Syncthing deserves better than a comparison written to lose. It is one of the most respected projects in self-hosting — around 89,000 stars, released under MPL-2.0, actively maintained, and trusted by people who trust almost nothing. This page is written by the people who give away the alternative, so read the last section accordingly.
The one difference that decides it#
Syncthing is peer-to-peer. There is no server in the middle; devices talk to each other directly. Its own documentation puts the consequence plainly: it "exchanges your data across your machines as soon as they are online at the same time."
A sync server is the thing in the middle. It is always on, so every device syncs against it whenever that device happens to be awake, and nothing waits for anything else.
For two desktops that are both on most of the day, that difference barely matters. For a laptop and a phone, it is the whole question. Edit a note on your phone on the train, close the app, and open the laptop at home: with Syncthing, the change only moves if both were reachable at some point in between. With a server, the phone pushed it the moment you made it.
Where Syncthing is the better choice#
- It is open source. MPL-2.0, with the source in public. The server on this site is free but its source is not published — said plainly in the licence. If you require open source, that settles it, and it should.
- There is no server to run. If your devices are online together often enough, you need nothing but the app on each of them.
- It syncs any folder, not just a vault. Photos, config, a code directory — one tool for all of it.
- It is mature. Over a decade of hard-won edge cases, and a community that has seen every failure mode twice.
Where a server is the better fit for an Obsidian vault#
- Devices that are never awake together. The phone-and-laptop case above.
- iPhone and iPad. From Syncthing's FAQ: "There are no plans by the current Syncthing team to officially support iOS in the foreseeable future." Third-party clients exist, one of them commercial.
- Android, with a caveat worth knowing. The official Syncthing Android app was discontinued in December 2024 and its repository archived. A community fork, Syncthing-Fork, carries on and is actively maintained — so Android is covered, just no longer by the Syncthing team.
- A browser. The server serves the vault over HTTP, so a machine without Obsidian can still open and edit notes. Syncthing's web interface configures the sync; it does not show you your files.
- History and guard rails in one place. Every version on the server, with restore, and a pause that asks before a pull would delete an unusual number of files — rather than one device's mistake propagating everywhere.
- Different folders on different devices. Per-device ignore patterns and a task-only workspace, so a phone can carry part of a large vault.
The honest middle: Syncthing with an always-on node#
Most experienced Syncthing users already solved the "online at the same time" problem, by adding a device that never sleeps — a NAS, a Pi, a small VPS — running Syncthing as one more peer. Every other device syncs with that one, and it behaves a lot like a server.
That closes most of the gap. If you already run that setup and it works, this page is not an argument for switching. What it does not give you is the browser access, the per-device partial sync, or the history in one place — but you may not need any of those.
When two devices disagree#
Both keep the losing version rather than throwing it away, which is the part that matters most:
- Syncthing writes the loser next to the original as a
.sync-conflict-…copy, which you resolve by hand. - The server keeps the loser in version history, so "the wrong one won" is a restore, and the client can also drop a copy next to the file locally.
One thing is true of both and worth doing either way: keep .obsidian out of
sync, or at least .obsidian/plugins/*/data.json and workspace.json. Those
files are rewritten in the background, and they conflict silently.
The part you should weigh against us#
We give the server away because we sell an Obsidian task-manager plugin, and a server you can run yourself makes "your data is yours" a checkable claim. So we have a reason to want you here rather than on Syncthing.
The counterweight is that the plugin's free tier is a complete sync client — you can run this server for years and never pay us — and that Syncthing is genuinely good. If you are already happy on Syncthing, stay. If a phone keeps missing your changes, you now know why.