Obsidian vs SiYuan
Thinking of swapping Obsidian for the open-source SiYuan? Here’s the honest trade-off.
45k TypeScript AGPL-3.0 2 days ago
What you give up vs Obsidian
- Primarily single-user; no real-time team collaboration.
- Official cloud sync and some features require a paid subscription.
- Documentation and UI are translated from Chinese and can be uneven.
- Smaller English-language community and plugin ecosystem.
What you gain
- • Full data ownership — self-host SiYuan on your own infrastructure.
- • No per-seat SaaS bill (Obsidian: paid sync and a closed-source core).
- • Open-source code you can audit and extend (AGPL-3.0).