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Notion vs Obsidian: Which is really better?

Published 2 months ago • 1 min read

Notion vs Obsidian for Academics

Dear Reader,

Notion and Obsidian are two very popular note-taking tools used by thousands of researchers, students, and academics worldwide. If you are a long-time reader of the EffortlessAcademic, you probably know my preference for Obsidian, but this has practical reasons.

Notion has a few strengths that Obsidian can't match, and for your use case, it might even be better suited. Sharing notes, for example, or AI and calendar integration are superb in Notion.

In this week's article, we dive into these two tools in detail, breaking them down by functionality, integrations, and their effectiveness for researchers.

The article compares the two tools in the following categories: Notes vs Files, Databases vs Bases, Blocks vs Markdown, Calendar, Links, Tex & Math, Integrations vs Plugins, Zotero connection, performance, price and mind mapping. If you are not using any digital knowledge management software, this article gives you a good overview of where to start.

Wishing you a wonderful weekend,

​
Ilya Shabanov, The Effortless Academic​

The Effortless Academic is a community, newsletter and learning place for the modern academic, where you can learn to leverage academic tools, digital note-taking strategies and AI for a stress-free, successful career.
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If you're ready to dive in, start with the foundation of Digital Note Taking to remember and synthesise ideas, the AI Lit Review Course to learn about recent (AI) tools for finding, reading and skimming relevant academic papers, or the AI writing and publishing courses to effectively publish your ideas.

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