Moving a team from Notion to Obsidian without losing the multiplayer half

Export the workspace as HTML, not as Markdown, then run Obsidian's Importer plugin over the file. The counterintuitive half of that comes from Obsidian's own import documentation, which says plainly: "We recommend that you do not use Notion's Markdown export as it omits important data." Most of the migration guides on this search tell you to pick Markdown & CSV anyway.

That is the mechanical answer, and it is the part that is already solved. The part the guides stop before is the other half. A Notion workspace is a place several people work. An Obsidian vault is a folder on one laptop. I work on Baalda, a team second brain built on the same plain markdown files, so the half of this migration I pay attention to is what happens to everyone who is not the person running the export.

How do you export a Notion workspace properly?

There are two routes into Obsidian and its documentation is explicit about what each one costs you.

Connect your Notion account. Obsidian calls this the recommended route: "Notion account (recommended) connects directly to your workspace and lets you preserve Databases and formulas which are converted to Bases." Bases is Obsidian's own core plugin for "database-like views of your notes", so a Notion database arrives as something you can still sort and filter rather than as a dead spreadsheet. It needs an API token and a working connection, and it has four stated limits: "Only the primary view for each database is imported", "Linked data sources are not imported", the People functions name() and email(), and the Text functions style() and unstyle().

Export a file and import that. The other route, in Obsidian's words: "File import uses Notion's .zip export files. Does not preserve Databases but does not require an API token or internet connection." You export from Notion, install the Importer plugin, choose Notion (.zip) as the file format, and point it at the download.

If you have databases you actually use, the account route is worth the token. If your Notion is mostly pages and the databases were lists you will rebuild anyway, the file route is simpler and works offline.

Why does Obsidian tell you to export HTML instead of Markdown?

Because Notion's Markdown export is lossy in a way the name hides, and Notion's own export documentation is where you can see it. A full-page database, it says, "will be exports as a CSV file, with Markdown files for each subpage". And: "Callout blocks will be exported as HTML, as there is no Markdown equivalent."

So the Markdown export already contains HTML in the places where Markdown ran out, and hands structure off to CSV in the places where a database was. You are not getting clean markdown by asking for markdown. You are getting markdown plus two escape hatches. The HTML export carries more of the original shape, and the Importer is the thing that turns it into markdown rather than Notion.

There is one more reason to pick HTML. Notion only exports your comment threads on that path: "When you export as HTML, you can also export comments at both the page and block levels. This includes resolved and unresolved comments and any files, pages, or users mentioned in them."

Whose workspace did you just export?

This is the line in Notion's export documentation that decides what the migration actually produces, and no guide on this search mentions it:

"Pages that the exporter doesn't have access to, such as private pages of other users, will not be included in the export."

The export is not the workspace. It is one person's reach into the workspace, flattened. Whoever runs it decides, without choosing to, which parts of the team's knowledge exist on the other side. Run it as an admin and you get everything including things people assumed were theirs. Run it as a regular member and you silently drop whatever was shared only with someone else.

Two other practical facts from the same page, both worth knowing before you book the afternoon. The Include subpages toggle is not available on every plan: "If you're on a Business Plan or Enterprise Plan, you can switch on the Include subpages option." And the wait is real: "Exports can take up to 30 hours to process, depending on the size of the workspace."

What actually survives the move?

The bottom two rows are the ones that matter and the ones no importer can help with, because they were never properties of the content. They were properties of Notion.

Where do the other people go?

Nowhere, and this is the part to plan for rather than discover. Obsidian is a single-user application by design: every note is a file in a folder, and the program assumes one person is editing that folder. That is the same decision that makes it fast, private and yours, so it is not a flaw. It is just the thing you are trading for when you leave a multiplayer tool. We wrote up the usual workarounds and what each one costs in multiplayer Obsidian, and the short version is that shared Dropbox folders and sync plugins replace whole files, so two people in one note means one person's edit survives.

Baalda is the same storage decision with the multiplayer half put back. Notes are plain .md files in a folder on your own disk, so everything you just converted stays converted and Obsidian can still open it. The difference is underneath: a note open in two places is one document, not two copies. The sync server names each document vault:{vaultId}/note:{docId}, authenticates the connection per document, and appends each incremental edit to that note's own log, so two people typing in the same paragraph both keep their text instead of one save clobbering the other. The editor is bound to a shared awareness channel, which is where live cursors come from, and a person's cursor colour is derived from their stable user id rather than assigned per session, so the same teammate is the same colour on every machine every time. Vault-wide presence is keyed by user, so you can see which note someone is in before you open it and land on top of them.

The permissions row in that table gets an answer too, though it is one you rebuild rather than import. Access is set per folder and per file, resolved on the server, and the same rules apply to a person and to an AI client reading over MCP. That is covered properly in per-file permissions. For this migration the useful thing to know is just that the structure Notion had and the export threw away is expressible again on the other side.

Baalda is open source under Apache-2.0 and self-hostable. It is free to run locally, and the managed Team plan is $10 a month per vault, or $97 a year, which is priced per vault rather than per person.

What do you do with the pages the import mangles?

Some will. Nested toggles, synced blocks, odd embeds and heavily formatted callouts are where any converter gets tired, and you usually find out weeks later when you open one.

The repair path is the clipboard, and it is better than it sounds. Copying from Notion puts a rich text/html flavour on the clipboard alongside the plain text. Baalda's paste handler reads that flavour and converts it to markdown itself rather than embedding it, so headings, bold, lists, links and tables arrive as their markdown equivalents and no raw HTML enters the file. The comment above that code names the sources it was written for, Notion among them. In practice it means a page that converted badly can be fixed by opening both and copying it across once, and what you end up with is still a plain markdown file.

Obsidian handles pasted rich text too. The reason to mention it here at all is that the HTML export Obsidian recommends and the HTML on your clipboard are the same shape of problem, and it is worth knowing that the single-page repair exists before you decide a bad import means the whole migration failed.

When is Obsidian on its own the right answer?

Often, and it is worth being clear about where this stops.

Baalda has no Notion importer. None. No account connector, no .zip reader, no conversion step of any kind. Obsidian's Importer is genuinely the tool for this job, and the honest sequence is to run it, get your markdown, and then decide where the folder should live. If a one-click migration is the thing you are shopping for, that is an argument for Obsidian and not for us.

Baalda has no Bases equivalent. If the databases are the reason you use Notion, and you want views, sorting and filtering over properties after the move, Obsidian's account route into Bases is the only path here that keeps them. We do not have an answer to that and you should weight it heavily.

Baalda has no comments. Whatever the HTML export carried across arrives as text, and there is no thread to reply in. If your team's decisions live in Notion comment threads rather than in the pages, you are going to lose the shape of them wherever you go, and you should read the threads before you export rather than after.

And if you are one person, you do not need any of this. A vault on your own disk with Obsidian on top of it is a very good second brain, it costs nothing, and adding a sync server to it solves a problem you do not have. The case for a shared vault starts at the second person, which is also exactly where this migration starts costing you something. There is a fuller comparison on Baalda vs Notion if you are still deciding which side of the trade you are on.

The migration is an afternoon. The question of where a team's knowledge lives after it is not, and it is worth answering before you click export rather than six weeks later when nobody can find anything and two people have started keeping their own copies.