Why You Should Migrate From Notion to Obsidian (w/ Neovim) & How

I have been using Notion for a couple years now to manage my personal and work notes. Everything has been going well until I started exploring other options. Here is why I migrated to Obsidian from Notion and I believe you should too!

Why Change a Good Thing?

If you use Notion for note taking, you download the app, you can open it via web browser, you can download the application on your mobile phone and get syncing across all those devices.

Incredibly easy to get setup and start writing notes as well as some powerful features like creating databases and viewing those many different ways in your notes.

What more could you ask for?

For me, I didn’t make much use of the database features and really just took a lot of notes from meetings and from reading books and blogs.

I would get very frustrated when I would search for something in a document and then not be able to jump to that point quickly to begin editing. How can you edit effectively when you can’t quickly get to where you need to be without needing a mouse?

Vim motions (and Neovim)

If you use Neovim and are used to navigating using Vim motions, then not having them can feel incredibly slow and imprecise.

In Obsidian, you can get Vim motions with a simple toggle.

🙌

On top of that, you can use a plugin to edit your notes directly in Neovim and use all of your normal configuration and settings to quickly navigate around notes and search / replace text with ease.

Check out obsidian.nvim and install that into Neovim:

Speed / Efficiency

With Obsidian you should be able to move much faster and more efficiently than in Notion.

Part of this is what I mentioned above with adding Vim motions.

Another part is having the files locally and not waiting on your internet speed to be able to view or edit your notes.

Customization also plays a role here since you can adjust keybindings and have them make sense and be intuitive for you instead of having to deal with whatever Notion has picked for keybindings.

I am still surprised that you cannot customize the keybindings in Notion.

Control of your data

Because you do not have to use Obsidian Sync, you have complete control of your data and where it lives. Huge privacy wins here and the flexibility with systems you can integrate with and get your data shared across devices is pretty impressive.

If privacy is important to you then this should feel really great. As long as you don’t mind managing it yourself, there are a lot of options. I’ll talk more about this later.

Migrate 🦆

Hopefully by now I have given you enough reason to at least give Obsidian a try. You can always go back to Notion if you don’t like it in the first couple of days or hours.

The commitment has very little risk other than you spending a couple hours with tinkering. Worth the exploration.

1. Export / Import from Notion to Obsidian

Because Obsidian wants to make this migration as seamless as possible, they have a dedicated page on their website:

2. Export from Notion

First, you need to go into your Notion account, either through the desktop app or via your browser, then follow these directions:

1. Go to Settings & members at the top of your left-hand sidebar.
2. Select Settings in the sidebar of that window.
3. Scroll down and select the Export all workspace content button.
4. Under Export format select HTML.
5. Enable Include subpages
6. Enable Create folders for subpages
7. You will receive a .zip file via email or directly in the browser.

3. Download Obsidian App

Check out this page. Install it for your OS.

Create an empty vault

1. To the right of Create new vault, click Create.
2. In Vault name, enter the name of your vault.
3. Click Browse to select where your new vault will be created.
4. Click Create.

Now you have a vault to place your Notion files after exporting them.

4. Import to Obsidian

You will need the official Obsidian Importer plugin. Once you have that installed.

1. Open Settings.
2. Go to Community Plugins and install Importer.
3. Enable the Importer plugin.
4. Open the Importer plugin using the command palette or ribbon icon.
5. Under File format select Notion (.zip)
6. Choose the .zip file with Notion files you want to import. It's recommended to import all your Notion at once so internal links can be reconciled correctly.
7. Optionally, select a folder for the import Your Notion pages and databases will be nested inside this folder. (I ended putting everything under a Notion folder and then moving folders / pages into the root of the vault)
8. Enable Save parent pages in subfolders to keep the Notion structure. Note that in Notion you can write content in Folders, this is not possible in Obsidian and these pages will be added as a subpage under the folder.
9. Select Import and wait until import is complete
10. You’re done!

Something to note, Notion uses a different concept than folders so you will have both a folder, and a page with the same name as the folder with the links to nested pages.

5. Setup Obsidian App

Configure (open settings using Cmd+,) - Adjust hot keys, as an example, for me I switched Cmd+k to open the QuickSwitch instead of Cmd+o and [ and ] to go forward and backwards in history.

Toggle Vim key bindings under Editor

Add Community Plugins - Git — used to sync to git (adjust how often you want backups to happen) - Templatr — Add custom templates (I added a Templates directory under the root) - Vimrc Support — Use .obsidian.vimrc to add configuration (imap jj )

There are a ton of plugins that I have yet to explore but this is the list I have at the moment.

Syncing Options

For me, I use Git to backup my notes into Github (private repo) and then Syncthing to sync across my devices.

I occasionally run into conflicts if I try to use both my mobile device and my computer while editing notes but I like the idea of having a source of truth (Github) and then everything syncing from that to my other devices.

Here are a few options for syncing across devices you can use:

• Dropbox
• Google Drive
• iCloud Drive
• OneDrive
• Syncthing

If you happen to use Syncthing, the setup is quite easy. Essentially download the app onto your computer, then select the location

Then add another device (download the app on your mobile phone to do this, you will need a device ID) and what you want to sync to that device (e.g. your Obsidian vault).

Then you should see that as an option on your phone to use as a vault and Syncthing will run in the background.

Note: because Syncthing runs in the background constantly it may reduce battery life. I haven’t noticed much difference personally but your mileage may vary.

My Experience So Far

If I chose one word to characterize what I initially felt when first starting to work in Obsidian:

SPEED

Having your files locally to begin with is an incredible speed increase. It takes all the lag of waiting for a page to load (I ran into this quite often in Notion).

You find a file, open it and are immediately dropped in to start editing.

Having options to tag, alias, add frontmatter to notes automatically, customize templates and use my Neovim editor with the obsidian.nvim plugin allows me to be much more efficient in my edits and finding notes and topics.

If you want to see how I have obsidian.nvim configured, check it out here.

Conclusion

I wish I had switched sooner. I am strongly considering Obsidian Sync, not only to reduce some moving parts but also to pay the team that is working to build this great tool. If you have switched to Obsidian OR prefer using Notion over Obsidian then I’d love to hear about your story in the comments.

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Here are a few other Neovim articles you should check out:

If you enjoy topics like this then you might also like my Youtube channel. Have a great day!