"Notion vs Obsidian" is the wrong framing — that's app vs app. The real comparison is app vs stack: can a markdown setup give you what Notion gives you, out of files you actually own? Mostly yes. Sometimes better. Occasionally, no.
We ran the full comparison on The Way of Markdown. It's not a hit piece — Notion wins some of these outright. Here's the shape of it.
Notion isn't competing against "markdown" — that's just a format — it's competing against a small stack: Obsidian for the editor, Bases for database-style views over your files, git for sync and history, a publisher for the "share to web" button, and AI tools that read your files directly.
A few categories go one way or the other with no real contest.
Markdown wins wikis and linking (native, not bolted on), offline use (total — the files just sit on your disk), history (a full git log going back to day one), lock-in and exit (there's nothing to export, because nothing was trapped to begin with), and AI on your content (agents work directly in your vault, no API required).
Notion wins real-time co-editing — genuinely good, and git is asynchronous by design so this isn't close. It wins page-level permissions, since repo-level access is the ceiling on the markdown side. And it wins zero-setup polish: sign up versus assembling two or three tools yourself.
Databases are closer than people assume. Notion's relational views are still ahead for heavy use, but Obsidian Bases closed most of the gap this year for lighter use — which covers most people's actual needs.
The trend line matters more than the snapshot. The database gap has been closing from the markdown side, and AI closed the smart-features gap from the other side, almost overnight. Meanwhile Notion's real advantages — real-time editing, granular permissions — come from the same centralized database that creates the lock-in. You can't get one without the other, in either direction.
Full scorecard (14 categories, feature by feature) and the honest "choose X if" breakdown: wayofmarkdown.com/notion-vs-markdown