Anytype vs Obsidian: Encrypted Objects or Plain Files

These two appeal to the same person: someone who has decided that their notes should not live on a company's server, and who is willing to accept some inconvenience for that. They agree on the principle and disagree on almost every implementation detail. (Disclosure: we make a third app, Clair Mind, aimed at a different problem. Referee only.)

The compressed difference: Obsidian's guarantee is the file format. Anytype's guarantee is the encryption.

At a glance

What Anytype is doing

Anytype models your notes as objects with types. A note, a person, a task, a book, a project — each type has relations, and objects link to each other with those relations rather than with bare [[wikilinks]]. Sets and collections are then queries over those objects, so "every unfinished book" is a live view rather than a maintained list.

Underneath, everything is encrypted on your device, and sync between your own devices is peer-to-peer over an encrypted protocol, included at no cost. There is no server holding a readable copy, which is a genuinely stronger position than most apps offer — see encrypted notes for why the distinction matters.

The result feels closest to a private, offline Notion, and for the object-shaped parts of life it is very good. Where it costs you is the same place any typed system costs you: you are designing a schema before you know your data, which is the standard way people end up with eleven types and thirty notes. The same trade appears in Capacities vs Obsidian.

The second cost is opacity. Your notes live in an encrypted local database. There is export, and there is a documented format, but you cannot open a folder and read them in any text editor on any machine for the next twenty years. That is the exact property Obsidian users chose Obsidian for.

What Obsidian is doing

Obsidian's position is minimal and durable: your notes are markdown files on your disk. The app is a viewer and editor over them. If Obsidian disappeared tomorrow, your notes would be unaffected — greppable, backupable, version-controllable, and readable by software nobody has written yet.

Everything else is built on top by you. Links and backlinks are core; almost anything past that is a plugin, and the ecosystem is enormous. You can reach a fair way toward Anytype's model with frontmatter properties and query plugins, at the cost of assembling it yourself. See plain text notes and backlinks.

Its weaknesses are the well-known ones. Sync is not included — Obsidian Sync is a paid add-on, and the free alternatives (a cloud folder, Syncthing, git) each come with their own conflict problems on mobile. The app is free for personal use but not open source. And the endless configurability is a documented failure mode: people spend three weekends on plugins and never write anything. See PKM mistakes.

On encryption, be precise: Obsidian files are not encrypted at rest by default. They are as protected as your disk and whatever sync service you chose. Obsidian Sync is end-to-end encrypted; a generic cloud folder is not.

The real decision

If your priority is longevity, choose Obsidian. A folder of markdown is the strongest available answer to "what happens when this company changes". Anytype's export is real, but a live plain-text folder and an export function are not the same guarantee, and the difference only shows up on the day you need it.

If your priority is privacy by default, Anytype has the better story. End-to-end encryption and P2P sync included, rather than assembled. If your notes are genuinely sensitive and you do not want to become your own sysadmin, that is worth a lot.

If your material is records rather than prose, Anytype fits it better. Objects with relations beat markdown files with frontmatter for anything that is fundamentally a database.

If your material is prose and links, Obsidian fits it better. A Zettelkasten wants text and connections, not schemas.

Maturity is a real factor

Anytype is considerably younger. That shows up as a smaller ecosystem, fewer integrations, a roadmap still in motion, and a smaller pool of people to ask when something breaks. None of that is disqualifying, and the project has been shipping steadily — but a decade-scale note archive is a bet on the software still being maintained, and Obsidian currently has the longer track record and the larger community.

Conversely, Obsidian's maturity means its shape is settled. What it is now is roughly what it will be, plus plugins.

Choose Anytype if

• You want end-to-end encryption without configuring anything.
• Sync across your own devices should be included and private.
• Your notes are objects with properties: people, books, tasks, projects.
• You like Notion's model and dislike Notion's servers.

Choose Obsidian if

• You want files you can read in any editor, indefinitely.
• Your material is writing and links rather than structured records.
• You want plugins, or a community that has already solved your problem.
• You are content to solve sync yourself, or to pay for it.

Neither is a capture tool

Both are desk-shaped applications for deliberate work. Both open in seconds rather than instantly on mobile, and both assume the thought has already survived long enough to be written properly.

If your actual bottleneck is that ideas arrive while you are walking and never reach any app, a stronger vault does not help — nothing is going in. That gap is what Clair Mind is built for: one-gesture capture on the phone, private, with connections drawn afterwards.

Related: Obsidian vs Logseq, Heptabase vs Obsidian, Joplin vs Obsidian, and the wider note app comparisons.