Every alternative,
honestly.

It depends on what you want beyond the writing. Obsidian has by far the largest plugin ecosystem and apps on every platform including phones. Typora is the cleanest single-window Markdown editor and costs $14.99 once. iA Writer is the most typographically careful and the most minimal. Logseq and Joplin are free and open source. Ampersand is the one that ships the heavy tools — vector PDF and Word export, bring-your-own-key AI, per-note encryption, version history and on-device meeting transcription — as built-in features rather than plugins. All of them keep your writing on your own machine.

Obsidian, Typora, iA Writer and Ampersand all store ordinary .md files in a folder you choose, which means you can open, edit, back up or grep them with any other tool. Logseq does too, but only in its original file-based version — its newer 2.0 database version keeps notes in SQLite instead. Joplin and Bear are often assumed to be plain-file apps and are not: both write Markdown-flavoured content into a local database, so getting your notes out means running an export. Notion, Craft, Apple Notes and Evernote are proprietary stores with no plain-text equivalent on disk at all.

Fewer than people assume. Ampersand encrypts individual notes on disk with age (X25519 with ChaCha20-Poly1305) under one passphrase per vault. Bear can lock individual notes with AES-GCM, but only on its paid tier. Apple Notes has Locked Notes, which encrypts a note and its attachments and is free. Obsidian and Logseq have no built-in local encryption at all. Joplin has excellent free end-to-end encryption for sync, but its own forum documents that the local database is not encrypted at rest. Ulysses offers a Password Lock, which its documentation describes as access control rather than encryption.

Several. Obsidian's app is free with no feature gates, though its Sync and Publish add-ons are subscriptions. Logseq and Joplin are free and open source, funded by donations and optional hosted sync. Typora is $14.99 once, and iA Writer is a one-time purchase per platform. Ampersand is free to use, and Ampersand Pro is a one-time $29 launch price (regularly $49) that unlocks export, AI agents and encryption. Bear, Ulysses, Craft, Notion and Evernote are all subscription products.

The controls differ far more than the feature lists suggest. Ampersand publishes a note to an unguessable link you can put a password on, or restrict to named email addresses or a whole domain, with an expiry of 7, 30 or 90 days or never, and it is never indexed. Craft is the closest match, offering a passcode, an expiry date and an email-domain restriction on a published document. Obsidian Publish builds a full public site from $8 a month, but its password covers the whole site rather than a page and there is no expiry. Notion has no password on a published page on any plan, including Enterprise — narrowing access there means inviting someone as a guest, who then needs a Notion account. Joplin publishes a public read-only link through its own sync service, though the copy is decrypted server-side and it cannot be used with end-to-end encryption. Bear has no sharing feature at all.

That depends on which part of Obsidian you are replacing. If it is the plugin ecosystem, honestly nothing replaces it — around 6,900 community plugins is not a number any competitor is close to. If what you want is the plain-Markdown-in-a-folder model with fewer moving parts, Ampersand, Typora and iA Writer all offer it, with Ampersand adding export, AI, encryption and version history as built-in features. If you want free and open source, Logseq and Joplin are the ones to look at, though Logseq is an outliner rather than a document editor.

For someone who mainly writes prose rather than managing databases, the strongest alternatives are the ones built around documents rather than blocks in a cloud. Ulysses and iA Writer are the most focused pure writing tools on Apple platforms. Ampersand keeps the block editor and slash commands that make Notion pleasant to write in, but stores everything as plain Markdown files on your own disk and works fully offline. Obsidian is the choice if you want a large plugin ecosystem. The one thing none of them replaces is Notion’s real-time collaboration, which remains genuinely best in class.

Yes, and it is a structural requirement rather than an editorial promise. Every comparison page must name at least two things the other app does better than Ampersand, and that requirement is a type in the source code, so a page that cannot meet it fails to build. The score printed under each comparison table is counted from the rows rather than written by hand, so it moves whenever a row moves. Several of these apps beat Ampersand on things that matter a great deal, including plugin ecosystems, phone apps, real-time collaboration and price.