SiYuan vs Obsidian: which local-first notes app in 2026?

Markdown files vs a block database — the real difference

Everything else in this comparison follows from one design decision. Obsidian’s vault is a folder of plain .md files: you can open it in any text editor, version it with git, grep it, back it up with anything, and if Obsidian disappeared tomorrow your notes wouldn’t change at all. Links connect files (with heading and block anchors layered on top), and the app is best understood as a very good lens over files you already own.

SiYuan is built the other way around: every paragraph is a block with a permanent ID, stored in SiYuan’s own JSON format with a SQLite index — not as plain Markdown on disk. That’s what makes block-level bidirectional links, block embeds, attribute views and Notion-style databases feel native rather than bolted on: a reference points at a block that keeps its identity when you move or rename things. The trade is legibility — your data is fully local and open-format, but you read it through SiYuan (or its exports), not through any old editor.

If “my notes are just files” is a first principle for you, that decides it for Obsidian. If you’ve pushed Obsidian’s block links and Dataview far enough to feel the seams, SiYuan is what that workflow looks like when the whole app is designed for it. (And if you’re here shopping for an Obsidian alternative more broadly, our guide to second brain apps covers the whole field.)

SiYuan pricing vs Obsidian pricing — what you’ll actually pay

Both apps are free to use seriously, on your own device, with no note limits — the money is all in sync. The costs are less symmetric than they look:

• Obsidian: the app is free (a commercial license is optional at $50/user/year — encouraged, not required). Official Sync is $4/month billed annually ($5 monthly), end-to-end encrypted. The DIY crowd syncs free via iCloud, Syncthing or git, which works but is famously fiddly on mobile.
• SiYuan: a one-time $64 PRO purchase unlocks sync and backup to your own S3 or WebDAV storage — a few dollars a year at any cloud provider, encrypted before upload. The official cloud subscription with 8 GB runs $148/year, which is roughly three times Obsidian Sync.

So the cheapest serious multi-device setup is SiYuan plus your own bucket — pay once, own the pipeline. The simplest paid setup is Obsidian Sync. And SiYuan’s official cloud is the expensive option, not the budget one — worth knowing before you assume “open source” means cheaper everywhere.

Plugins and community

Obsidian’s ecosystem is the largest in the category — roughly two thousand community plugins, an active forum and subreddit, and years of themes, tutorials and workflows for every niche. If you want something, someone has built it, documented it, and argued about it. The flip side: stock Obsidian is deliberately minimal, so the power features live in plugins you assemble and maintain yourself.

SiYuan inverts that. The core app ships what Obsidian users install plugins for — database and attribute views (Obsidian only recently added native Bases), spaced-repetition flashcards, PDF annotation, block embeds — and layers a smaller plugin marketplace on top. If your real comparison is SiYuan vs Notion, that’s the point: SiYuan is the closest thing to Notion’s blocks-and-databases model that runs entirely on your own disk. Development is very active (45,000+ GitHub stars; v3.8.0 shipped August 12, 2026 after the v3.7.x series in June–July, with beta builds most days), but the community is smaller and Chinese-first: the app and docs are fully usable in English, while much of the forum activity isn’t. If built-in flashcards are a deciding factor, we’ve also compared SiYuan against Logseq, the other open-source contender there — and against Anytype, the other local-first, self-hostable one.

Mobile experience

Obsidian’s iOS and Android apps are mature — the same vault, most plugins working, and a capture flow good enough to use as your daily notes app. Multi-device life is smoothest with paid Sync; iCloud works on Apple platforms, and Android DIY sync remains the community’s perennial thread.

SiYuan has real iOS and Android apps too (App Store, Play, and F-Droid), and they’re functional rather than polished: the desktop’s dense interface translates awkwardly to small screens, and multi-device use effectively requires setting up one of the paid sync paths first. If mobile is where most of your notes happen, that’s a genuine point for Obsidian; if your phone is mostly for capture and reading, SiYuan’s apps are entirely serviceable.

Getting your notes out

This audience reads exit clauses first, so: Obsidian has nothing to export. The vault already is the export — copy the folder and you’re done, which is the strongest portability story any notes app can offer.

SiYuan exports individual documents or whole notebooks to Markdown (plus PDF and other formats), and it’s good — but it is an export: block references flatten into text, and database views don’t survive the trip to plain files. Coming the other way, SiYuan imports Markdown folders, so an Obsidian vault’s text, headings and images come through cleanly. Expect to re-link, though: some [[wiki links]] resolve, plain Markdown links to other files often don’t, and plugin syntax — Dataview queries, Templater, Tasks metadata — arrives as literal text. The sane migration is a trial import of a copy of your vault, then an afternoon of link checking, not a one-click switch.