You Don't Need Obsidian Sync to Read Your Notes on an iPad. You Need Notion Free

There's an almost unquestioned belief in the Obsidian community: if you want your notes with you, on your phone or your iPad, you have to pay.

Pay for Obsidian Sync so the vault lives on every device. Or pay for Obsidian Publish so you get a site you can read from anywhere. Or both.

I'm not saying either service is bad. They're good. But let me ask you an honest question: the last time you opened Obsidian on your phone, were you writing or reading?

If the answer is "reading" (checking a process, reviewing meeting notes, pulling up a checklist before a client call), then you're paying a monthly fee for a need that Notion's free plan already covers for nothing. The only missing piece is a bridge. I built that bridge and called it Vault to Notion.

What you're actually paying

Obsidian itself is free. The pricing page says "Free without limits", and that includes work use. The money only starts flowing once you want your notes to leave your computer.

From Obsidian's official pricing:

The entry Sync plan has limits too. According to Obsidian's documentation, Sync Standard covers 1 vault, 1 GB of total storage, a 5 MB maximum file size and 1 month of version history. Anything beyond that means upgrading to Plus.

$48 to $180 a year, every year, just to read notes on a small screen. It won't bankrupt anyone. But it's a recurring fee for something you can do for free, and small recurring fees are exactly the ones that quietly pile up.

"Just use iCloud or Git for free": easy to say, tiring to live with

Long-time Obsidian users will push back straight away: you don't need Sync, just put the vault in iCloud or Google Drive, or push it to Git.

True, in theory. But read Obsidian's own sync guide and count the warnings:

• iCloud works between Apple devices; on Windows, iCloud Drive "may lead to file duplication or corruption."
• Google Drive and OneDrive are "not officially supported" for syncing vaults on iOS.
• Syncthing "works best when at least one device is always on", and the official Android app is no longer maintained.
• Git "isn't automatic". You push and pull by hand, and on iOS you also need Working Copy, where "some features require a paid in-app purchase."

So the free route exists, but it turns you into the maintainer of your own sync system. For a founder or anyone with a full calendar, an evening spent untangling duplicated files costs far more than $5.

That's why most people end up paying anyway. Not because they need two-way sync, but because nothing was both free and maintenance-free.

There is such an option. It just lives in a different app.

Separate the two jobs: write in the workshop, read in the showroom

This is the most important shift in this post.

Writing and reading are different needs, and they don't have to share a tool.

• Obsidian is the workshop. Plain Markdown files on your machine, no lock-in, fast search, a huge plugin ecosystem. It's where you think and write.
• Notion is the showroom. Smooth apps on iPhone, iPad and Android; open and read; send a link and anyone can view it; comments built in.

And here's the key: according to Notion's pricing, the Free plan gives individuals unlimited pages and blocks, plus the option to download pages for offline use. Notion also has apps for iOS and Android.

The free showroom already exists. What you need is a way to move the goods from the workshop to the showroom without carrying them by hand: no copy-pasting note by note, no broken formatting, no duplicate pages every time you edit.

Vault to Notion does exactly that one job

Vault to Notion is an open-source (MIT) Obsidian plugin I wrote. It calls the Notion API directly from Obsidian and publishes your notes to Notion in one of two ways.

Page tree mode (default)

Folders and notes become pages in the Notion sidebar, with the same structure you already organised. All it needs is one root page, such as "Obsidian Vault".

📁 Projects                     📄 Obsidian Vault
   📁 Website                      📁 Projects
      📝 Launch plan       →          📁 Website
      📝 SEO checklist                   📄 Launch plan
   📝 Ideas                              📄 SEO checklist
📝 Reading list                       📄 Ideas
                                   📄 Reading list

Database mode

Every note becomes a row in a Notion database, with an optional Tags column (from frontmatter) and a Folder column (the folder path) for filtering, sorting and grouping. It can also build a folder tree in which every folder page shows a filtered table of its notes. That's a good fit for knowledge bases, internal processes and document libraries.

The details that make it usable every day

A publishing tool that only works the first time is useless. The hard part is the second run, the tenth, the hundredth. This is what I focused on getting right:

• Updates in place. Publishing again updates the same page, so the link stays the same and comments survive. The plugin stores notion_id and notion_url in the note's frontmatter, so the link travels with the note across devices.
• Whole-folder publishing. Right-click a folder and choose Publish folder to Notion. Unchanged notes are skipped without re-uploading, and you get a summary like 12 created, 3 updated, 85 unchanged.
• Move a note and its page moves too. Rename a note and the page title follows. Delete a page in Notion by mistake and it's recreated on the next publish.
• Speaks Obsidian. Callouts, ==highlights==, task lists, tables, code blocks and math convert to their Notion equivalents.
• Private notes stay private. Anything inside %% comment %% or <!-- comment --> is stripped and never sent to Notion, so you can keep raw thinking right inside a note without it showing up on the reading page.
• Works on mobile too. The plugin supports both desktop and mobile.

On privacy

The plugin talks to exactly one service: api.notion.com. No telemetry, no middleman server. It only reads the notes you choose to publish; it doesn't scan the rest of your vault. Your API token is kept in Obsidian's secret storage, not in the settings file, so it never ends up in backups, Git or any sync service.

Set up in five minutes

You do this once per vault:

1. Create a Notion token. In Notion's Developer portal, create an internal connection (for example "Obsidian Sync"), keep the Read, Update and Insert content capabilities, and pick No user information. Copy the token that starts with ntn_.
2. Create the destination. A plain page called "Obsidian Vault" (page tree mode), or a full-page database (database mode).
3. Grant access. Open that page, then ••• → Connections → add your connection. Sharing the parent page is enough; everything inside inherits it.
4. Configure the plugin. In Obsidian, go to Settings → Vault to Notion, pick the token, choose the mode, paste the page link and click Test. When you see Connected to "Obsidian Vault", you're done.

From then on: click the ribbon icon to publish the open note, or right-click a folder to publish it all. Open Notion on your iPad, and the notes are there.

The plugin is on Obsidian's community directory; you can also install beta builds through BRAT, or download main.js and manifest.json from GitHub.

The honest limits, and when you should still pay for Sync

I'm not going to sell you a tool that "does everything". It doesn't, and that's by design.

Publishing is one-way. Obsidian is the single source of truth. If you edit a page in Notion, that edit is overwritten the next time the note changes. I considered two-way sync and decided against it: two-way sync between systems with different data models is where conflicts and data loss breed. One-way is simple, predictable and safe.

A few more limits worth knowing upfront:

• Local images, attachments and embeds aren't uploaded yet. They appear as a marker such as [image: image.png].
• [[Wiki links]] become plain text, not links between Notion pages.
• Deleting a note in Obsidian doesn't delete its Notion page, to avoid accidental data loss. Renaming or moving a folder creates a new folder page; you delete the old one yourself.
• Duplicating a note copies its notion_id. Remove that line from the copy, or both notes will write to the same page.

So when is Obsidian Sync still worth it? When you really write on your phone every day, edit the same note across several machines, or need full version history. Then $4 a month is a sensible investment, and it funds the team behind a great app. If that's you, keep paying, and use Vault to Notion alongside it to share notes with other people.

But if your phone is mostly a reading screen, you're paying for a capability you don't use.

A benefit few people think of: sharing with your team and clients

For anyone running a business, this may matter more than the savings.

Your Obsidian vault is a private world. Clients, staff and partners can't open it. A Notion page, on the other hand, opens from a link, and people can comment right on the page. Because Vault to Notion updates in place, the link you sent last week always shows the latest version, and the comments stay put.

A few practical uses:

• Internal SOPs: write them in Obsidian, publish the "Processes" folder to Notion, and your team reads them on their phones.
• Client project docs: scope, handover checklist, meeting notes. One link, always current.
• A filterable knowledge base: database mode with a Tags column, grouped by topic.

One important technical note: according to Notion's documentation, Free workspaces with more than one member are limited to 1,000 lifetime blocks through internal connections. Single-member workspaces have no such limit. If you share a Free workspace with others, use a personal access token instead of an internal connection, because that limit doesn't apply to it.

The final math

Run the numbers for yourself:

• If you pay for Obsidian Sync only to read: save $48 – $60 a year.
• If you also pay for Publish to get a page you can read remotely: save up to $144 – $180 a year, and get a page with comments, mobile apps and one-link sharing in return.
• What it costs: five minutes of setup and $0 a month.

But the bigger win isn't a few dozen dollars. It's that you stop paying for capabilities you don't use, a habit worth applying to every piece of software in a business, from notes to CRM to your website. Before you renew any subscription, ask: what do I actually use this for, and is there a simpler way to do exactly that?

If you try Vault to Notion, head to GitHub to report bugs or suggest features. Image uploads and turning wiki links into Notion page links are at the top of the list. And if your business needs a custom integration between the tools you already use, let's talk.

Data sources: Obsidian pricing; Obsidian Sync plans and storage limits; Obsidian: sync your notes across devices; Notion pricing; Notion API: workspace block limits; Vault to Notion on GitHub.