Obsidian vs Apple Notes

Apple Notes asks for nothing. It is on the iPhone already, Quick Notes open from anywhere on a Mac, and notes appear on every device signed in to the same Apple Account. Scanning a receipt, sketching with an Apple Pencil, recording a meeting with a live transcript or sharing a shopping list takes a tap.

Obsidian asks you to decide where the vault lives, how it syncs, and which of its features and plugins you want. Those decisions are the point: they let it become a writing desk, a research database or a task board. They also mean an evening of setup before it feels like yours, and a habit of tending it afterwards.

Since iOS 17 you can link one Apple Note to another by typing >>, and iOS 27 adds links to a section of a note. The links go one way: there is no list of the notes that point back, and no graph. Markdown arrived in iOS 26 and macOS 26 as import and export, and iOS 27 adds Copy as Markdown and converts pasted Markdown into formatting. You still never write or see Markdown in Notes, and photos do not travel inside an exported .md file.

Obsidian is built on both ideas. Every note is a Markdown file, [[links]] autocomplete, every note shows its backlinks, and the graph, Canvas and Bases (database views of your notes) help a large collection stay navigable. If you expect to keep notes for a decade, or to open them in other tools, plain files are the safer bet.

Dash has [[links]] with backlinks and Markdown shortcuts as you type, and exports Markdown, without a graph or plugins.

Apple Notes syncs through iCloud, which includes 5 GB free; 50 GB costs $0.99 a month in the US. With Apple’s standard data protection, notes are encrypted in transit and on Apple’s servers, but Apple holds the keys. A note you lock is end-to-end encrypted, and turning on Advanced Data Protection (ADP) extends that to every note. Notes in the On My iPhone or On My Mac account never leave the device.

Obsidian needs no account. A vault in iCloud Drive syncs a Mac and an iPhone for free, with the same Apple protection as Apple Notes. Obsidian Sync, $4 a month billed yearly ($5 monthly), encrypts end to end by default and keeps a month of version history; Sync Plus at $8 a month keeps a year. Files on your own disk are not encrypted by Obsidian.

Neither app locks itself on a Mac; Obsidian only through a community plugin. On iPhone, iOS 18 and later can require Face ID to open any app, both of these included. Dash locks the app on Mac and iPhone with Touch ID or Face ID and an auto-lock timer, locks any note with AES-256-GCM (including notes with attachments, which Apple Notes will not lock), and syncs only if you turn on its end-to-end encrypted sync.

• To Obsidian: on a Mac, install the official Importer plugin and choose Apple Notes. It converts notes to Markdown with images, scans, tables and PDFs. It does not run on iPhone, and it skips locked notes, so remove those locks first.
• Back to Apple Notes: on macOS 26 and later, File › Import Markdown brings in a folder of Markdown files and can keep its folder structure.
• To Dash: export notes from Notes as Markdown (File › Export as › Markdown on a Mac), then import the folder in Dash. An Obsidian vault imports directly, with its [[wikilinks]], photos and tags. A preview shows what will come across before anything is written.

Keep Apple Notes for scans, sketches and shared lists; it is very good at them. Choose Obsidian if you want a knowledge base in plain files on every platform. Choose Dash if you write on a Mac and an iPhone and want notes that are private by default: no account, nothing uploaded unless you turn on end-to-end encrypted sync, a lock on any note and on the whole app, a duress password and self-destructing notes. Dash is $14.99 once on Mac and free on iPhone. It has no handwriting, scanning or shared editing.