In general, I’m finding Obsidian and DevonThing complement each other nicely. I do most of my work in Markdown, and Obsidian is a great Markdown editor and document repository. DevonThink is … OK at Markdown. It’s gotten much better recently, for which I am grateful, but it’s still just OK. For example, Obsidian supports folding, and readable line widths make it easier on the eyes.
Flipping between multiple documents throughout the day is easier in Obsidian than DevonThink.
Also, the Obsidian mobile experience (in beta) is light-years better — for me — than DevonThink to Go. DTTG is far inferior to DT for desktop.
On the other hand, DevonThink excels at storing and organizing multiple document types, and searching them. DT also lets you create a permanent link to a document, which will stay with that document wherever it moves to.
Also in DevonThink’s favor:
- It’s bombproof. I’ve been using DT for three years and have never had a database corruption problem. I know others who’ve used it much longer and who can say the same.
- It’s relatively futureproof. Been around for nearly 20 years. Futureproofing is relative; I’m relatively confident that my DT databases will still be usable years from now. I won’t say the same for other apps that have more current cachet.
- It’s aggressively designed to work with other apps. Again, other, trendier note-taking and document creation apps are not so friendly with other apps.
Lately I think of Obsidian and DevonThink as a single, unified app, and switch between them multiple times a day. I’ll be writing an article in Obsidian and suddenly need to access a DIFFERENT project that I thought I was done with last week or in November. I Cmd-Tab over to DevonThink, find that project, and then flip back to Obsidian and keep going.