screen.garden is shutting down
Where to move your Obsidian vault

The timeline, and what happens on 1 September

These dates come from the shutdown announcement on screen.garden's own blog. Nothing here is our interpretation.

• 1 July 2026Shutdown announced. Creating new teams disabled the same day.
• 15 July 2026Expanding existing teams disabled.
• 1 August 2026All subscriptions paused — no further charges are made. If you were billed monthly, you have already stopped paying.
• 1 September 2026The service shuts down and the data held on screen.garden servers is deleted. This includes uploaded attachments in your 10 GB of storage.
• After thatThe team plans to release the client and server source code under a permissive licence for self-hosting. No date is given, and the announcement states the team "can't offer support for the code in the way we did for the commercial project".

On the part that matters most, the announcement is unambiguous:

"Your local Obsidian notes are untouched."

The Markdown files in the vault folder on your own machine are yours and stay yours — that is the design of Obsidian itself, not a favour from any sync vendor. What disappears is the server-side copy and anything that only ever lived there.

For context on what you were paying: screen.garden's pricing page lists "$4 per month for up to 3 people" and "$2 per person/month for members thereafter", including 10 GB of file storage. That number is worth holding on to, because several of the replacements below cost about the same, and one costs less than two months of it, once.

Do this first, before anything else

Before you evaluate a single replacement, spend ten minutes making sure the shutdown cannot cost you anything. The order matters — a migration decision made while you are unsure whether you still hold your own notes is a decision made under pressure.

1. Open the vault folder on the computer where you run Obsidian and confirm the notes are there. Not in Obsidian — in the file manager. You are looking for actual .md files with recent modification dates.
2. Hunt for notes that exist only on the server. This is the real risk. If you ever created or edited a note from the web interface on a device that does not run Obsidian — a work laptop, a tablet, someone else's machine — check that it has landed in the local vault. Open Obsidian on your main machine, let it sync one last time, then search for the titles you remember writing on the web.
3. Collect your attachments. Images, PDFs and videos that you uploaded through screen.garden live in its 10 GB of server storage. Those are deleted on 1 September. Files referenced from your local vault folder are fine; anything you only ever dragged into a browser window is not.
4. Take one copy off the machine. Copy the whole vault folder to an external drive, a zip file, or a private git repository. Do it before you start changing sync tools, not after — most vault accidents happen during a migration, not during a shutdown.
5. Only then, pick a replacement. If your team was sharing a vault, agree on who holds the authoritative copy before two people start syncing the same notes with two different tools.

The migration map

Find the row that describes why you paid for screen.garden. The right-hand column is the honest part: what you give up by moving to the replacement.

Scroll the table sideways to see every column →

Obsidian Sync and Publish prices are from obsidian.md/pricing, checked 16 August 2026. screen.garden prices are from its own pricing page on the same date. OB Lite is our product; its price is a one-time purchase, and the free tier is described in full further down.

"I used it to edit my notes in a browser"

This was, judging by how screen.garden described itself to individuals, the most common single reason to subscribe: your notes are on a machine at home, and you want to reach them from a browser tab somewhere else. There is no official Obsidian answer to this — the app is local software and Obsidian Publish is a publishing product, not an editor.

Which replacement fits is decided almost entirely by where your vault is stored, not by which tool has the nicest screenshots:

If your vault is in a git repository

github.dev is free and already attached to your repository — open the repo on GitHub and press the full stop key. It is VS Code in a browser tab, which is exactly as good and exactly as bad as it sounds: excellent for a quick fix, awkward as a notes interface, with no note list, no wikilink navigation and no rendered preview unless you go looking for it. OB Lite covers the same storage location with a notes interface instead of an editor interface; details in the last section.

If your vault is on your own machine and you can run a small server

Browsidian is free and open source, and it is the only option here that reaches a vault sitting on your own disk. It runs several ways — a local Node.js server that reads and writes the vault folder, a browser-only mode using the File System Access API, and a Dropbox mode. The trade is the usual self-hosting trade: you are now responsible for running it and for reaching it safely from outside your network.

If your vault is in Google Drive

There is a Chrome extension built specifically for editing Obsidian vaults stored in Google Drive. It is the narrowest option on this page and the easiest to set up, provided your vault genuinely lives in Drive and you are willing to work inside Chrome.

We compared all of these in detail, including setup requirements and the exact limitations of each, in Edit your Obsidian vault from the browser — every option in 2026, compared.

"I used it to sync my devices"

If screen.garden was mainly your sync layer, you are in the best position of anyone reading this page — sync is the most crowded, best-supported category in the Obsidian ecosystem, and you have a genuine choice.

• Obsidian Sync — $4 per user per month billed annually, $5 billed monthly. First-party, end-to-end encrypted, with version history, and it is the only one nobody has to configure. It includes collaborating on shared vaults, which covers part of what your team lost.
• obsidian-git — free, and it turns your vault into a git repository that commits and pushes on a schedule. Note the maintainer's own warning about mobile before you plan around it; on desktop it is solid.
• Remotely Save — free for the standard version, connecting your vault to S3, Dropbox, OneDrive or WebDAV.
• Syncthing — free, peer-to-peer, no server in the middle at all. Mature on desktop; check the current state of its mobile apps before committing, as Android support has had a rocky history.

Longer comparison, with the mobile catch spelled out for each: Obsidian Sync alternatives compared.

"I used the realtime collaboration"

Then you have our sympathy, because this is the part of screen.garden that genuinely has no replacement, and we would rather say so plainly than pretend otherwise to sell you something.

Realtime multiplayer editing with live cursors, inside Obsidian, with conflict-free merging — that combination did not exist before screen.garden built it and does not exist commercially now that it is closing. The nearest things available are all compromises in a different direction:

• Obsidian Sync's shared vaults get several people working in the same vault, but it is file sync, not live co-editing. Two people in the same note at the same time produces a conflict to resolve, not two cursors.
• Self-hosting screen.garden once the code is released is the only route to the actual feature. See the next section for why you should not treat this as a plan yet.
• Moving the collaborative subset of your notes elsewhere — a shared document tool for the handful of pages that genuinely need simultaneous editing, with Obsidian kept for everything else — is unglamorous, and it is what most teams in this position will actually end up doing.

"I used it to share notes with other people"

Sharing splits into two quite different needs, and screen.garden covered both, which is why no single replacement lines up neatly.

Sharing with collaborators who also use Obsidian

Obsidian Sync's shared vaults are the direct answer — $4 per user per month billed annually. Everyone involved runs Obsidian and holds their own licence, and you share at vault level rather than per note.

Sharing with people who do not use Obsidian

This is the harder half, because the recipient has nothing installed and should not have to install anything.

• Obsidian Publish — $8 per site per month billed annually, $10 monthly. A real published site with search and a graph view, and it supports password protection, but the unit is a site rather than a note, and readers cannot edit.
• OB Lite share links — a single note becomes a link that opens in any browser, with an expiry date, included in the one-time purchase. The recipient needs nothing but a browser. It is per-note rather than per-site, and it is one-way: they read, they do not edit.

Neither is a like-for-like replacement for permissioned team folders. If that was your setup, read the Publish and Sync pages carefully before you commit — the pricing units are different enough that a team of five lands in a very different place depending on which you choose.

Should you wait for the open-source release?

The team has said it will release both the client and the server under a permissive licence so people can self-host and modify them. That is a genuinely generous ending, and for a technical team it may well be the right answer eventually.

It is not a plan you can rely on before 1 September, for three reasons that are all in the announcement itself:

• There is no date. "After the shutdown" is what is stated. Your service ends on a known day; the replacement arrives on an unknown one.
• There is no support. The team says explicitly it "can't offer support for the code in the way we did for the commercial project". A sync server you cannot get help with is a different proposition from a sync service you can email.
• You become the operator. Uptime, backups, upgrades, TLS certificates and the security of a server holding your notes all become your responsibility. That is a fair trade for some people and a bad one for most.

If your vault is, or could be, a git repository

This is the part where we are describing our own product, so here is the honest shape of it before the pitch.

OB Lite is a browser editor for Obsidian-compatible vaults that live in a git repository. It is a web app, so there is nothing to install — you open it in a browser on a phone, a tablet or a work laptop, connect it to one repository, and your notes are there. It is not a sync service: your vault stays in your own repository, and we never hold a copy of it on a server.

It replaces exactly one thing screen.garden did — reaching and editing your own notes from a browser. It does not do realtime collaboration, and it does not sync your desktop machines to each other. If those were your reasons for subscribing, the sections above are the honest answer, not this one.

What it costs, in full

• Free, permanently: reading your vault, editing and saving existing notes, drafts, search, recent files, dark and light themes, 3 bookmarks, and creating up to 10 new notes a month.
• $6.99, one time: unlimited new notes, delete, rename and move, wikilink navigation, the outline drawer, unlimited bookmarks, the Moon theme, image upload, Dataview tables, and expiring share links.
• No subscription of any kind. There is no server-side storage to pay for, because the storage is your repository.

For a screen.garden subscriber that arithmetic is unusually blunt: the paid tier costs less than two months of what you were paying, once, and never again. What you give up in exchange is real — no live cursors, no server-side copy, and your vault has to be in git.

Try it before you migrate anything

The demo is a real vault you can browse and edit in the page — no account, no sign-in, no email. If the interface is not what you want, you have lost thirty seconds rather than a migration weekend.

Open the live demo What is OB Lite?

FAQ

Sources and method

Every date and price on this page comes from a primary source — the vendor's own announcement, pricing page or repository — checked on 16 August 2026. Where we describe a competing product's limitations, the limitation is quoted from that product's own material rather than from our testing. Where the honest answer is that our product does not fit, we have said so in the relevant section instead of in a footnote.

• screen.garden shutdown announcement and timeline — screen.garden/blog/shutting-down
• screen.garden pricing before the shutdown — screen.garden/pricing
• screen.garden Obsidian plugin — github.com/screendotgarden/screengarden-obsidian
• Obsidian pricing (Sync and Publish) — obsidian.md/pricing
• Obsidian Help, sync troubleshooting (double-syncing) — obsidian.md/help/sync/troubleshoot
• Browsidian — github.com/blamouche/browsidian
• github.dev web-based editor — docs.github.com