This time, I have to admit that I am late to the party. I have been using Notion for years and loving it bit by bit as I learn how to properly get it working for my use cases. Lately, I have introduced it as a documentation tool and low-code application platform for all kinds of organizational tasks. I may write about some of those in the future. For the moment, however, I am keeping it at a personal level (i.e., not moving my professional data there just yet). Not leaving it completely, mind you. As I explained in [[2025-03-05-johnny-decimal]], my document organization follows this pattern, and one of the main places where I store information is Notion. The problem is that while I am mostly okay with the lock-in of the platform for current applications (for example, the planning of an upcoming trip), I find it troublesome when it comes to my private knowledge base (aka second brain). There are a couple of reasons for this.

Notion is an application that can boast many different features, but speed is not one of them. With its online-first (and second, and last) all-in approach, the app takes a while to start, loading is slow, and searching for stuff is laggy as well. This is something that the offline-first approach favored by Obsidian handles much more gracefully. When just trying to accomplish the digital equivalent of a scribble, going through the motions in Notion takes too much time. I am sure there are shortcuts and hacks to reduce the time, but for quick and dirty notes, nothing beats the “sit and write” experience of offline tools like Obsidian. While most of what I do in my personal knowledge base (PKB) is exactly this kind of “write now, perfect later” flow, there are many other cases where the clunkiness of working with relational data requires a more sophisticated approach. Be that as it may, Obsidian has the edge here for the time being.

Since I have accumulated a sizable amount of notes in recent years working as a Software Engineer (I tend to document most of the technical stuff I come across that could be relevant for me in the future), my Notion Second Brain has grown to several hundred pages containing information ranging from investment opportunities to how to accomplish a specific task in Git. Migrating this by hand (which I did when I left Evernote) is just not feasible anymore. Luckily, I found Obsidian Importer, and it worked so well that I decided to write about it just to help someone thinking about jumping ship to take the first step. Exporting the entire PKB database from Notion and importing it directly into Obsidian is a 10-minute task that leaves the pages in a state where you can start integrating them into Obsidian (and linking them with other existing pages there). Piece of cake.

Now, I want to mention two points where the application did not work quite as I wanted. First, the links themselves: while Obsidian uses Wikilinks for all in-app linking functionality, Notion has its own system, and when imported, the result uses standard Markdown links. This is not a dealbreaker, but it requires a bit of maintenance to bring everything under control again. Surely one of the thousands of plugins Obsidian offers could help with this. Personally, it does not currently annoy me enough to take that step just yet.

Second, the images are (as expected) imported with their original filenames. This means that most of the time, images that were just copy-pasted into Notion (for example, from the fantastic tool Greenshot) have cryptic names, which mess up the neat organization I have for my images in the Obsidian Vault. Some other images were (back in the day) imported into Notion with more intelligible filenames, and those are imported as such into the Vault, which simplifies the migration somewhat.

All in all, I have successfully migrated my Notion Second Brain to Obsidian with roughly 1-2 hours of effort and will gladly keep it going in Obsidian for the time being. Notion will remain my personal database system for anything more complicated than wiki-style notes and Zettelkasten.