Obsidian Publish Alternatives

What options are there for publishing your Obsidian vault? We review the main ones, paid and free, cloud or self-hosted.

Rufus Pollock
Rufus Pollock

Here we review the existing options for publishing an Obsidian vault, including official Obsidian Publish and the major alternatives.

In general, the main division is between approaches where the site creation and hosting are done for you (like Obsidian Publish and Flowershow Cloud) and approaches that are self-hosted options where you need to build and then host the published site and options.

Amongst the self-hosted options there are roughly three main methods:

  • NextJS or similar static site generator where you use a full service static site generator to generate the site from the markdown files in the Obsidian vault. This is the approach of Flowershow self-hosted and Quartz
  • Obsidian plugin where site rendering is done within a plugin
  • Scripted conversion to a static site (usually python). This is like a simplified version of the first option where

Options

Flowershow

The software provided on this site. There's a cloud version where you can just click and publish and a self-hosted version. The cloud version is completely free with a premium upgrade for $5 a month if you want your own domain or some more advanced features.

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Pros

  • Full compatibility with Obsidian syntax and features e.g. math, mermaid diagrams etc
  • Cloud hosting so nothing to install and maintain.
  • Elegant default theme
  • Fully customizable design
  • Blog support
  • Obsidian plugin as well as direct publishing
  • Can select what notes you want to publish
  • Sidebar
  • Commenting (via giscus)

Cons

  • Missing graph view of note linkages
  • No dataview support

Obsidian Publish

The official obsidian publish plugin.

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Pros

  • previews on hover
  • Andy's sliding windows
  • graph view
  • possible password protection
  • in form of Obsidian plugin
  • you can select the notes you want to publish (set in frontmatter)
  • you can toggle some UI elements like graph or sliding windows
  • sidebar with collapsable groups of notes (no nesting, only grouping)
  • light/dark theme
  • readers comments (planned feature)

Cons

  • costly (20/monthor20/month or 198/year) and no self-hosting option
  • not very customizable: you can use community themes (same as for desktop app) and tweak them or create your own
  • not website-like look, just like an online version of Obsidian
  • no dataview support

obsidian-zola

A no-brainer solution to turning your Obsidian PKM into a Zola site.

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Pros

  • one-file setup and very easy to publish on netlify: only requires netlify.toml (with content copied from their example) to be added to Obsidian vault (+ of course Netlify setup)
  • the above file also serves as a config file (see screenshot below), so you pass all the config as environment variables (not sure what are benefits/drawbacks of this) Pasted image 20220815160117
  • Fusion 360 embeds Pasted image 20220815201204

Cons

  • looks like Obsidian (on purpose, the author wanted to keep it simple)
  • you can only configure a few elements on the page (again, using netlify.toml, where you can even write some HTML strings, which is a bit weird…)

Perlite

A web-based markdown viewer optimized for Obsidian

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Pros

Cons

  • looks like Obsidian copy, but more geeky, raw
  • doesn't really allow for customizations
  • it's PHP 😛
  • may not be obvious for people unfamiliar with PHP, docker or programming whatsoever how to run and configure this

Pubsidian

An Obsidian-Publish alternative that's free. Static export via python script.

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assets/Pasted image 20220823164330

Pros

  • has a simple GUI program (for Windows) that you can run inside the folder you want to publish; you can set the name and assets folder; it will convert your content dir to static siteoutput dir (HTML, JS) and drag and drop your output directory in netlify
  • search: full-text but also filename, tags
  • button "Share now" to share current page
  • flexibility to choose the notes to list in pubsidian

Cons

  • raw look, not website-like
  • menu is just an alphabetical list of all notes
  • graph can't handle too many nodes
  • if you want to set some tags or unpublish a note you need to find it in a list of nodes (autogenerated) Pasted image 20220814214316

MindStone

Free Obisidian Publish alternative, for publishing your digital garden.

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Pros

  • backlinks support
  • graph view
  • walkthrough video on yt
  • rather simple setup - its just npm (although in the docs it says you need to copy content/images over to the project)

Cons

  • not customizable
  • transclusion is not working yet
  • graph view doesn't work very well (reportedly)

Planned features

Obsidian Digital Garden

An obsidian plugin that builds your digital garden and publishes to netlify

  • 💻 JS (obsidian plugin)

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Pros

  • Obsidian plugin
  • transclusions
  • dataview queries (?)
  • PlantUML diagrams
  • Excalidraw embedding
  • Image embedding
  • supports applying any community obsidian theme
  • per-note settings with front-matter + global settings
  • publication center?

    Open Publication Center: This command behaves the same as the ribbon icon. It will open the publication center where you can view a list what files are published, changed, deleted and not yet published.

  • you can "Update site to latest template" with a button

Cons

  • looks very geeky, raw
  • only customization you can make is to fork and tweak

Gatsby Garden

A Digital Garden Theme for Gatsby. Gatsby Garden lets you create a static HTML version of your markdown notes

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Pros

  • RSS feed auto generated (?)
  • sitemap autogenerated (?)
  • page tags Pasted image 20220815160848
  • some meta data of the page Pasted image 20220815161044

Cons

  • customization: just some basic config options (site metadata, navbar) in a js config file; if you want to change the look or behavior you need to make changes directly to to source code (fork & tweak)

Quartz

🌱 host your own second brain and digital garden for free

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Pros

Cons

  • installation process is full git plus you need to operate inside of the quartz structure
  • again, you need to directly tweak CSS, no separation for future upgrades

Markbase

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Pros

  • Obsidian plugin so you can publish from within obsidian (no git etc required)
  • good looking callouts
  • good looking tables

Cons

  • there will be a paid option if you want to customize it (5/month,5/month, 49/year)

obsidian-userland/publish

An open-source Obsidian Publish alternative. Obsidian is good for taking note / writing documentation but not good enough for reading. Since Obsidian Publish is too expensive for me, I start making a free alternative.

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Obsidian Mkdocs

Publish your obsidian vault through a python script.

Mkdocs Obsidian is an association between a python script and a Material mkdocs template to get a personal wiki site based on your Obsidian Vault.

Comments

Metadata

This is the metadata we try to collect on each item.

  • description
  • screenshot
  • metadata
    • 🔗 primary url
    • 📣 announce date and url
    • ⭐ stars (plus github url)
    • 💤 is it actively developed
    • 💰 cost and/or license (if missing assume free and open source)
    • 💻 tech approach summary e.g. is it js, what framework, script to static then publish
  • comments

Analysis

What are common features (we can compare across)

  • Syntax support i.e. markdown plus obsidian
  • Default theme (look/feel)
  • Customizability (themeability)
  • Search
  • Publishing control (e.g. show/hide pages)
  • Links and network graph e.g. back/forward link info and overall graph

Attributes to sort by

  • Date created
  • Active-ness
  • Cost/open-source
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