Why OneNote is Still Necessary Despite Markdown and Obsidian Being Good
January 17, 2026 18:45
I have 30 years’ worth of accumulated digital notes in OneNote. It contains all sorts of notes on creative work and daily life. The reason I have notes from before OneNote even existed is that I used to take notes in plain text before then. However, I also use Obsidian+Markdown in parallel, primarily for managing AI prompts. OneNote is very convenient, but its compatibility with AI other than Copilot is not very good. And just as Microsoft Publisher’s support suddenly ended one day, OneNote cannot be said to be safe forever either.
Get YASHIMA Yugen’s stories in your inbox
Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.
Things I noticed after trying Obsidian. Once you get used to it, Markdown has the best compatibility with AI. Full-text search is faster than OneNote. Since the volume of my OneNote text being searched is huge, they might not be comparable. Also, it might just be that OneNote’s search is slow on Snapdragon (Windows on Arm).
Because Obsidian is local-first, and precisely because of the Markdown file format, syncing across devices is inevitably its weak point. I noticed a fatal issue when trying to sync using Remotely Save. If edited on both a PC and a smartphone, only one of them (for example, only the newer one) remains. Because OneNote’s file structure is not simple text, and timestamps are automatically embedded in each individual edited part, this kind of thing does not happen (though syncing can sometimes fail). You could just increase the sync frequency, but that seems like it would drain the smartphone’s battery.
Also, Obsidian requires you to insert timestamps manually. I managed to handle file-level timestamps with a plugin, though. Timestamps are critical in digital notes. Even when the context is unclear, having a timestamp alone can sometimes make things understandable. As mentioned earlier, since OneNote automatically embeds timestamps for each edited location, you can always check later when a specific part of a note was edited. You might be able to check differences if you sync Obsidian with GitHub, but if you’re going to do that, OneNote is easier to use.
In conclusion, Obsidian is very good for managing prompts. However, when taking quick notes across various devices, I feel that OneNote is still better after all.
