lost when iCloud did its quiet merge behavior where it picks a version and skips the other with no warning pop-up.

I switched to the paid Obsidian Sync ($10/month-ish) and syncing performance became immediate. Files updated between desktop and mobile almost instantly. But the moment I tried to invite a classmate to collaborate on a shared study vault, I hit the wall. Sync is deeply personal. There’s no multi-user concept and no one-click permissioning like you find in Google Docs or Notion. You either share your vault folder directly (bad idea) or push to Git (which 90% of students won’t do). No commenting, no presence indicators, no version history beyond your own local backups or plugin setups.

In contrast, Notion makes real-time sync and commenting feel native. But it comes with invisible rate limits. I once had a 3000-word essay draft vanish for ten seconds while Notion rebuilt the page after someone else had just pasted a bunch of images. No error, no alert. Just whoosh — it blinked out and back. If you’re relying on Notion for timed edits (like a live collaborative submission), that undocumented flicker matters.

3. Mobile behavior shifts wildly between the two platforms

Want to take notes on the bus? Get ready to care a lot about app caching. Obsidian’s mobile app, while impressive, loads entire vaults into memory. If your vault is heavy (lots of PDF embeds or plugin metadata files), you’ll feel it. My iPhone once froze for nearly 20 seconds just switching vaults during a tutoring session.

Notion is the opposite: it loads nearly nothing, then fetches what it needs. That means your notes open fast but render content like a 2009 blog on 3G if your internet’s bad. Tapping into a database takes time, and offline mode is laughably inconsistent. I had a whole lecture typed up into a Notion page on the subway only to realize it hadn’t saved when I reconnected. There’s no indicator it hasn’t written to server yet.

This edge case hit during finals week: I was mid-note in Obsidian, and my phone battery ran out. Because it saves locally as markdown, everything was there when I reopened. With Notion, I still can’t be sure when “Save” means saved.

A few tips that helped—but only after two failures each

• In Obsidian mobile: switch to Live Preview mode for smoother typing—Raw mode lags more on iOS.
• Keep note titles short in Obsidian. Long filenames slow down vault indexing.
• In Notion, turn off “Prefer offline” in Settings → Advanced if you’re constantly opening pages on flaky LTE.
• Add a “Synced” callout to each desktop Notion edit to verify refreshes on mobile.
• Syncing with iCloud as a backup works decently—but press save manually after every editing session.

4. Zettelkasten-style links require rewiring your brain in Obsidian

If you’re used to Notion’s hierarchy (pages inside pages), Obsidian’s wiki-link structure at first looks chaotic. But once your brain clicks into it, it gets fast. Tags and backlinks in Obsidian let you operate almost page-free — everything’s just a node. Still, without strict naming, things decay fast.

I made a mess of botched links early on. Example: I had [[Bio 101 Lecture 4]] in 6 different notes — but one was spelled “Bio 101 Lecture 4” and the rest “BIO101 – Lecture 4”. No linking. You don’t get warnings. There’s no concept-level awareness.

There’s a plugin called “Alias” that fixes some of this, letting you define alternate titles per page — but again, all manual. You have to pre-think every variant you might use. Notion solves this with you not needing any of it — every block ID is preserved in references and backlinks just work. Even if you rename the page, links continue functioning because it’s all running through an internal identifier.

So if you rename a class folder in Obsidian, links break unless you use a plugin. In Notion, renumber it, nest it, change hierarchy — links update across the graph. The technical difference comes down to: Obsidian is file-based; Notion is database-based. Once you get that, you’re less surprised when Obsidian makes you do the housekeeping.

5. Tables behave like completely unrelated species in Notion and Obsidian

This came up when I tried to recreate a study tracker across both: due dates, lecture topics, progress tags, quiz grades. In Notion, tables are native and relational. You can drag to sort, create formula columns, sync with other tables — borderline spreadsheet behavior. That’s expected. What I forgot was how Obsidian handles tables.

In Markdown, tables are just lined-up text. You can’t sort them without a plugin. You can’t filter. You can’t create views or queries. I tried to set up a basic grade tracker and ended up installing three plugins: Advanced Tables (for formatting), Dataview (for filtering), and Calendar (to mimic due dates). It worked—but it looked like a weird nerd dashboard instead of a simple student tracker.

Here’s the kicker: the Dataview plugin reads YAML frontmatter and renders Markdown files like SQL fragments. It’s insane once it clicks. I had this --- Due: 2024-04-05 Grade: 87% block sit invisibly at the top of each lecture note, and my table pulled from every file in that folder. But I only discovered that setup after someone on Discord said, “Try treating your notes like objects instead of pages.”

“You don’t build tables. You let your notes aggregate into them.”

That sentence unlocked everything. But until then, I kept trying to make Obsidian be Notion, and it kept throwing silent errors.

6. Exports from Notion always look better until someone tries to edit

Group project curse: we had to export a reading summary worksheet for submission. I drafted my portion in Notion, applied headings, callouts, and quote blocks to separate commentary. Looked pristine. Exported as a Word doc — and instantly the margins collapsed, quote blocks got weird grey borders, and callout emojis became giant alt-text blocks.

Obsidian exports as plaintext or PDF, and never looks dynamic — but it’s bulletproof. No formatting rage. Just raw, footnote-style plainness. I once exported a whole research notes vault straight into a zipped folder and sent it to a professor. He opened it in VS Code and thanked me for “the cleanest folder structure I’ve ever received.” That’s not something you ever hear about Notion exports.

But for group-friendly handouts or slides, Notion still wins. It’s a problem of predictability vs presentation. One exports plain and editable. The other exports silky and unreadable.

7. Plugin ecosystems feel completely different in maturity and user control

Obsidian’s plugin system is wild. I had 23 installed at one point. That included spaced repetition, custom CSS themes, backlinks-as-calendar, and even Kanban boards that rival Trello. But the moment Obsidian updates, any of them can break — especially if built by solo devs. In one case, I updated Obsidian and lost the ability to render LaTeX properly in math notes. Turns out, the MathJax renderer clashed with a theme I installed last month. No warning.

Notion adds features slowly but with consistent stability. Their API is still limited, and integrations are mostly top-down. That means fewer wild experiments, but also fewer crashes. If you’re the kind of student who wants to build your own workflows, Obsidian’s your playground. If you want safety and known UI behaviors, Notion’s the cafeteria tray line.

The gotcha: Obsidian plugins run code. There’s a real risk of data corruption or performance lag if you start nesting too many render hooks. Notion doesn’t even let you do that. Which might be why my Notion always opens; and sometimes, my Obsidian vault does not.