Obsidian Sync is a good product, supported by the team that makes the app, and for a lot of people it is the right answer. This page exists because the comparison is usually written by someone selling one side, and here that someone is us.
What each costs#
| Self-hosted | Obsidian Sync Standard | Obsidian Sync Plus | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Price | Free — you provide the machine | $4/mo billed yearly, $5/mo monthly | $8/mo billed yearly, $10/mo monthly |
| Who operates it | You | The Obsidian team | The Obsidian team |
| Where the notes sit | Your disk | Their servers | Their servers |
| Support when it breaks | Your evening | Their support | Their support |
That third row is the whole argument, in both directions.
Where Obsidian Sync is the better choice#
- You do not want to run a server. That is not laziness; it is a correct reading of what a server costs over years. Certificates expire, disks fill, distributions stop shipping security updates.
- You want someone to be responsible. With a subscription there is a company whose job it is when sync fails. Self-hosting means that person is you, at eleven at night, on holiday.
- It is first-party. It is built by the people who build the app, it ships when the app ships, and it will not break because an API changed underneath.
- The price is not the problem for you. $4 a month against the hours a homelab costs is an easy trade for most people, and pretending otherwise is dishonest.
Where self-hosting wins#
- The notes never leave your machine. Not encrypted on someone else's disk — simply not there. For some people this is a preference; for others it is a policy they have to satisfy.
- The price does not move. There is no plan to be restructured and no per- seat count to grow into. A household or a small team costs the same as one person: nothing.
- Storage is whatever your disk is. No tier to outgrow, no charge for the 10 GB of scanned PDFs you keep meaning to sort.
- You get a browser app as well. The container serves the vault over HTTP, so a machine without Obsidian can still read and edit it.
- The exit is a script. See what happens when you want out. This matters more than it sounds when the vendor is one person.
The part you should weigh against us#
We give the server away. That is not generosity — it is that we sell an Obsidian task-manager plugin, and a server proving "your data is yours" makes that plugin credible in a way marketing copy cannot.
So read the section above knowing we have a reason to want you self-hosting. The counterweight: the plugin's free tier is a complete sync client, so you can run this server for years, sync your entire vault, and never pay us a thing. That is a deliberate design, and it is written into the licence rather than left as a promise.
The honest summary#
If you are already running a NAS, a Pi or a VPS, self-hosting costs you one evening and then nothing. If you are not, a subscription is probably cheaper than the hobby you are about to acquire.