Obsidian vs RemNote: pricing, features and which to choose

Obsidian is a desktop and mobile note-taking app made by Dynalist Inc., a small independent company founded by Shida Li and Erica Xu, and first released in 2020. It runs on Windows, macOS, Linux, iOS and Android. Notes live in a vault, which is a folder of plain Markdown files on your device, so they open in any text editor and outlast the app. Obsidian takes no venture capital and calls itself 100 percent user-supported. In February 2025 it made the commercial license optional, and the company says people at more than 10,000 organizations, including Amazon and Google, use it for work. Version 1.15 shipped in October 2026.

Writing happens in a Markdown editor with live preview. Typing double brackets links one note to another, and every note shows its backlinks, so ideas connect without a fixed folder hierarchy. The graph view draws those links as a network. Canvas gives an infinite board for arranging notes, images and web pages, and Bases, a core plugin added in 2025, turns notes with properties into sortable tables, cards or maps that work like a lightweight database. Daily notes, templates and tags cover journaling and task capture. The 1.15 mobile release added voice Quick Capture with live transcription on iOS 26, and PDF export on mobile.

Obsidian's flexibility is also its main drawback. A new vault is a blank editor, and building a useful system takes time and plugin choices. Real-time collaboration is limited compared with Notion, Microsoft Loop or Google Docs, and community plugins vary in quality and security. Notion suits teams that want shared databases and built-in AI. Logseq, which is open source, offers an outliner model with similar local files. Anytype offers local-first, encrypted notes with object-based structure. Pick Obsidian if you want notes that remain usable files in 20 years and are willing to add AI yourself; pick Notion for team wikis.

RemNote is a study app built around one idea: the notes you take should become the material you review. It was founded by Martin Schneider, who leads the company as CEO, and it is aimed at students in medicine, law, languages and other subjects with heavy memorization, as well as lifelong learners. Notes are written as nested bullet points, and any line can be turned into a flashcard with simple syntax. Those cards then enter a spaced repetition queue that schedules reviews shortly before you are likely to forget. Because notes and cards live in the same place, editing a note updates its card, and every card links back to its context.

The note side works like an outliner. Each bullet, called a Rem, can be referenced from other pages, tagged and nested, which builds a linked knowledge base over a semester. Students can import and annotate PDFs, highlight text and create cards from highlights, add images and use image occlusion cards that hide parts of a diagram for anatomy or maps. Handwritten documents are supported for tablet users. An exam scheduler lets you set a test date so reviews are paced toward it. RemNote runs on the web and has desktop and mobile apps, and the free plan syncs across an unlimited number of devices.

RemNote's strengths are the tight link between notes and flashcards, a mature spaced repetition scheduler, PDF annotation that feeds cards, and an AI tutor grounded in your own material. Its weaknesses are a learning curve for the outliner and card syntax, tight document limits on the free plan and AI features that push heavy users toward Pro+AI. Anki is the free, highly customizable flashcard standard. Quizlet suits quick study sets. Knowt turns notes into AI flashcards. Obsidian and Logseq are general note apps with flashcard plugins. Choose RemNote if you want to write notes and review them with spaced repetition in one app.