Obsidian Sync costs $4 per user per month billed annually, or $5 billed monthly. The practical free alternatives are Remotely Save, Self-hosted LiveSync, Syncthing and git via obsidian-git, plus folder sync through iCloud, OneDrive or Google Drive.
All of them are cheaper. None of them is free of trade-offs, and the trade-off is almost never storage or speed — it is mobile. Every option on this page has a documented platform limitation on a phone, and that limitation, not the price, is what should decide your choice.
This comparison is published by the team behind OB Lite, a mobile editor for git-synced vaults. We have a stake in one row of the table below, so we have sourced every claim in it — including the ones that do not favour us.
The comparison table
Prices and platform notes below were checked against primary sources on 2 August 2026. Every limitation quoted comes from the project's own documentation, not from our testing of competitors.
Scroll the table sideways to see every column →
| Option | Cost (Aug 2026) | Where notes live | Mobile situation | Setup effort |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Obsidian Sync | $4/mo billed annually$5/mo billed monthly | Obsidian's serversEnd-to-end encrypted | Officially supported on iOS and Android | None — sign in |
| iCloud Drive | Free within your iCloud plan | Apple's servers | Recommended for macOS and iOS onlyObsidian warns iCloud Drive on Windows may cause duplication or corruption | Low |
| OneDrive / Google Drive | Free tier of the service | Microsoft / Google servers | OneDrive has limitations on Android; neither is officially supported for vault sync on iOS | Low |
| Remotely Save | Core freePRO free during beta until 1 Jan 2027; price not yet announced | Your own S3, Dropbox, OneDrive app folder or WebDAV | Works inside Obsidian mobileAuto-sync only runs while Obsidian is open | Low to medium |
| Self-hosted LiveSync | Software free (MIT)You pay for the server you run | Your CouchDB or object storage, or peer-to-peer | All Obsidian-compatible platforms | High |
| Syncthing | Free and open source | Nowhere central — device to device | Official Android app discontinued after Dec 2024; no official iOS appCommunity fork on Android; Möbius Sync ($4.99 one-time Pro) on iOS | Medium |
| git (obsidian-git) | Free and open sourceFree GitHub repository | Your GitHub / GitLab repository | The plugin's own README: "I would not recommend using this plugin on mobile" | Medium |
Prices change. If you are reading this well after August 2026, treat the cost column as a starting point and check the linked sources in the final section.
What are you actually choosing between?
Most comparisons of this kind answer the wrong question, because "syncing Obsidian" is really three separate decisions bundled together:
- The sync engine — the thing that decides which version of a note wins when two devices disagree.
- The storage location — whose servers hold your notes, and who can read them.
- The mobile client — how you read and write on a phone, which is where nearly every free option runs into a wall.
Obsidian Sync answers all three at once, and that bundling is most of what the $4 buys. Every alternative on this page answers one or two of them and leaves you to solve the rest. Keeping the three apart is the fastest way to work out which option fits you, so the sections below say explicitly which of the three each one solves.
One rule applies to all of them, and it comes from Obsidian's own documentation: do not run two sync services over the same vault. Obsidian's troubleshooting guide names double-syncing as a common cause of files disappearing. Pick one and only one.
What do you get for Obsidian Sync's $4 a month?
You get all three decisions solved, end-to-end encryption, version history, and someone to email when it breaks. At $4 per month billed annually — $48 a year — it is the only option here where sync is a product with support attached rather than a configuration you maintain yourself.
It is worth being straight about this: the paid option is good, and it funds the app everyone on this page is using for free. If your notes matter to your income and your time is worth more than $48 a year, the honest recommendation is to stop reading and buy it.
Is iCloud, OneDrive or Google Drive good enough?
Only if you live inside one vendor's ecosystem — and on iOS, mostly only Apple's. Obsidian's help documentation lists these three as third-party cloud sync options and attaches a different platform caveat to each one.
- iCloud is recommended for macOS and iOS. Obsidian warns that iCloud Drive on Windows may lead to file duplication or corruption.
- OneDrive is supported on Windows and macOS, has limitations on Android, and is not officially supported for syncing vaults on iOS.
- Google Drive is not officially supported for syncing vaults on iOS either; people work around it with third-party plugins.
The deeper problem is what these services are. They sync files, not notes. They have no concept of a merge — if two devices edit the same note before either has synced, you typically get two files or a silently overwritten one, and Obsidian never learns that a conflict happened. On a vault you touch from one machine at a time, that is fine for years. On a vault you touch from a phone during a commute and a laptop that was asleep, it is a slow leak.
What is Remotely Save, and what does it cost?
It is an Obsidian plugin that syncs your vault to storage you already have, and its core is free. It solves the sync engine and lets you choose the storage location — you keep the vault, the plugin pushes and pulls it.
The free tier covers S3 and S3-compatible storage (Cloudflare R2, Backblaze B2, MinIO), Dropbox, the OneDrive app folder, and WebDAV services such as NextCloud or Synology. A PRO tier adds Google Drive, Box, pCloud, Yandex Disk, Koofr, Azure Blob Storage, full OneDrive access, and smarter conflict handling. As of August 2026 PRO is free during its beta until 1 January 2027, and the project states the price will be decided later — so budget for it becoming a paid tier rather than assuming it stays free.
Two limitations worth knowing before you commit, both from the project's own documentation: auto-sync only runs while Obsidian is actually open, so a phone with the app closed is not syncing in the background; and the Obsidian mobile API has performance problems with files of 50 MB or more. The project also tells you plainly to back up your vault before using it.
Is Self-hosted LiveSync worth running a server?
If you want real-time sync and full ownership of the data, it is the most capable option here — and the most demanding. It is MIT-licensed and free as software; what you pay for is the backend you run, whether that is CouchDB on a Raspberry Pi, object storage such as MinIO or S3, or a peer-to-peer setup over WebRTC.
Unlike file-level sync, it syncs changes at a finer granularity and handles conflicts properly, which is why the people who use it tend to be emphatic about it. The cost is operational: you are now running a database, and a database that holds your notes is a database you have to back up, secure and upgrade.
The project's documentation is unusually honest about the risks, and they are worth repeating: back up your vault before installing or upgrading, it cannot run alongside Obsidian Sync or any other sync solution, and you should not close Obsidian mid-sync. It requires Obsidian 1.7.2 or later.
Does Syncthing still work with Obsidian in 2026?
On desktop, yes. On phones, the answer got materially worse and most comparison articles have not caught up. Syncthing is free, open source, and sends files directly between your devices with no server in the middle, which makes it the natural pick for people who dislike cloud storage on principle.
The catch is mobile. The official Syncthing Android app was discontinued — after December 2024 there are no new releases, with the project citing both the difficulty of publishing on Google Play and a lack of active maintenance. A community fork, Syncthing-Fork, is maintained separately and is what Android users are now pointed to. Obsidian's own help documentation reflects this and notes that the official Syncthing Android app is no longer maintained.
On iOS there has never been an official app. The practical route is the third-party Möbius Sync, which is free for small files within its own sandbox and $4.99 as a one-time Pro purchase for unlimited sync. Worth pausing on that number: if you came here to avoid $4 a month, the iOS path to the free peer-to-peer option costs a one-time $4.99 — still far cheaper over any real time horizon, but not zero.
There is also a structural quirk people discover late. Peer-to-peer means two devices must be awake at the same time to exchange changes. A phone that has been in your pocket all day syncs when it next meets your desktop, not before.
Can you just use git?
Yes, and on desktop it is excellent — but the plugin's own documentation tells you not to use it on a phone. The obsidian-git plugin is free and MIT-licensed, works with a free GitHub repository, and gives you something none of the other options do: a complete, inspectable version history of every note, plus off-site backup, for nothing.
It does not need Git installed separately, because it bundles isomorphic-git, a JavaScript reimplementation. Obsidian's own documentation lists git under version control alongside Working Copy, and notes that git requires manual syncing — in practice the plugin automates commit, push and pull on a timer, which is close enough to automatic for most people.
Then there is mobile, and here we should quote rather than paraphrase. The plugin's README states: "The Git implementation on mobile is very unstable! I would not recommend using this plugin on mobile." The documented limitations include no SSH authentication, repository size restricted by memory, no rebase merge strategy, no submodule support, and crashes or indefinite hangs on larger vaults.
That is not a flaw the maintainers are hiding — it is a structural consequence of running git inside a phone's memory budget. It is also the exact gap this site exists to fill, which we will come back to below.
Which one should you pick?
By scenario, since that is how the decision actually gets made:
Every device you own is Apple
iCloud Drive. It is free, the setup is trivial, and it is the configuration Obsidian explicitly recommends for macOS and iOS. Revisit this the day you add a Windows machine.
Mixed devices, and you want it to just work
Obsidian Sync. This is the case the $4 exists for, and every free alternative will cost you more in configuration time than $48 a year is worth.
You already pay for cloud storage
Remotely Save on the free tier. You are reusing storage you already have; just note the conflict handling is "newest wins" unless you are on PRO.
You do not want anyone else holding your notes
Self-hosted LiveSync if you are willing to run a server, Syncthing if you would rather run nothing at all and can live with the mobile app situation.
You want version history and free off-site backup
git via obsidian-git on the desktop. Then read the next section, because this is the route with the sharpest mobile problem and the cleanest mobile answer.
The mobile catch, and what to do about it
Look back at the table's fourth column. Every single row has an asterisk on it: iCloud is Apple-only, Google Drive and OneDrive are not officially supported on iOS, Remotely Save only syncs while the app is open, Syncthing lost its official Android app and never had an iOS one, and obsidian-git's own README advises against mobile use.
This is not a coincidence. Phones sandbox their filesystems, kill background processes to save battery, and cap the memory any one app can use. Every desktop sync strategy has to be rebuilt to survive those three constraints, and mostly they have not been.
There is a way around it that the comparison framing hides: you do not have to run the sync engine on the phone at all. If your vault is already a git repository, the phone can talk to the repository directly instead of holding a synced copy of it. No sync engine on the device means nothing to conflict, nothing to crash, and nothing to run in the background.
That is what we built OB Lite for
OB Lite is a browser-based editor that reads and writes your GitHub-hosted vault straight from your phone, with no git running on the device. Each save becomes one commit, checked against the remote first, so it never fights the obsidian-git setup on your desktop. Reading and basic editing are free; the Pro unlock is a one-time $6.99, not a subscription.
In the interest of being explicit about the bias declared at the top: OB Lite is not a sync engine and does not belong in the comparison table above. It solves the third decision — the mobile client — and only for people whose vault is in a git repository. If you chose iCloud or Remotely Save, it is not for you. This setup is the one we run daily ourselves: obsidian-git on the desktop, vault in a private GitHub repository, phone through OB Lite on both an Android foldable and an iPhone.
FAQ
What is the cheapest way to sync an Obsidian vault?
Syncthing, Self-hosted LiveSync and git via obsidian-git are all free and open source, and Remotely Save's core tier is free. The option that costs nothing on every platform is git with a free GitHub repository. The trade-off is not money but mobile — each free option carries a platform limitation, and that is usually what decides the choice.
Can I use Obsidian Sync alternatives on an iPhone?
Partly. Remotely Save and Self-hosted LiveSync run inside Obsidian on iOS. Syncthing has no official iOS app, so iOS users rely on the third-party Möbius Sync, whose Pro version is a one-time $4.99. Google Drive and OneDrive are not officially supported for vault sync on iOS. The obsidian-git plugin documents its own mobile implementation as very unstable and advises against mobile use.
How much does Obsidian Sync cost in 2026?
$4 per user per month billed annually, or $5 per user per month billed monthly, per the official Obsidian pricing page in August 2026. Obsidian Publish is a separate product at $8 (annual) or $10 (monthly) per site per month. The Obsidian app itself is free.
Does Syncthing still work with Obsidian in 2026?
On desktop, yes. On Android the official app was discontinued after December 2024 with no new releases, and a community fork called Syncthing-Fork is what users are directed to; Obsidian's own help documentation notes the official Android app is no longer maintained. There is no official iOS app.
Can I edit my Obsidian vault on my phone without installing a sync plugin?
Yes, if your vault is in a git repository. Rather than running git on the phone, you can open the repository from a browser-based editor such as OB Lite, which reads and writes the GitHub-hosted vault over the GitHub API. Nothing syncs in the background, so there is no sync engine on the phone to conflict with your desktop setup.
Can I run two sync methods at once as a backup?
No. Obsidian's troubleshooting documentation names double-syncing — running two sync services over the same vault — as a common cause of files disappearing, and Self-hosted LiveSync states outright that it cannot run alongside another sync solution. If you want redundancy, use one sync method plus a separate backup that does not write into the vault.
Sources and method
Every price and platform limitation above was read from a primary source — the vendor's pricing page or the project's own documentation — on 2 August 2026. We did not take figures from other comparison articles, and while checking we found several that still quote Obsidian Sync tiers that no longer appear on the official pricing page. If you spot something here that has gone stale, tell us and we will correct it and change the date at the top.
- Obsidian pricing — obsidian.md/pricing
- Obsidian Help, syncing notes across devices — obsidian.md/help/sync-notes
- Obsidian Help, sync troubleshooting (double-syncing) — obsidian.md/help/sync/troubleshoot
- Remotely Save — github.com/remotely-save/remotely-save and remotelysave.com
- Self-hosted LiveSync — github.com/vrtmrz/obsidian-livesync
- obsidian-git — github.com/Vinzent03/obsidian-git
- Syncthing Android discontinuation announcement — forum.syncthing.net
- Möbius Sync (third-party Syncthing client for iOS) — mobiussync.com