Ampersand vs
Obsidian
Both keep your notes as plain Markdown in a folder you own. The difference is whether the rest of the app arrives assembled.
Obsidian is the app Ampersand is most often measured against, and for good reason: the two agree about the thing that matters most. Your notes are ordinary Markdown files in an ordinary folder. No database, no account, no export step between you and your own writing. If either company disappeared tomorrow, your library would open in any text editor on any machine, and that is not a small thing to have in common.
The disagreement is about what an app should arrive with. Obsidian is a platform: a fast, careful core, and then roughly 6,900 community plugins that turn it into whatever you need. The good Obsidian setup is the one you built. That is genuinely a feature — it is why people who love Obsidian love it that much — and it is also a standing commitment, because a configuration made of thirty third-party plugins is a thing you maintain, and update day is when you find out which of them still work together.
Ampersand takes the other side of that trade. The things most people reach for a plugin to get — a real PDF, an editable Word file, encryption, AI, a history of every save — are written as first-party features, tested together, and shipped as one app that updates as one app. You give up the long tail. Nothing here matches a plugin ecosystem that size, and if the thing you need is specific enough, Obsidian is where someone has already built it.
Ampersand and Obsidian, row by row
Every row states what both apps do. A dot marks whichever one leads — including the rows Obsidian takes.
| Feature | Ampersand | Obsidian |
|---|---|---|
| Price | Free, then a one-time $29 (regularly $49) for export, AI agents, encryption and extra vaults. Never a subscription. | Advantage: Obsidian.Free, with nothing switched off in the app itself. The optional add-ons are subscriptions: Sync from $4 a month, Publish from $8 a month per site. |
| Where notes live | A folder you pick. Plain .md files with optional YAML frontmatter. | A folder you pick — a vault of plain .md files, plus a hidden .obsidian config folder. |
| Works offline | Everything except cloud AI, and running a local model removes even that. | Everything. Editing, search, the graph and plugins all work with no network at all. |
| Platforms | macOS 14+, Windows 10+ and Linux, on both Intel/AMD and ARM. There is no phone app yet. | Advantage: Obsidian.macOS, Windows, Linux, iOS and Android — all official, all first-party. |
| Plugins | None. What ships is what you get, and it is the same app for everybody. | Advantage: Obsidian.Around 6,900 community plugins and 700 themes against a documented API. The largest ecosystem in the category by a wide margin. |
| Structured content | Advantage: Ampersand.Notion-style blocks over plain Markdown: tables whose cells take spreadsheet formulas, Mermaid diagrams, Vega charts, KaTeX maths, live calculation blocks with units and currency, callouts and highlighted code — all round-tripping as ordinary .md. | A lot of this is native and good: Mermaid, KaTeX maths inline and block, callouts in thirteen GitHub-alert styles, and Prism-highlighted code across more than 200 languages. Tables are GFM tables with no cell formulas, and there are no charts and no live calculation. |
| Encryption | Advantage: Ampersand.Per-note, in the app, using age (X25519 + ChaCha20-Poly1305) under one vault passphrase. Unlocking your own notes is never gated behind a licence. | Nothing built in. Local encryption exists only as a community plugin, which is not vendor-supported. |
| Export | Advantage: Ampersand.Vector PDF from a real layout engine, editable Word with native equations and highlighted code, self-contained HTML, and Markdown. | PDF, and only PDF, styled by whichever theme the vault is using. Word, HTML and the rest need community plugins. |
| AI | Advantage: Ampersand.Built in and bring-your-own-key: Claude, OpenAI, Gemini, Apple Intelligence, local models through Ollama, and CLI agents. | Nothing official. Every AI feature is a community plugin, most of them bring-your-own-key, some pointing at local models. |
| Search | Full text across the whole vault, with case-sensitive, whole-word and regex toggles, and #tags, wiki-links and backlinks indexed alongside it. It covers encrypted notes too while the vault is unlocked. It does not read text inside images or PDFs. | Full text, local and entirely offline, with regex, a case-sensitivity toggle and a genuinely good query language — file:, path:, content: and tag: operators, combined with booleans. Core search does not index the contents of PDFs or images either. |
| Sync | None of our own. Point it at iCloud Drive, Dropbox, Syncthing or a git repo — a vault is just a folder. | Advantage: Obsidian.Optional first-party sync, end-to-end encrypted, from $4 a month per user. Bring-your-own works too, exactly as it does here. |
| Version history | Advantage: Ampersand.Every save, snapshotted into a git repository kept outside the vault, with a timeline and a line-by-line diff. Browsing and diffing are free; one-click restore is Pro. You set how long it keeps. | Two mechanisms. The free File Recovery core plugin keeps device-local snapshots — every five minutes for seven days by default, both configurable — with no diff view built in. The paid Sync add-on adds per-note history with a diff, held server-side and kept for a month on Standard or twelve on Plus. |
| Meeting recording | Advantage: Ampersand.Records a meeting and transcribes it on your own Mac with a local Whisper model, then writes the note. macOS only, and part of Pro. | Nothing built in. |
| Publishing | A share link you control: expiry of 7, 30 or 90 days or never; an optional password, or an email allowlist that can cover a whole domain; and a choice of how much a chat app may preview. Never indexed, no scripts, and changing the password signs every existing reader out. Pro; taking a note down never is. | Obsidian Publish builds a real public site with backlinks and search, from $8 a month per site — a different product for a different job, and better at that job than anything here. Its password is site-wide rather than per-note, with no expiry and no way to name who may read, and its pages are indexable unless you switch that off. |
| Real-time collaboration | None. | None official. Third-party plugins attempt it; the vendor ships nothing. |
| Open source | No. The encryption is the standard age format, so the files outlive the app either way. | No — the core app is closed-source freeware. The plugin API and most plugins are open. |
Across these 16 rows, Ampersand leads 6, Obsidian leads 4, and 6 are a draw. The dot marks the leader. Where Obsidian leads, the dot is on its side of the table.
Ampersand is desktop-only today. An app for iPhone and iPad is in development and not yet released. The roadmap is where that gets announced.
Obsidian details checked against its own pricing and documentation pages on . If something here has gone out of date, tell us and we will fix it.
Where Ampersand pulls ahead
Export that never goes through a browser
PDFs are laid out by a real vector engine, not printed from a web page, with running headers, controlled page breaks and proper maths. Word export is genuinely editable — native equations, real styles, syntax-highlighted code — rather than a document full of images.
Encryption in the app, not in a plugin
Lock a note and its body is age-encrypted on disk under one vault passphrase, unlocked with Touch ID on a Mac. It is a first-party feature with a recovery kit, and decrypting your own notes is never gated behind a licence, now or if you stop paying.
AI you do not have to assemble
Claude, OpenAI, Gemini, Apple Intelligence, a local Ollama model or a CLI agent — configured once, routed per feature, and bring-your-own-key throughout, so you pay your provider directly and we take no cut. A local model keeps the whole thing on your machine.
Meetings recorded and transcribed on your Mac
Record a call or a room, and a local Whisper model turns it into a note with a summary, the decisions and the action items. No bot joins the call, nothing is uploaded, and the audio is deleted once the transcript exists unless you ask to keep it.
Where Obsidian is the better tool
Every page here names at least two, because Obsidian genuinely has them and a comparison that pretended otherwise would not be worth reading.
Around 6,900 plugins
Nothing in Ampersand comes close, and nothing will. If what you need is specific — a Zotero bridge, a spaced-repetition system, a particular flavour of Kanban — somebody has already built it for Obsidian, and that is a real reason to use it.
Apps for your phone
Obsidian ships official iOS and Android apps with genuine feature parity, including plugins. Ampersand has no phone app at all today. If you capture and read on a phone as much as you write on a laptop, this one difference may decide it.
A free tier with nothing switched off
The Obsidian app is free and complete — no feature gates, no upgrade prompts, no licence needed even for work. Ampersand is free to use but puts export, AI agents and encryption behind a one-time payment.
End-to-end encrypted sync you can just buy
Obsidian Sync is $4 a month, works across every platform including phones, and encrypts with a key the company says it does not hold. Ampersand has no sync service of its own — you bring iCloud Drive, Dropbox or git and set it up yourself.
Which one should you use?
Choose Obsidian if
you want the largest plugin ecosystem in the category and enjoy assembling your own setup, you read and capture on a phone as much as you write on a desktop, or you want a complete app that costs nothing and stays that way. Obsidian is an excellent piece of software and none of those is a consolation prize.
Choose Ampersand if
you want the same plain files with the heavy tools already in the box — a real PDF, an editable Word file, encryption, AI, meeting transcription — and you would rather pay once for an app that updates as one piece than maintain a configuration of thirty plugins that update separately.
Moving from Obsidian
Asked plainly
Is Ampersand a good Obsidian alternative?
It is a close one, because both store your notes as plain Markdown files in a folder you control, with no account and no database. The practical difference is that Obsidian expects you to add features through its roughly 6,900 community plugins, while Ampersand ships PDF and Word export, AI, per-note encryption, version history and meeting transcription as built-in features. If you want a large plugin ecosystem or a phone app, Obsidian is still the better choice.
Can I open the same folder in both Ampersand and Obsidian?
Yes. Both apps read and write plain .md files in an ordinary folder, so you can point Ampersand at an existing Obsidian vault and keep using both. Each app keeps its own settings in a hidden subfolder and leaves the other one alone. Wiki-links, tags and frontmatter are shared conventions and work in both. The one caveat is that a note you encrypt in Ampersand becomes a .md.age file, which Obsidian cannot read until you decrypt it again.
Does Ampersand have plugins like Obsidian?
No, and that is a deliberate trade rather than a gap we intend to close soon. Ampersand ships the capabilities people most often install plugins for — export, AI, encryption, version history, diagrams, charts, spreadsheet-style table formulas — as first-party features that are tested together and updated as one app. The cost is the long tail: if the feature you need is niche, Obsidian is where someone has already written it.
Is Ampersand free like Obsidian?
Ampersand is free to use for as long as you like, with the full editor, search, wiki-links, backlinks, version history and Markdown export. Obsidian is more generous at the free tier, because its app has no feature gates at all. Ampersand Pro is a one-time $29 (regularly $49) that unlocks export to PDF, Word and HTML, AI agents, per-note encryption and multiple vaults. There is no subscription in either app for the core product.
Which is better for privacy, Ampersand or Obsidian?
Both are strong, in slightly different places. Neither requires an account, and both keep your notes as local files that no company holds. Obsidian offers end-to-end encrypted sync that it says it cannot decrypt, which Ampersand has no equivalent of. Ampersand encrypts individual notes on disk with age as a built-in feature, where Obsidian leaves that to a community plugin. Ampersand sends one anonymous count per day that you can switch off, and neither app tracks what you write.
Other alternatives
Stop reading tables.
Open the app.
Ampersand is free to start and there is no account to make. Point it at the folder your notes are already in — including the one Obsidian keeps them in — and see for yourself.
Free to start · Mac, Windows & Linux · No account required