Notion has been off my radar for a while now. The open-source and local app world is where most of my note-taking and PKM stuff lives these days, and Obsidian is the one I'd point to as my favorite out of that batch. So Notion doesn't really come up for me anymore, even though I used it heavily for a few years before all this.

Every now and then though, I do wonder whether there's anything I'm actually missing by being out of that ecosystem, and the one thing that used to nag at me was databases. Notion did that part really well, and Obsidian's options at the time were more of a workaround than a proper feature. Then Obsidian shipped Bases. And if I was ever going to go back to Notion just for the database functionality, Bases killed that idea pretty quickly.

Notion's databases stopped working for me

The same complaints everyone else has

Notion's databases are good and I don't think anyone really argues with that part. The criticisms most of us have heard already are still criticisms though, and they all still apply.

The big one is maintenance. Every database in Notion is its own contained thing, so you're building the table from scratch, then constantly tweaking views and properties as your data grows. With one or two databases it's manageable, but once you've got a handful running, you end up spending more time keeping them up to date than actually using what's in them.

The cloud dependency is the other thing. Your databases live on Notion's servers, so when Notion has a bad day, your databases do too. And then there's the data lock-in side of all this - even if you decide to export everything out, the database-specific behavior like relations and rollups doesn't survive and just comes out as plain text.

None of this is new. It's the trade-off of using Notion for stuff like this. But then Obsidian shipped something that made the trade-off look pretty silly.

Obsidian Bases in a nutshell

The quick rundown for anyone new to it

Bases is a core Obsidian plugin that landed in mid-2025 as part of the 1.9 update. It started in early access for Catalyst members and then rolled out to everyone, with a pretty big syntax overhaul in 1.9.2 that's basically what we're working with today.

The general idea is that your Obsidian notes are already structured, they have YAML frontmatter properties like tags and dates, or whatever else you've set up. Bases just lets you query and view that structure. It's Obsidian's official take on what the Dataview plugin was doing unofficially for years, except built in and way more approachable.

Each base lives in your vault as a .base file, and inside that file you set up the filters and views that pull your notes together. It also supports formula properties for more advanced rules, using a JS-like syntax. Out of the box you get Table, Card, and List views, with Calendar and Map view extensions already added by the community. You can also edit notes directly from inside a base, so it's not a read-only thing.

For a lot of people, Bases pretty much replaces Dataview outright. And beyond Obsidian, it's the cleanest argument I've come across for not reaching for Notion or Airtable for personal organization.

Bases is a way better fit for how I think and work

It's there before you even start

The main thing is that Bases doesn't require you to build anything. By the time you've installed and enabled it, it's already running across your entire vault, so there's no scaffolding step where you put together a database from scratch and import your data into it. The data is just your notes, and the structure is whatever properties they already have. All you're doing is putting filters and views on top of what's there.

That setup cost is what made Notion's databases feel heavy for me. Bases skips it. If my note system already has a project tag and a status property set up, I can put together a view of all my in-progress projects in about a minute, and the view stays accurate as I update my notes the regular way I always have. No double bookkeeping required.

The filter system also goes deeper than I expected. It uses a JavaScript-style syntax with formulas and operators that can be combined into pretty complex rules. So if your vault is a bit messy with overlapping tags and inconsistent properties, Bases is flexible enough to surface what you actually want.

Each configuration also gets saved as a .base file inside the vault, so it travels with your notes, plus, nothing lives on a foreign server. That said, it doesn't get everything right…

What Bases probably won't do for you

It's not a one-to-one Notion replacement

The first is the flip side of everything I just praised. Because Bases defaults to your entire vault, the upfront discipline Notion forces on you gets pushed to the filter side instead. With Notion, each database is like a little curated container where you only see what you've actually added. With Bases, if your tagging and properties are inconsistent across notes, you'll pull in stuff you didn't mean to and have to keep refining the rules. So the maintenance tax isn't exactly entirely gone with Bases, it just moves elsewhere.

The other thing is collaboration. Notion is built around multi-user workflows with real-time editing and shared permissions baked in. Bases sits inside a local single-user vault. So if you need to hand a structured view to a teammate or a client, Notion is still doing the thing it was actually built for.

I'm not really looking beyond Bases anymore

Bases is pretty much where I've landed. Notion's databases are still good for the teams that actually need them, no argument there. But for the way I work, Bases is a better fit because the data and the view share the same notes instead of being maintained separately. That alone is one of the reasons I haven't reopened Notion in months and it probably won't change anytime soon.