Obsidian Bases: The Feature That Finally Makes Me Stop Opening Notion
The feature that finally got me to close Notion for good.
For two years I’ve kept Notion open on my Mac Studio. Not because I love Notion. Because I needed somewhere to put structured data. A table of books with status columns, a simple project tracker with dates, a list of apps I’ve tried with ratings. Obsidian is where I think. Notion is where I organize things that need columns.
That split has always bothered me. Two tools means two mental contexts, two syncing systems, two places something might be. So when Obsidian introduced Bases publicly in version 1.9.10, I paid attention.
What Bases Actually Is
Bases adds database-like views directly inside your Obsidian vault. You can create a table, a card view, or a list view that pulls from your notes using filters and sorts. If you’ve used Notion’s database feature, the concept is familiar. The key difference is that Bases works on your actual markdown files. It’s reading properties from your notes’ YAML frontmatter and surfacing them in a structured view.
In practice this means you can create a file called Books.base, point it at your /Books folder, and instantly get a filterable, sortable table of every book note you’ve created: title, author, status, rating, whatever properties you’ve been adding to your notes.
Reorganize your vault without relying on an external database or a separate app.
Where It Works Well
For personal use cases, Bases is genuinely good. I set up three views in the first week:
A reading tracker. My book notes already had frontmatter properties for author, status, and rating. Bases surfaced them as a clean table in about three minutes. I can filter by status (reading / finished / abandoned) and sort by rating.
A content pipeline. Each article draft in my folder has a status property. Now I have one view that shows everything in draft, in review, or scheduled for the week. No more opening five folders to remember where things stand.
An app log. I keep notes on apps I’ve tried. Bases turned this into a searchable grid with columns for category, verdict, and whether I’m still using it.
For these kinds of personal organization tasks (the ones where you want to see your notes in a grid instead of a list) Bases works cleanly.
Where It Falls Short
This is not Notion. Not yet.
There are no relations between databases. In Notion, you can link a project record to a list of tasks, and the tasks know which project they belong to. In Bases, each view is a flat surface. You can filter and sort, but you can’t create relationships between different sets of notes.
There are no Notion-style relational rollups. Bases has formulas and summaries inside a view, but you can’t create a formula that counts tasks in a linked database or sums values across related records.
There’s no collaboration. If you’re working with other people, Bases doesn’t help as this is just a personal-use feature and the views are still early. The filtering is functional but limited, and there are edge cases where Bases doesn’t pick up frontmatter the way you’d expect.
Whether It Closes the Gap
For me, it closes about 80% of it.
The use cases that kept Notion open in my dock were personal organization tasks: tracking reading, managing content, logging things with status fields. Bases handles all of those. I deleted my Notion workspace last week and I haven’t missed it.
If you need relational databases, collaborative docs, or Notion’s web publishing features, Bases is not a replacement. But if you’re using Notion as a personal organizer while keeping your actual thinking in Obsidian, you might be surprised how much you can move back.
The one-brain-one-tool ideal I’ve been chasing for years is finally possible. That’s worth paying attention to.
If Bases makes you want to move more of your system into Obsidian, The Magpie Vault is the starter structure I use for that: folders, templates, assistant instructions, skills, and memory files for turning a vault into a working AI assistant system.
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