Obsidian & Notion praise
Users are again calling Obsidian and Notion effective 'second brains' for idea connections, long‑form thinking, and brain dumps — social posts highlight them as the go‑to tools for building knowledge systems. (x.com)
Notion publicly announced it passed 100 million users in a company blog post celebrating the milestone on Sept. 3, 2024, a scale that helps explain why people point to Notion when building shared or solo “second‑brain” systems. (notion.com) Obsidian’s ecosystem shows heavy community activity: Obsidian Hub data lists 21 community plugins with more than 100,000 downloads and 155 plugins with over 10,000 downloads, signaling widespread plugin-driven customization around long‑form note workflows. (publish.obsidian.md) Independent summaries peg Obsidian’s audience in the low millions and show divergent revenue estimates—one industry history cites roughly 1.5 million monthly active users and ~$25M ARR by mid‑2025, while SaaS trackers reported about $2M in revenue for 2025—underscoring that Obsidian’s growth is real but differently reported across sources. (taskade.com) Notion’s AI rollout has been a major adoption vector: Notion AI hit 1 million users in its first month after April 2023 and was integrated into an estimated 65% of Notion workspaces by Q4 2023, driving faster workspace growth and greater daily usage. (worldmetrics.org) Community forums, how‑to guides and comparison pieces consistently split use cases—Obsidian is recommended for local, Markdown‑first, backlink‑centric knowledge graphs and long‑form thinking, while Notion is recommended for database‑driven dashboards, team wikis and enterprise onboarding. (forum.obsidian.md) Analysts and recent roundups say the next phase is AI‑first “second brains”: 2026 reviews rank tools by AI workflows and mention newcomers and hybrids (AFFiNE, AI plugins) even as Obsidian and Notion expand AI integrations and templates for connecting notes to agents. (affine.pro)
