Notion vs Obsidian vs Craft: what the free tier actually includes (2026)

Obsidian's free tier isn't really a free *tier* in the usual sense — it's just the app, complete, no feature gate, forever. The only thing behind a paywall is Sync, $4 a month, which exists purely because keeping your notes updated across devices costs Obsidian real server bandwidth; the note-taking itself was never metered to begin with. That's a meaningfully different promise than what Notion or Craft are offering.

Notion's free plan is generous if you're the only person using it — unlimited pages, real structure — but starts capping you the moment you add guests, upload much in the way of files, or want more than a shallow slice of page history. Craft's free plan is narrower still, limiting blocks and storage in a way that pushes most real use toward its paid tier fairly quickly.

| Tool | Free tier | Paid plan | AI |
|---|---|---|---|
| Obsidian | full app, unlimited notes, local files | Sync — $4/mo · Publish — $8/mo | bring your own via plugins |
| Notion | unlimited pages solo; limited guests, uploads, history | Plus — $10/user/mo | credit-based, billed on top |
| Craft | limited blocks + storage | ~$5/user/mo (Personal Pro) | included in paid |

The change worth flagging this year is Notion moving AI to a credit-based system billed on top of the base subscription — "Notion with AI" stopped being a flat number and became a variable one, which makes budgeting for a team noticeably harder than it used to be. Obsidian didn't touch its model at all: the app is still free, Sync is still $4, and AI is whatever you bolt on yourself through the plugin ecosystem, for better or worse.

What actually separates these three has less to do with price than with where your notes live and who else needs to see them. Obsidian stores plain-text Markdown files on your own disk — you own them permanently, no export required, and a genuinely enormous plugin ecosystem lets you build the tool around your own workflow rather than the other way around. What it doesn't do well is real-time collaboration, which is precisely Notion's strength: databases, shared workspaces, and lightweight project tracking that a team can build on together, with the free tier working fine for a solo user who just wants more structure than a blank page. Craft's case is narrower and more aesthetic — it's simply the nicest writing and document interface of the three, especially on Apple hardware, and that's reason enough for people who care how the page feels under their hands, not just what it stores.

If you want a personal knowledge base you'll still be able to open in ten years regardless of what happens to the company behind it, Obsidian is the only one of the three built around that guarantee. If the job is a shared team workspace, Notion is worth the per-seat cost — just watch the metered AI on an invoice. And if you're buying this mainly for how it feels to write in, that's Craft's whole reason to exist.