NotePlan vs Obsidian
A calendar-first planner vs a vault you shape with plugins
NotePlan and Obsidian both keep your notes as plain Markdown files — that's usually why they end up on the same shortlist, and NotePlan even documents how to open your NotePlan folder as an Obsidian vault. The difference is the center: NotePlan is built around your calendar, with events, scheduled tasks, and time blocking beside daily and weekly notes. Obsidian is built around linked notes, with planning features arriving through its core and community plugins.
The short version: if your notes serve a schedule, NotePlan fits. If your notes form a knowledge base and planning is one part of it, Obsidian fits. The table below is compiled from both apps' own pages, linked at the bottom.
NotePlan
ObsidianThe third option
Both apps keep your notes as Markdown files, and both charge a subscription for part of the experience — NotePlan $99 a year for everything, Obsidian $4 a month for first-party sync. Octarine takes the files and skips the subscription: daily notes with natural-language dates, backlinks and a graph, Views over your notes, Git or folder sync built in at no extra cost, Windows and Linux apps, and a one-time Pro price.
What Octarine doesn't give you: the calendar. No events beside your notes, no time blocking, no automatic task rollover — if your day runs from the calendar, NotePlan is the better pick of the two, and we say so on our own comparison page. It also has no plugin ecosystem, which is Obsidian's strength. See the full tables at Octarine vs NotePlan and Octarine vs Obsidian.
Sources · Checked Nov 9, 2026
Compiled from both apps' own pricing pages and help centers — the same sources as our Octarine-vs-each comparisons, last verified November 4, 2026. Facts were re-checked against those sources when this page was compiled.
- NotePlan pricing
- NotePlan AI features
- NotePlan import and export
- NotePlan: CloudKit vs iCloud Drive
- NotePlan: Use NotePlan with Obsidian
- Obsidian pricing
- How Obsidian stores data
- Obsidian community plugins
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Something wrong or out of date, including if you work on NotePlan or Obsidian? Suggest a correction
Octarine.