Notion vs Obsidian for Claude: it depends which Claude
Obsidian wins for Claude Code, Notion wins for Claude in a browser or on a phone. Speed limits, undo and public links compared, from each one's own docs.
PS
Prashant Shaw
Founder, Sumibako
7 min read
People have argued Notion versus Obsidian for years, with the stamina normally reserved for text editors and the correct way to load a dishwasher. Then the AI assistants arrived and the argument got a new judge. Never mind which one you like. Which one can Claude actually work in?
I read both companies' documentation instead of their fans. The answer is annoyingly reasonable: it depends which Claude you mean, because there are two of them and they live in different places. Every claim below is linked to its source and was checked on 8 October 2026. The last section is about the notes app I build, which is neither of these, and it says so.
If you only ever talk to Claude Code on your own laptop, pick Obsidian. If you talk to Claude in a browser or on your phone, pick Notion. If that settled it, you are free to go. The rest is the reasoning, and a third option at the end for people who wanted one column from each side.
🏠 Two Claudes, two addresses
Claude Code runs on your computer. It reads and writes files the way you do, in the folders you can reach.
Claude in a browser and on your phone runs in a data centre and has never seen your disk. It reaches outside tools through connectors, and Anthropic's help centre is blunt about what that means: Claude connects "from Anthropic's cloud infrastructure, rather than from your local device", so the thing it connects to "must be reachable over the public internet".
Notion is a website. Obsidian is a folder. One Claude lives on the internet and the other lives in your folders. You can probably see where this is going.
💻 Claude Code: Obsidian wins, and it is not close
An Obsidian vault is a directory of Markdown files. To Claude Code that is not an integration. It is a Tuesday. It searches every note with the same tools it uses on code, edits forty files in the time it takes you to find the right tab, and never meets a rate limit, because there is nobody there to limit it.
Andrej Karpathy's LLM wiki gist, which started the current wave of AI-kept notes, has the line everybody quotes: "Obsidian is the IDE; the LLM is the programmer; the wiki is the codebase."
Obsidian has also been building for this. Its roadmap lists two things under February 2026:
The Obsidian CLI, which promises that "Anything you can do in Obsidian you can do from the command line." One catch, in its own words: "Obsidian CLI requires the Obsidian app to be running."
Obsidian Headless, in open beta, which syncs a vault onto a machine with no desktop app at all. Its list of reasons to exist includes this one: "Give agentic tools access to a vault without access to your full computer."
Notion works from Claude Code too, and politely. There is an official plugin that installs skills, slash commands and the connector together, or you can add the connector alone with one line:
It is well made. But every read and every write is a trip across the internet to Notion's API, and that API has a speed limit: "180 requests per minute (an average of 3 per second)" on every plan below Business. Notion's connector docs add: "Every tool call counts toward them."
For one page, that is plenty. For "reorganise my four hundred notes", it is a long afternoon, in which Claude Code could have reorganised an Obsidian vault, linted it, and written a short poem about the experience.
📱 Claude on your phone: Notion wins, and it is also not close
Notion's connector sits in Claude's own directory, marked "Anthropic verified". You add it, sign in to Notion once, and Claude on your phone can search your workspace and write into it from a bus.
Obsidian, from that same bus, is a folder in a house you are not in. There are three ways to fix that, and I would describe all three as hobbies.
1️⃣ The desktop app and a community server. The best known is mcp-obsidian, which talks to Obsidian "via the Local REST API community plugin". It works on the computer the vault is on, while Obsidian is open. It does nothing for your phone.
2️⃣ Headless Sync onto a server you run. Then a connector in front of it, which you also run, and a login in front of that, unless you would like the internet to read your diary. It needs an Obsidian Sync subscription, $4 a month billed annually.
3️⃣ Wait for an official one. Obsidian has no connector of its own, and there is none on the roadmap. I would not hold my breath, and I would not blame them either. "Your notes are on your disk" and "reachable over the public internet" are opposite promises.
🧰 What Claude can do once it is inside
Notion's connector is the broadest of any notes app I have read: around three dozen tools, covering pages, databases, views, comments and even Notion's own agents. If your notes are secretly a database in a notes costume (a reading list with ratings, a tracker, a small CRM), nothing else in this post competes. A folder of Markdown has no idea what a view is.
Two pieces of small print. Search through the connector is plain keyword search unless you pay for more: the docs say AI search "needs a Business or Enterprise plan with Notion AI". And I could not find a tool among the three dozen that puts a page on the web. Claude writes the page, and a person still clicks Share.
In Obsidian, Claude can do anything that can be done to text, and nothing else. No databases to query. Also no schema to respect, no API to wait for, and no chance of a tool being renamed on a Thursday.
🧯 When Claude gets it wrong
It will. Any assistant allowed to edit your notes will one day confidently improve a page into nonsense. What matters is the undo.
Notion keeps page history for you: 7 days on the free plan, 30 on Plus, 90 on Business. It is automatic, which is the best kind of backup, because it works on people like me.
Obsidian keeps whatever you arranged. Put the vault in git and every change Claude makes is a diff you can read and reverse, for ever, which beats anything Notion sells. Skip that step and the undo is your memory of what the page used to say. Obsidian Sync includes version history as well, if a subscription is more your style than a repository.
🚪 The third option, which I build
This is the part I build, so adjust your trust accordingly. I make Sumibako, and the reason is the table at the top of this post. I wanted the right-hand column's Markdown with the left-hand column's address.
It is a notes app with a hosted connector, so Claude Code, Claude in a browser, the phone app and ChatGPT all reach the same vault, and pages go in and come back out as Markdown. It has six tools where Notion has three dozen: write, edit, read, search, publish, and one that reports your plan's limits. There is no delete tool, on purpose. A page Claude overwrites keeps its earlier versions for two weeks. And it can publish a page it wrote and hand you back a link, which is the one thing in that first table that otherwise needs a person or a subscription. The free plan holds a thousand pages, and setup is on the agents page.
What it does not have: databases, a graph view, plugins, or files that live on your own disk. If you need the first, use Notion. If you need the other three, use Obsidian. I mean that. They are both better at being themselves than I am at being them.
📝NOTE
If you want this comparison across more apps, I put eight of them in one table in Which notes apps have an MCP server, including who runs each server and what it is allowed to do.
🧭 So, which one
If you
Use
Talk to Claude Code on one machine
Obsidian, with the vault in git
Talk to Claude in a browser or on your phone
Notion
Need databases, views, or a team in the same place
Notion
Want your notes to exist with no company involved
Obsidian
Want Markdown, every Claude, and a link you can send
The third option
The honest summary is that this stopped being an argument about notes apps. It is a question about where your assistant lives. Answer that one and the old fight settles itself, which after all these years is almost a pity.
🦄
Is there a web version of Obsidian? No, and five ways around it
Obsidian has no web version. Five ways to reach a vault from a browser anyway, from GitHub's free editor to the real app on a server, and what each costs.
7 min read
shellscript
claude mcp add --transport http notion https://mcp.notion.com/mcp
