Joplin vs Obsidian: Open app or open files (2026)

Joplin's licence is AGPL-3.0 and the code is on GitHub, so anyone can read it, fork it, or keep running it without Laurent Cozic's permission. Obsidian's source is closed and Dynalist Inc. alone decides what the app does next. On licence terms the argument ends in one line.

Now look at storage. Joplin's markdown lives in an SQLite database. Obsidian's markdown lives in a folder, one file per note, named however you named it. The open-source app puts a database between you and your text and the proprietary one does not. That inversion is why the two camps talk past each other: each side thinks the other has already conceded the point.

In Obsidian a note is a .md file. ripgrep finds it, Pandoc converts it, a shell script rewrites 300 of them in a second, and Obsidian does not need to be running for any of it. This is the specific property people mean when they say plain files.

Joplin writes markdown too and stores it in SQLite. Its exporter is honest and produces real .md files whenever you ask for them. What it cannot hand you is a live file to edit from outside, which is the complaint Obsidian switchers raise on Joplin's own Discourse forum. Concurrent edits show the same seam: when two devices touch one note, Joplin asks you to resolve the conflict by hand, because it is reconciling database rows and not merging text.

Joplin syncs through Dropbox, OneDrive, Nextcloud, WebDAV, S3, or Joplin Cloud, with optional end-to-end encryption over any of them. Joplin Cloud runs about €2.40 a month for Basic and €4.79 for Pro, and you can refuse all of it and point the app at storage you already pay for. Encrypted self-hosted sync at no extra cost is a strong hand and Obsidian does not hold it.

Obsidian asks $4-5 a month for its own end-to-end encrypted Sync. The free routes are iCloud, Syncthing, or the community git plugin, and that plugin has documented rough edges: index.lock errors, line-ending conflicts, and merge handling on mobile that its users call unstable. Obsidian Sync itself works well. It is simply the one part of Obsidian that costs money.

Obsidian has wikilinks, backlinks, and a graph view in the app, with more than 2,000 community plugins layered above them. Joplin has notebooks, tags, and note links. Backlinks and any graph arrive through third-party plugins, which puts their maintenance outside the project entirely. A core feature cannot stop being maintained; a plugin can.

The gap decides the page if you are building a wiki rather than a filing cabinet. Obsidian's plugin breadth does cut both ways, since quality varies, mobile compatibility is a recurring problem, and its forum carries threads about slow startup on large vaults with many plugins loaded. Breadth still wins. Joplin was designed as an Evernote replacement and its core reflects that history.

Joplin's web clipper is excellent and its ENEX importer is the standard recommendation for anyone leaving Evernote. It runs on macOS, Windows, Linux, iOS, Android, and in a terminal. There is no paid tier gating any of it, and no commercial licence to think about, while Obsidian keeps an optional $50 per user per year commercial licence on the table.

Both apps are Electron, so both carry a Chromium instance and a JavaScript runtime per window and neither is a native binary. Joplin's interface is widely called dated and Obsidian's is not. Neither vendor publishes performance figures, so on a large vault you are the benchmark.

Joplin costs nothing and its sync can also cost nothing if you already have Dropbox, Nextcloud, or a WebDAV box. Joplin Cloud is optional at roughly €2.40 to €6.69 a month depending on tier. Obsidian is free for personal and commercial use, so the only line item is Sync at $4-5 a month, which is $48-60 a year, plus the $50 per user per year commercial licence if you choose to buy one. Valutorio is the most expensive of the three: a paid Mac App Store app, and its sync is a separate optional subscription. On money alone Joplin wins and Obsidian is close behind it.