Tana vs Obsidian: Schema or a folder (2026)

Tag a node in Tana and it acquires fields, templates, and views. The outline stops being text and starts behaving like a database you happen to type into, and querying a supertag returns a real collection rather than a search result. Ex-Roam power users moved to Tana in numbers for exactly this reason.

Obsidian has no schema. It has wikilinks, backlinks, tags, a graph view, and 2,000-plus community plugins, some of which get partway there: Dataview queries frontmatter as if it were a table, Templater stamps out new notes. That is convention held together by plugins rather than structure enforced by the app, and nothing validates it. Tana's own documented weakness is the flip side: a steep learning curve for the node and supertag model, listed as widely reported.

Tana stores a proprietary node graph in its cloud and its export options are limited. That combination deserves thought before you pour two years of thinking into it, because the exit is narrower than the entrance and a supertag's structure has no obvious representation outside Tana.

An Obsidian vault is a folder. One note, one .md file, named by you, sitting in directories you made. Nothing is imported when you open it and nothing is converted when you close it. ripgrep searches it, Pandoc converts it, another editor opens it while Obsidian is running. Obsidian is closed source, but the format is not, and that is the distinction that matters when the question is what happens to your notes if the company changes.

Tana added desktop offline support in late 2025, which fixed a real problem. Mobile is still the weak spot: the app can capture offline but cannot show you content you already have, so a commute underground finds that limit quickly. Tana is a web application on every platform it ships to.

Obsidian works offline everywhere by default, because the vault is a local folder on all five platforms including iOS and Android. Its own weakness list notes the mobile app is slow to load large vaults, and mobile plugin compatibility is a recurring problem. A slow local app still beats an app that cannot read notes you already have.

Tana's AI is not decoration. Meeting transcription, agents, and summaries run against structured nodes, so the output lands somewhere the app already understands. If you take meetings for a living, this is the feature that justifies the subscription and Obsidian has no answer to it.

Obsidian ships no AI. Community plugins wire it to external models, with the quality and upkeep that implies, and some of them are good. The core app is a markdown editor with links. Whether that is a gap or a relief depends entirely on how you work, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest in either direction.

Tana is free up to roughly 20,000 nodes, then Plus is $8-10 a month and Pro is $20. That step up from the free tier is something Tana's users criticise openly. Sync is included, because sync is the product.

Obsidian is free, including commercial use since February 2025, with an optional $50 per user per year commercial licence. Its Sync service is $4-5 a month and Publish is $8-10. Free alternatives are iCloud, Syncthing, or the community git plugin, which carries documented index.lock errors, line-ending conflicts, and unstable merge handling on mobile. So Obsidian is cheaper and its cheapest sync route is the least reliable part of it.

Tana is free to roughly 20,000 nodes, then $8-10 a month for Plus and $20 for Pro, which is $96 to $240 a year. Obsidian is free for personal and commercial use, so the only recurring cost is Sync at $4-5 a month if you want it, or nothing if you sync with iCloud or Syncthing. Three years works out near $288 to $720 on Tana against zero to $180 on Obsidian. Valutorio is a paid Mac App Store app with sync as a separate optional subscription, so it is not the cheap seat on this page either. Tana's price buys hosting, AI, and structure, which is real work; whether it is worth $240 a year is the calculation its own users argue about publicly.