Capacities vs Obsidian: Typed Objects or Plain Markdown Files?

Ines is in the third year of a history PhD. She has 900 sources in her reference manager, writes literature notes per source, and drafts chapters on a Linux desktop at the department and a ThinkPad at home. Her supervisor wants the notes kept for five years after graduation.

Recommendation: Obsidian. Both apps run on Linux, but only Obsidian keeps the notes as files she can back up to the university drive, put under version control, and open in any editor in 2031. Community plugins connect it to reference managers and citation workflows that Capacities does not offer. She should resist installing more than five plugins in the first month, and pick a sync method before the first chapter, not after.

Malik records a weekly interview podcast. Every episode involves a guest, the guest's book, three or four topics and a list of follow-up questions. He has tried twice to set up a system of folders and templates and abandoned both by week three.

Recommendation: Capacities. A Person object for each guest, a Book object for their book, and an Episode type with properties for date, guest and status gives him the structure he kept failing to build. Opening a guest shows every episode and note that mentions them. The free plan covers this; Pro adds the AI assistant and smart queries if he later wants "all episodes with authors in 2026" as a live list. The trade is that his notes live in Capacities' cloud, so he should run a full Markdown export each quarter.

Jun installed Obsidian in July to organize work notes as a product designer. By October she has 42 plugins, a custom theme, a Dataview dashboard and 60 notes, most of them about her setup. She opens the vault, adjusts something, and closes it.

Recommendation: Capacities, or Obsidian with almost every plugin turned off. The honest problem is not the app. Capacities removes most of the decisions: types, daily notes and links work out of the box, and there is no plugin list to browse. If she would rather keep her files, she can disable everything except core plugins for a month and write one daily note per day. Either way, the test is the same: are there more notes about work than about the system by December?

Rafael is an independent security consultant. His notes include client network details, findings before they are disclosed, and interview transcripts. He works on a Windows laptop and reviews notes on an iPhone between meetings. Two clients require that their material is not readable by third-party providers.

Recommendation: Obsidian with Obsidian Sync. Sync is end-to-end encrypted, so the service stores data it cannot read, and the files on his laptop sit under his own disk encryption. Capacities encrypts in transit and at rest but is not end-to-end encrypted, which fails his clients' requirement. Sync Standard at $4 a month billed annually covers one vault; he should check whether his notes and attachments fit in its 1 GB before he relies on it.

Ruth has logged every book she has read since 2019 in a spreadsheet: title, author, date finished, a rating and a paragraph of notes. That is 412 rows, and she wants to link books to the authors and themes they share.

Recommendation: Capacities. A Book type with properties for author, date and rating matches her spreadsheet columns, and every Book sits in one collection she can browse and filter. Authors become Person objects that collect every book they wrote. In Obsidian she could build the same thing with front matter and a query plugin, and some people enjoy that. Ruth does not want to. She should try twenty books on the free plan before importing all 412.