Obsidian is great at many things, but one thing that it doesn’t do out of the box is make it easy to share notes.
That may seem like an oversight in our ever more connected world, but it’s by design. The Obsidian team believes that your notes should be private and durable by default.
Private notes are stored on your device, and nowhere else. If your notes were published to a server somewhere by default, like in Notion or Tana, they are inherently not private. Even if they require a login to view, they are still accessible by people with the right permissions (or someone who breaches the system).
With Obsidian you don’t have to worry about data breaches, logins, or passwords. All of your notes are stored locally on your computer, so your notes are as secure as your per…
Obsidian is great at many things, but one thing that it doesn’t do out of the box is make it easy to share notes.
That may seem like an oversight in our ever more connected world, but it’s by design. The Obsidian team believes that your notes should be private and durable by default.
Private notes are stored on your device, and nowhere else. If your notes were published to a server somewhere by default, like in Notion or Tana, they are inherently not private. Even if they require a login to view, they are still accessible by people with the right permissions (or someone who breaches the system).
With Obsidian you don’t have to worry about data breaches, logins, or passwords. All of your notes are stored locally on your computer, so your notes are as secure as your personal computer. No servers to hack, no account needed, you can download the app and just start making notes.
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But what if I want to Share Notes in Obsidian?
Good question! Sharing notes in Obsidian is trickier than other note-apps, but that doesn’t mean it’s hard. You just have to know about the options available to you, and choose the one that works best for you.
There are numerous ways that you can share notes if you want to do so. But because Obsidian doesn’t support this by default, they all require a bit of legwork.
So let’s talk about a few of the different ways you can share notes with Obsidian.
Share a Single Note Online
Let’s start with the simplest use-case: sharing a single note.
I frequently have conversations with people about topics that I have notes on, and I want to share a single note with a single person. In that case, I like to use the Share Note plugin.
The Share Note plugin is a Community Plugin that allows you to easily and quickly share single notes with people. It is perfect for one-off situations where you want to temporarily share a note with someone.
To use it, install it and enable it from the Community Plugins. Then you can share a note any number of ways: using the Command Palette, or by right-clicking on a note and clicking “Share note on the web”.
Once you share a note, the Share Note plugin will automatically copy the link to your clipboard, so you can paste it into an email or a text message to share with your contact of choice.
Share Note also adds the link to your Properties, along with a few icons that give you the ability to control the share. You can update the shared information with the little cloud icon, re-copy the link, or delete the link, all from the comfort of Obsidian.
Share Note is an extremely easy-to-use plugin, and it’s also relatively private (as much as anything on the internet is private), because your content is end-to-end encrypted and only accessible through the link created in your vault.
Share Note also supports themes and plugin content. For example, I recently shared my Simple Bookshelf using the Share Note plugin, and all of the Dataview content just worked! I was surprised and delighted. You can view my 2025 bookshelf here if you’re curious, and all thanks to the Share Note plugin!
Sharing a Collection of Notes
Share Note is great for one-off shares, but what if you want to share a whole collection of notes? Perhaps a whole vault, or a folder or two?
This can be more complicated. Again we have a lot of options at our disposal, and which one you choose all depends on your goals.
The easiest way to do this is to use Obsidian Publish: this is a premium product from the Obsidian team that allows you to turn any folder of notes into a website. Obsidian Publish is a great product, reasonably priced, and easy to use. This would be my first choice, if you can afford it.
There’s also a Digital Garden Plugin that has some unique benefits. It’s free to get started (although you may have to pay for hosting, depending on how you set it up), and it supports themes and plugins as well as the basic Obsidian features. The Digital Garden plugin is more of a “pro tool”: it gives you more options, at the cost of more setup and maintenance.
If you want to host a website as fast as possible using Obsidian, try Publish. If you want more customization, try the Digital Garden plugin.
Collaborating on Notes
Another popular request for sharing notes is for collaboration. What if you want to work on a note (or a collection of notes) with another person, or a small team?
First of all, I feel like I should note that there might be an official solution coming for this problem soon. The Obsidian Roadmap (at the time of writing) says that the Obsidian team is working on “multiplayer”, a method for sharing and collaborating on notes. So we might have an official way to do this soon!
But until then, there are a few good options out there.
Collaborating by Syncing
Obsidian uses Markdown files behind the scenes, so you don’t necessarily need to solve this inside of Obsidian. You can always use a syncing service like Dropbox, Google Drive, Github, or (my favorite) Syncthing to sync files between computers.
Of course if you use something like Dropbox or Google Drive you are sacrificing some privacy, but depending on the project you might not mind. You can sync a whole vault with any of these services, or you can sync individual folders, depending on your needs.
Collaborating with Plugins
There are also numerous Community Plugins out there that aim to solve this problem. Here are a few of my favorites.
- Relay is a strong option for multiplayer. It’s real-time similar to Google Docs, but fully private and end-to-end encrypted. It’s a premium plugin, but has a solid free tier: you only need to pay if you need more than 3 collaborators or the ability to edit non-markdown files.
- The LiveSync plugin is more technical and more difficult to set up: it requires you to bring your own server, using S3 or Fly.io or something similar. More for advanced users, but doesn’t have the same limitations as Relay.
Collaborating with Git
Several years ago I wrote about hosting Obsidian vaults on Github. This may seem technical, but if you learn how to do it, it has a huge number of benefits.
And if you host your vault on Github, it also makes sharing easy. This doesn’t give you real-time sharing, like several of the plugins above, but it does give you version control, and allows you to see exactly what changes were made by each collaborator and when.
When I collaborate on notes with other people this is my preferred method, because of the huge number of benefits that come along with version control.
Conclusion
There are many different ways to share your notes with Obsidian. This article reviews some of the best options that I have found, but there are many other methods.
Don’t forget that Obsidian creates Markdown files behind the scenes, so you can use any method that works with text files! No need to reinvent the wheel if you already have a file sharing solution that you like.