Frequently Asked Questions
Q1: What surprised me most when I migrated from Notion to Obsidian after 3 years?
The biggest shock came in month two — my note-taking speed dropped by half because Obsidian doesn’t have Notion’s fancy database views. But then I realized I was actually thinking more instead of just organizing. The local markdown files mean my notes load instantly offline, and there’s no subscription eating my budget. The graph view showing connections between ideas became my real reason to stay.
Q2: How did the migration process actually feel during the first month?
Pure pain. I spent two weekends exporting everything from Notion, dealing with broken formatting, and rebuilding my template system from scratch. My daily note habit broke for almost three weeks because I kept reaching for Notion’s UI out of muscle memory. I almost switched back twice. The turning point came when I discovered the Templater plugin — suddenly my morning pages自动填充 correctly and everything clicked.
Q3: What specific Obsidian feature finally made the switch worth it?
The backlinks. Notion has them now, but Obsidian’s bidirectional links work without any database setup — I just type double brackets and it creates the connection. I found three old notes about AI tools that suddenly talked to each other through a topic I’d forgotten I was tracking. That discovery moment — seeing your own forgotten knowledge connect — doesn’t happen in Notion the same way.
