Jotura vs Obsidian.
Both apps keep your notes as plain Markdown files on your own disk, and they make different choices about everything built on top of that. This is an honest comparison, and it includes the places where Obsidian wins.
Open your Obsidian vault and keep writing.
Obsidian and Jotura both store a vault as a folder of Markdown files, so you can point Jotura at the vault you already have and pick up the note you were halfway through. Nothing gets imported or converted, and you can go back to Obsidian whenever you like. Reading the vault writes nothing into it, and a note you open and save without edits stays byte-identical. Your callouts, highlights, footnotes, embeds and wikilinks are editor features here too, written with the same syntax.
What each app gives you.
Both are excellent local-first Markdown editors, so the table covers everything around the writing itself.
| Feature | Jotura | Obsidian |
|---|---|---|
| Opens the same vault as it stands, syntax kept through edits | ||
| Plain Markdown files on your disk | ||
| Free app, works fully offline | ||
| End-to-end encrypted sync | £4 a month or £40 a year | $4 to $8 a month billed annually, or $5 to $10 monthly (Sync add-on) |
| Share notes with other people, encrypted | folders or single notes, editor and viewer roles | a whole shared vault, encrypted when the vault is |
| Version history | 3 years with attribution, on Jotura Sync | 1 month on Sync Standard, 12 months on Sync Plus |
| Read books on your phone, highlights saved as notes | Android: EPUB, PDF and CBZ | PDFs open in the app; EPUB reading and highlight collections need community plugins |
| Daily notes and templates | built in | core plugins |
| Nested tags, with a pane listing every tag and its count | a nested tag such as work/admin is listed by its full path | shown as a tree |
| Vault-wide task view | built in | checkboxes are core, task queries need a community plugin |
| Table editing | built in | built in |
| Callouts, highlights, footnotes, embeds | built in | built in |
| Maths | typeset on the desktop, TeX on the phone | typeset |
| Search inside PDFs and Word documents | built in | |
| Search by meaning | built in on the desktop, on-device or your own OpenAI key | community plugins |
| Command-line tool | included, works without the app open | official since 1.12, needs the app running |
| Plugins | thousands of community plugins | |
| Themes | five built-in, plus your own colours in a synced theme file | community themes and CSS snippets |
| Graph view and canvas | canvas files open as JSON | |
| iPhone app | Android today | |
| Publish notes as a public site | $8 a month billed annually, or $10 monthly (Publish add-on) |
Obsidian pricing and history limits as published by Obsidian, October 2026.
Four things Jotura builds in.
- Share a folder with the people you work with.
- Give your partner the house renovation folder, or send a colleague the one meeting note they need. You both edit, the changes merge on their own, and every word stays end-to-end encrypted along the way. Obsidian Sync shares a whole remote vault with collaborators, rather than a single folder or note.
- Three years of version history.
- Delete a paragraph in March and you can still bring it back next year. Every synced note keeps its full history for three years, shows who changed what, and restores any version in one click. Obsidian Sync keeps one month of history on Standard and twelve months on Plus.
- Tasks and document search come built in.
- Both apps ship daily notes, templates, and a table editor. Jotura also builds in a Tasks pane that gathers every checkbox in the vault, search by meaning on the desktop (on-device, or through OpenAI with your own key), and document conversion that makes the PDFs and Word files in your vault searchable. Obsidian's core search covers notes and canvases only, and a vault-wide task query or search by meaning is a community plugin that you track down, keep updated, and trust with full access to your vault.
- Books on your phone, highlights in your notes.
- EPUB and PDF books and CBZ comics in your vault open in the Android app, and your place follows you between devices. Highlight a passage of an EPUB or a text PDF in one of four colours, add a comment, and it lands in a plain Markdown note for that book that you can read and rewrite anywhere. Obsidian opens PDFs and can copy a link to a selected passage, and reading EPUBs or collecting highlights into a note is left to community plugins.
Where Obsidian wins.
If your work depends on any of these, Obsidian is the better choice for you, and we would rather you stayed with it.
- Plugins. Obsidian ships graph view and canvas as core features and has thousands of community plugins, Excalidraw, Dataview, and Templater among them. Jotura makes no attempt to match that range.
- Transclusion. Obsidian shows an embedded note's content inside another. Jotura keeps the embed in the file and shows it as a chip. Canvas and Bases files open as JSON text, and Excalidraw drawings are not rendered.
- iPhone. Obsidian runs on iOS today. Jotura is Android-only on mobile for now.
- Community. Years of guides, videos, shared vault setups, and community themes exist for Obsidian, and Jotura has had far less time to build that up. Jotura has five built-in themes and lets you set any colour in a theme file that syncs with your vault, but there is no gallery of themes to browse, and its theme file changes colours where an Obsidian theme can restyle the whole interface with CSS.
- Publishing. Obsidian Publish turns notes into a public website. Jotura has no equivalent.
Common questions.
- Can Jotura open my existing Obsidian vault?
- Yes. An Obsidian vault is a folder of plain Markdown files, which is exactly what Jotura reads, so you point Jotura at the folder and start writing. There is nothing to import, copy, or undo, and you can run both apps on the same vault at the same time. Jotura leaves every note byte-identical apart from the edits you make, and it creates notes or converts documents only when you ask. It reads your daily notes and templates settings from the .obsidian folder without ever writing there. Wikilinks, aliases, embeds, callouts, highlights, comments, math, footnotes, and task states use the same syntax in both apps.
- Is Jotura cheaper than Obsidian?
- Both apps are free, and paid sync costs about the same: Jotura is £4 a month or £40 a year, and Obsidian Sync is $4 to $8 a month billed annually, or $5 to $10 monthly. Both services share notes with other people. Obsidian Sync shares a whole remote vault, while Jotura Sync shares a single folder or note with editor and viewer roles and keeps three years of version history.
- Does Jotura have plugins?
- No. Jotura puts its effort into a fast, private app with the everyday tools already built in: tables, tags, tasks, daily notes, callouts, search by meaning, and document search. If your workflow depends on specific Obsidian community plugins like Dataview, Templater, or Excalidraw, Obsidian remains the better fit, and Jotura leaves their syntax in your notes as plain text.
- Can I switch back to Obsidian later?
- Yes, at any time. Your notes stay plain Markdown files in an ordinary folder for as long as you use Jotura, so Obsidian or any other editor can open the same vault the day you decide to go back, with nothing to export first.
- Is there an iPhone app?
- Not yet. Jotura runs on Mac, Windows, Linux, and Android today, with iOS on the roadmap. If you need an iPhone app now, Obsidian has one.
Try it on a copy of your vault this afternoon, knowing your files stay plain Markdown whichever app you keep.
Switching? Read Coming from Obsidian.