As an Evernote user I gave Obsidian a heartfelt try over Q4 of 2022. Here’s why I’ve gone back to Evernote as of this week.

What I didn’t like:

  1. Obsidian is too complex. There are plugins on top of plugins to customize Obsidian for pretty much every single use case. I found this getting in the way too often and instead of getting things done, I was spending time learning how to make it work within Obsidian.
  2. While it is nice the plugins are open source and hosted on Github, it is cumbersome to go to each Github repository to learn about the plugin and how to change it to your liking. Obsidian needs better plugin support within the UI itself. This is partially on the plugin developer, but Obsidian should put an emphasis on making this easier.
  3. Adding files - in particular PDFs - to notes just never worked great and looked great when viewing the file. I like other productivity systems/apps handling of PDFs much better.

What I liked:

  1. Markdown support. Markdown makes sense, it is easy to learn, and compatible with more and more apps every day. I know there are ways to make Markdown work natively in Evernote, but I will miss the simplicity of having it work natively in the text editor like it does in Obsidian.
  2. Files sizes are small and storing everything as a .txt file is amazing. This makes it so easy to move your files from one cloud provider to another.
  3. Obsidian is free and has a massive developer community. This is good because there is likely someone who has the same use case as you and created a plugin for it. But for general note taking and Second Brain capturing, I just don’t think Obsidian is for me.