Obsidian vs Outline: what their users struggle with

Collaboration is where they differ most: 0 of the 32 Obsidian reports on file (all years) against 9 of the 66 Outline reports, each linked to where it was said. The table below counts only the recent reports.

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Every count in this table is of open reports in the recent window (Obsidian since 2023-11, Outline since 2023-11); older and fixed reports are not counted. The counts measure how much public discussion exists for each product, not which is better: a popular tool collects more reports.

Problems mostly raised about Obsidian

• Paid Sync is difficult to avoid on iOS · Pricing & plans · Annoyance
• Obsidian Sync fails to sync reliably · Reliability & bugs · Annoyance
• Running an Obsidian vault in a jail can break paths and lose state · Reliability & bugs · Annoyance
• Git plugin has erased history and notes · Reliability & bugs · Blocks work
• Cannot manually sort notes · UI & usability · Annoyance

Problems mostly raised about Outline

• Default themes give limited formatting and less readable documents · Customization · Annoyance
• Sub-documents cannot have fewer permissions than their parent · Permissions & security · Blocks work
• No automatic mapping of LDAP/OIDC groups to Outline groups · Permissions & security · Annoyance
• Malformed editor content makes documents and revision APIs unusable · Reliability & bugs · Blocks work
• Document history attributes edits to the wrong colleague · Reliability & bugs · Annoyance

Go further

Open Obsidian and Outline in the compare tool to filter by area and severity, Obsidian alternatives, Outline alternatives, or the state of workspace and files.

How the data is built. A theme is a group of reports about the same problem; unique means not matched to a theme on the other product.