which note-taking app should you choose should it be obsidian or should it be bare well this video will show you exactly which app suites the best your needs hey everyone matt giaro here and on this channel i help content creators take their ideas and actually turn it into an income so if that sounds like you hit the subscribe button now and before digging deeper into today's video be sure to check out the first link in the description which will give you access to a free pdf that will give you three powerful tips to supercharge your note-taking system and this no matter which app you're using so with that being said let's just dive deeper into today's video so what you have to understand is that obsidian works on all interfaces which means that obsidian works on windows it works on android it works on the apple ecosystem but bear is only available on the apple ecosystem which means that this comparison will only focus on the user experience and the different features that are available on the apple ecosystem so let's just dive deeper right now into the shared features because you're going to see that there are a lot of similar things between those apps so the first thing i wanted to mention here is that both apps actually have an offline mode which means that you can access your notes without the need being connected to the internet which is quite appreciable especially if you want to think clearly and don't want to be bogged down in all the noise of being connected 24 7. second point which is highly appreciable also is that both apps on the apple ecosystem are blazing fast which means that you won't have to wait several seconds in order to launch the app and also start writing actually allow you to also cloud sync your notes another thing is that both apps allow cloud syncing which means that your notes will be automatically backed up into the cloud so when it comes to bear what you have to understand it bear only works on the apple ecosystem and only with icloud which means that your icloud account will also store your notes when it comes to obsidian we're going to see the different option that you have later on in this video and when it comes to bayer cloud syncing is only available on the paid plan which costs around 15 bucks per year another appreciable thing is that you can easily add attachments to your notes on obsidian and on bare those can be audio files those can be pdfs those can also be images and finally both apps actually allow you to export your note easily and this is very important for your long term vision when it comes to reno's because you don't want to be locked down into one specific ecosystem in case you just want to change your note-taking app in the future so now let's just dig deeper into what really makes the difference between those apps so the first point i want to tackle here is the node organization so you really have to understand how the note-taking apps have been set up by their founder in order really to grasp what the difference are and how you can take advantage of them when it comes to obsidian you're going to notice that obsidian uses folders and tags in order to organize your notes but when it comes to bear you're going to see there are absolutely no folders only tags so depending on the structure on depending on how you actually work with your notes you may prefer one through another and and especially if you are a fan of using tags when using your notes you're going to see that the experience on bear in my opinion is way more enjoyable than using tags on obsidian and for that let's just let me just show you exactly how this works you can see right now i'm in a demo vault here on obsidian and if i want to create a new node i just simply click here on newnote and it automatically opens up the note editor so this is actually the note title and i can just start writing here and then at the end just add some tags so tag zero tag one tag zero two and that's it so after that what i wanted to do in order to retrieve actually my tag using different options so the first thing is what you're going to notice is that all notes will be stored here and they are not really um sorted out by tags uh what is actually the case in bear when we're going and you're going to notice that in a few seconds so the thing is that actually if i want to just search by tags i have to click the search panel here and then just actually search for specific tag and then you're going to see i have different suggestions here of the tags i've already created there are also other options but i won't dig deeper into them in this video but when it comes to bear as you can see here i have all my different tags sorted out here with a nice and convenient icon that i can simply choose by clicking on the tag and then just change the icon here so let me just show you exactly how this works so let's let's suppose that i'm just creating a new node here so this is a test node with a test content and then let me just add here a tag that starts with abc let me just add this abc tag here and what you're going to see is that abc right now appears here and all nodes that are tagged with abc will appear under this tag so if you're really a fan of working with tags in my opinion bear is way more convenient than obsidian so let's just dive back into obsidian to show you exactly the folders that i talked to that i talked about so what you can see here is you can just create different folders here so a test folder and let's just r add another folder here and what i can do after that is if i create notes i can just easily drag and drop them into different folders if i want to work like that or i can just um actually like directly create a note that's outside the folder so it allows you actually to take full advantage of folders and tags in the same way but if you are like me and you are really paying attention to the user experience in my opinion bear is way ahead the curve than obsidian so let's just now talk about the storage and the sync options so as you saw previously i told you that both apps actually give you the option to sync your data on the cloud but but there are difference so when it comes to obsidian what you have to understand is that you have different options when it comes to actually storing and syncing your data so obsidian actually allows you to sync directly to the cloud of your choice maybe dropbox google drive icloud and this is actually very convenient if you don't want to pay for an extra cloud storage the second option that you have with obsidian is actually only storing your data on the local computer or the local phone that you are actually using for running the app and the third option that you have is what they call obsidian sync which actually is a service by obsidian which allows you to encrypt and also store your data on the cloud managed by obsidian which costs eight bucks per month when it comes to bayer you actually just have two options so option number one is that you use icloud to store your data and your notes on the cloud and the second option is to not activate any syncing at all which means that all your files will only be accessible and only be stored on the device that you are using bare with so this is something that you have to consider depending on if you want your nodes to be on a cloud or not so now let's just talk about the integrations so what you have to understand is that both apps actually don't have a lot of integration when it comes to zapier when it comes to automating actually your workflow but there are a lot of workarounds that you can use for those apps so the first thing at there is actually working with ios shortcuts so you can automate creating node appending things to node adding things to node directly with an ios shortcut when it comes to obsidian you're going to see there where there are way more templates way more plugins that you can add in order to really make it a power horse so i won't dig deeper into all the different plugins and features that you can add into obsidian but it really depends on how you use your note-taking app so if you're looking for automating a lot of things while both apps will actually not help you a lot but by the time i'm recording this there is just a new feature that has been released by read wise which actually allows you right now you to export your notes for example if you're reading on kindle you can directly right now export them into obsidian so there is actually a new feature that just came out recently and you can check that out simply um on on on read-wise so the thing is that when it comes to bear as you actually as you can see if you're using read-wise and there is no way to automatically export your highlights and you have to do this manually which is not that convenient and now let's just talk about the user interface and i have to admit that obsidian is way more powerful and it has way more option than bear but all this comes at a price it comes at a price of the user interface and actually the accessibility and how you actually going to interact with your notes especially if you work a lot of on mobile like myself you're going to see that the obsidian mobile app is just not convenient at all we hope that this will change in the future and will allow me to get the best out of obsidian not only on the computer but also on my mobile device so now let's just talk about the note editor and what are the difference between the note editor on pair and the note editor on obsidian so what you have to understand is that actually right now by the time i'm recording this video there are two modes on obsidian you have the first mode which is the edit mode and the second mode is actually the preview mode and right now obsidian is actually working on what you see is what you get editor so i hope that this in the future would actually disappear and that you only will have one mode to edit and preview your notes so let me just show you exactly how this looks like right now so as you can see right now i'm in the edit mode and i can just like tap anything right here i can just add images it dragging and dropping the image right here into the editor and then as you can see it won't actually show the image so if i actually want to see the image i have to go to the preview mode and right now as you can see the image actually appears so this is one thing the other thing is actually is that both of of of the apps actually use markdown so as you can see you can just add a title here and an h2 title here and so on and so forth so the same thing goes for pair so if i go back to barry as you can see this what is really convenient what i really have done pretty well here is that if i just type um an h1 title here it would actually appear as the h1 and i will actually have also a small annotation here that shows me the level of the header actually same thing goes for actually if i want to make something bold here um pretty easy so um the preview and edit mode is just one mode so i don't really understand why uh in obsidian they actually differentiate by that but this should actually be fixed in the near future so same goes for the image you could click that drag and drop another image here as you can see the image directly appears here don't have to switch between modes to actually so show the image so as you can see both uh editors actually use markdown which is pretty convenient especially if you're used to this language so um regarding the editor i've noticed also a lot of flaws when it comes to beer on mobile so yeah this is my little rant about obsidian on mobile but i hope this will be fixed in the future so let's talk about pricing and how much does it actually cost so the thing is that obsidian is actually free it's open source and this is really really appreciable so the only thing that you have to pay in obsidian is actually if you want to use the obsidian sync option right but you can just bypass that by using another cloud system or if you want to use actually the publish feature which allows you to publish different notes automatically in to a website hosted on uh on the obsidian system right so if you want to actually use bear and his full feature which me which also includes the and if you want to use spare with its different panel of options you have to go for the paid subscription which costs around 15 bucks per year so right now let's talk about note linking and this is actually one of the main differentiators also between obsidian and bare so obsidian is primarily designed to allow easy linking between nodes so that you can actually fully apply the detail casting method with your notes and this is actually not the case with bear and actually sent an email to bear a few months ago asking them if they are going to add this feature and as you can see here is the reply so they are clearly mentioning that this feature is not coming in the near months for sure but it may be added in the future updates so this might be so this feature might be coming in the future but we don't have any guarantee so if you are a pair veteran user you know right now exactly what to expect when it comes to adding new more obsidian features into bear let me just jump to into obsidian right now so you show you exactly how this link feature works in obsidian let me just show you exactly the procedure or the process here in the app so the first thing let's assume that i'm just creating a new node here and this node is about actually computer okay so a computer so here i'm going to put a description what a computer actually is blah blah blah okay so now let's just create a new note about a phone okay so and if we combine those two ideas we gonna come up with a smartphone okay so this is to show you exactly how you can come up with different ideas so the first thing let's assume right now here i'm in the note computer and let's just say that i have an idea and i could just write here it would be cool if there was a phone with some computer computer features okay great so right now what's interesting is as you can see here inside obsidian here i have what's called on unlinked mentions which means that obsidian is going to search in other in other notes where i have the exact uh the exact same title as the note that i'm currently in so right now it's phone and as you can see it just found the note where i have the word phone in it which is actually this one so here i have two options either i create a link directly here from obsidian to the note here and as you can see let me just do that here so link and right now what will happen is that now i've got a backlink here okay so the thing is that i could also easily like remove the link here okay so let me just do that right now and i could just easily add right now here another another link basically either by selecting it and then just um typing bracket bracket or let's say if i'm in the mids of actually writing this down i could just open the brackets here let me just delete that i can just open the brackets here and then just type phone as you can see and here i can actually link notes between them okay so let's just see what the procedure looks like in bear right now i'm back in there and right now i'm going to create a new note here and let's just assume this is my computer note and then let's create a new note here and this is my phone note okay so right now what i can do is i can actually i don't have the unlinked feature here but what i can do is i can easily link right now my computer node to my phone by just same procedure here tapping the two brackets and entering right now phone and as you can see here here right now i have directly my phone note i can just hit enter and voila here i have actually my backlink so as you can see obsidian is actually built around building links right and and actually combining between nodes what's actually not the case when it comes to bear but as you can see the node leaking feature is still available in paper right now let's just dive deeper into the conclusion so which app should you choose what is actually the best app is it obsidium is oh is it bare let me just give you my opinion on that question but before that let me remind you about the free pdf that you can get by clicking the first link in the description that will give you three powerful tips to supercharge your note-taking system no matter if you're using obsidia if you're using bear or if you're using any other app just show you quickly right now what i like about obsidian and what i like about baron obviously what i like in one app i don't like it in the other but let me just show you exactly so that you can actually get a nice opinion about those two apps so the first thing what i like about obsidian and there is actually no doubt about that it that it's multi-platform so let's say if you have an android phone and a mac computer you are going to be able to access your note on both of those devices which is actually not the case in bayer because it's only locked down into the apple ecosystem so you have to be an apple and like you have to be locked in in the apple ecosystem in order to work on your notes so the second second thing and this is actually where obsidian actually stands out it's because it's all bit about backlinks so if you really care about backlinks creating backlinks between your notes linking between your notes coming up with new ideas then obsidian has actually um is actually better for for this purpose the other thing is what's pretty interesting and it is actually that in in obsidian you can have multiple votes which means that ever you can create actually more than one vote in which you can actually take notes right let's say for example if you want to separate between your uh notes uh in your personal life and in your business in actually everything related to business you can create multiple votes in um in obsidian and like it will create a whole ecosystem about notes but which are actually not linked and you could also basically link between them if you wanted to so it gives you actually more versatility which is actually not the case in bear so the bear is actually locked into your device or into your icloud account and actually you cannot separate notes if you um wanted to do so so basically um it depends all on the preference that you have regarding your notes so the other thing about obsidian is that it has a lot of customization options so there are a lot of plugins and a lot of things that you can actually do in obsidian like you can just check that out and check also also the community plugins that there are available for obsidian so there is a bunch of things that are going on but uh the drawback basically that it can be actually overwhelming and complicated if you start just taking um taking notes right so if you're new to the app so the other thing is which is really really amazing in obsidian is actually the graph view so let me just show you that so right now as you can see i don't have a lot of notes here only two demo notes but if you switch to the graph view what you can do is you can actually see how the notes are actually connected between them and this gives you actually a nice overview of um of the different topics and the different things that you have in your note taking system the other thing that i really like about opposition is obviously that it's free and you only have to pay to if you really want to to to use their paid features so what i really like about bayer is that actually the mobile app in the aesthetics of of the overall user experience right clearly especially when it comes to using the app on your phone you're going to see that obsidian by the time that i'm recording this i really don't like their ios app it actually creates more friction in actually entering my personal knowledge management system and it's actually counterproductive if you don't like like the way how the app looks you're not going to consult you're going not going to create notes so this can be actually a huge problem in the long run the other thing is i really like about bear is actually the note editor you see how they actually were able to to seamlessly integrate between the editor and the preview mode which i found is just genius when it comes to bear the other thing is that bear is actually quite simple there are not a lot of bells and whistles so they do a small kind of things but they do them well um and obsidian it can actually be quite overwhelming as i told you previously so be careful about that the other thing that i really like about bear and that i showed you previously is the tag pane and actually how you can add specific icons to specific tags so if you really like working with tags bayer looks actually better than obsidian in my opinion the other thing is that you can actually create notes in in bear without titles which is actually not the case in obsidian let me just show you that so let's assume that i'm going to create a note here and let's say this note is actually a quote from somebody i can just leave it like like that in um in bear but it's not the case in obsidian as you can see i it still like gives me the untitled title and i actually have to put a title here and sometimes when i'm creating a note i just don't want to use a title so as an example if i want to create just a note here i can just delete the h1 tag and i just put my quote here and the the note will actually live like that inside the bear app which is actually not the case in obsidian so this can be quite annoying especially if you just want to capture quick notes um it will actually you will have to to put actually the title here and then and then again inside the note so it's not very convenient when it comes to that okay the other thing i really like also about baird that that works with ios shortcuts and right now by the time you're recording this uh obsidian does not have any integration with ios shortcuts so this could this could be actually um a solution to their mobile app not be very ios friendly and ios optimized so if i was just able to run a quick ios shortcut to put a to create a new node or to append something to an existing node it will make actually the thing way easier and then i could still go back to my computer if i really want to organize the node better and actually work on that so what is actually better obsidian or bare well it's completely subjective it all depends on the usage that you have and like if you really if you don't have any issues actually working on a computer then obsidian may be the app that you should go for but if you work a lot on mobile if you really care about design having a nice and neat note editor then i think that bear will actually more floats your boat but the best thing is actually to try out both of those apps and to see which one works for you so right now what i want you to do is leave a comment below are you an obsidian user are you a bear user are you an expert user or an x obsidian user who switched to bear well let me know exactly how which app you're currently using or which app you left basically for another app and what where the reason for that okay so i can't wait to read your comments down below so right now at the end of this video i wanted to remind you to download the pdf for free for getting the three powerful tips to supercharge your note-taking system no matter which app you're using and also don't forget to subscribe to the channel because on this channel i'm going to release more content for content creators to make a living from their ideas so make sure to subscribe if this sounds like you and also what you can do is just watch another video on my channel that should be suggested based on your youtube history thanks to the youtube algorithm and with that being said i see you guys in the next one