I’m currently trying out Obsidian after 3 years on Ulysses. In hindsight, I maybe wasn’t the target audience for Ulysses - although I do write a lot of blog posts, Ulysses is supposed to also work for people who are writing full-length novels, which is a completely different experience.
I definitely do think I fit into the target audience for Obsidian though. My initial impression of it is that there is a lot it can do, if you are willing to put in the time to add a million different plugins and set up the configuration yourself. Basically a programmer’s dream, albeit quite the time sink.
I’m finding adding new notes is such a smooth experience, especially on Obsidian’s mobile app. Its quick switcher lets you start typing in a search bar - which will show any pages that match your query and/or can also be used as the title of your new note.
By comparison, Ulysses just has a regular “New sheet” functionality which opens a new page to type into.
Now with Ulysses, it will add your new notes to an inbox, so you can figure out where it’s sorted later. I sort of used this feature - although sometimes my inbox just ends up as a dumping ground. It looks like Obsidian doesn’t have an equivalent. I think I don’t have strong opinions either way, but we’ll see how the organisation of my notes fares over time.
💡D has helpfully noted in the comments below that you can send your notes to a specific folder in Settings > Files and Links > Default location for new notes - so you could create an inbox folder and achieve the same effect here.
Being able to write my notes with Markdown is a must have feature for me. I don’t like block formatting like Notion has. Both Ulysses and Obsidian are good at markdown editing.
Ulysses is just plain Markdown - when you bold text, for example, as you view the text in the editor it will continued to be bolded **like this**.
On the other hand, Obsidian has what they call a “Live preview” editor, which is quite smart actually. You start typing with Markdown, but once you’re finished with bolding the text (for example) the text just becomes bolded like this, and it’s only when you go back to edit the text that you can see the Markdown syntax again. I really like this feature.
Writing posts about hiking usually means I’ll import 10 - 30 photos per hike. I change the file name for these, and add a caption and alt text to each.
With Ulysses, it requires a couple more clicks - which in itself isn’t so bad, but becomes quite tedious after 30 photos. You have to click to open the photo, click to edit the caption, and if you want to edit the file name you first have to click a little plus icon to bring it up as an extra option.
Obsidian on the other hand uses Markdown which feels a tiny bit smoother, since you can directly edit the alt text and caption without much work. If you want to change the image’s name, you’ll need to use its file explorer and right-click to change, which will automatically update the Markdown too.
By default, Obsidian will render the image at full-size. I quite like that Ulysses has the image posted as a small square preview. But luckily you can have this same behaviour in Obsidian by adding some custom CSS.
Now Ulysses doesn’t support this feature, so I’ve never used it, but Obsidian does.
For now, the only case I use this for is organising hikes - I’ll have a hiking-plans folder, and a ⭐ 2025 hikes file which I use as an index - I add the star emoji because then that puts the file at the top of the folder.
I then link out to all the separate hike plan pages from within that file.
Ulysses’s keywords feature lets you right-click a post and add keywords to it, which basically function the same as tags. I’ll be honest, I didn’t really utilise this feature too much.
Obsidian provides tag support within each post, and by hitting the # key it will auto-complete tags for you, which is handy. The mobile app even has a specific tag button where you can get a list of all your tags.
I’ll say I originally started off using this feature a little bit, by adding #draft to certain blog posts that were in draft mode, but as of now I’m back to not using it.
Instead of using Ulysses’s tags, I would use its starring feature and just star all of my in progress notes. Obsidian also has a bookmarking feature - I’m using it the same way I used Ulysses, to note all the posts that are in draft.
Obsidian’s killer feature is how extensible it is with all its plugins. I’m only using a couple at the moment, but finding them to be quite useful. e.g. I have one that automatically updates the updated date whenever I edit a note.
The biggest productivity boost Obsidian has provided me is how easy it makes it to write my blog posts in Obsidian, and do a one-way sync to my Github repository where I store my blog. Actually - the post you are reading right now lives in my Obsidian vault! I go into how I did this in in my digital garden post.
Ulysses and Obsidian both offer syncing with iCloud. Obsidian also does have paid version ($4 a month) which provides better syncing support, but I’ll just be be comparing the iCloud versions here.
From my experience so far, Obsidian is worse. When I first started using it, I had an experience where I started a note on my laptop, and then continued it on my phone while I was out during the day. When I got home and opened my laptop, I started editing the laptop version and then noticed it was missing all the changes from my phone… then I went to my phone and saw it had synced to the laptop version. Luckily, I could press the “undo” button on my phone and it brought the changes back, but this wasn’t great.
Luckily that’s only happened the once for me, but I oftentimes get an “Obsidian is indexing. This should only happen once” message, where I can’t open up notes for about 30 seconds. It’s frustrating because although the message says it should happen only once, it happens quite a bit.
Now I don’t want to say that definitively, Obsidian is better than Ulysses - I suspect there are still specific use cases where Ulysses wins. However I’ll end this by saying that I think Obsidian is the better text editor for me personally.
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