# Obsidian collaboration plugins, compared on whose server carries your edits

> Relay, Peerdraft, EVC Team Relay, Live Share, Vault Rooms, Synqra, Mood Collab and DoMD: hosting, price, permissions and encryption, from each project's own page.

Source: https://baalda.com/blog/obsidian-collaboration-plugins
Site: Baalda, https://baalda.com
Published: 2026-10-13

**Short answer.** Relay is the default pick: the most used by far, free for up to 3 users, with private folders from $6 per user a month. For free and self-hosted, EVC Team Relay has folder roles and Live Share encrypts end to end. Peerdraft is easiest for one-off sessions. All of them add live editing that Obsidian itself does not have yet.

Obsidian does not do live co-editing yet. Its own help page says so ("Obsidian does not yet support collaborative live editing on the same file"), and its public roadmap lists "Multiplayer: Share notes and edit them collaboratively" with no date. Until it ships, live editing inside Obsidian comes from community plugins, and there are more of them than most people realise.

They split on one question before any other: whose server carries the edits. Some run on the plugin author's cloud, some on a server you run, and some connect two machines directly. That one choice decides the price, who can see your notes, and whether it still works next year. Below are the eight that exist today, with the facts from each project's own page, checked on 13 October 2026.

## Which Obsidian collaboration plugins exist?

Downloads are from Obsidian's own community plugin stats file. Prices are in US dollars.

| Plugin | Whose server | Price | Access control | Downloads |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Relay | Relay's cloud, or self-hosted on paid plans | Free up to 3 users, then from $5 a month | Private folders from Starter ($6 per user a month) | 219,344 |
| Peerdraft | Peerdraft's cloud, or peer to peer for one-off sessions | Free, Pro $5 a month billed yearly | Not documented | 19,533 |
| EVC Team Relay | Self-hosted, or a hosted service | Free self-hosted, hosted from $9 a month | Viewer or editor per shared folder | Not in the directory |
| Live Share | Your own relay server | Free, MIT | Read-only or read-write per guest | 998 |
| Vault Rooms | One machine on your local network | Free, MIT | Deny by default, per path, per user | 360 |
| Synqra | Your own relay server | Free, MIT | A room password | 235 |
| Mood Collab | Your organisation's own server | Not published | Editor, commenter or viewer per folder | 124 |
| DoMD | Peer to peer through a macOS app | Not published | Edit or read-only per session | 80 |

All eight merge edits with a CRDT, most of them Yjs, which is the same family of technique Google Docs-style editors use. The differences are everything around that.

## Which one should most teams try first?

**Relay**, if you want to stay inside Obsidian. It is the most used by a wide margin, it is actively maintained (its latest release was 9 September 2026), and it does what people expect: live cursors, shared folders and offline editing that merges when you reconnect. The plugin is MIT licensed. The account and billing service behind it is not.

Relay's pricing page lists Free at $0 for up to 3 users, Hobby at $5 a month in total, Starter at $6 per user a month and Premium at $18 per user a month. Private folders, the thing that lets one folder be shared with some people and not others, start at Starter. The free cloud tier syncs markdown files only.

## Which ones are free and self-hosted?

**EVC Team Relay**, **Live Share** and **Synqra** all run on a server you control, and none of them charge for that.

- **EVC Team Relay** is the most complete of the three: viewer and editor roles per shared folder, offline editing, and a server you run with Docker Compose. Its server is Apache-2.0 and the plugin is MIT. It is not in Obsidian's community directory, so it installs through BRAT, and its hosted plans are $9 a month or $90 a year.
- **Live Share** is the only one that encrypts end to end for all sync, using AES-256-GCM with a key derived from a shared secret. Guests can be read-only or read-write, enforced by the server, with per-file overrides.
- **Synqra** adds shared Excalidraw drawing. Access is a room password rather than per-person roles.

The cost of free is that someone on your team now runs a relay server, keeps it updated and backs it up.

## What about the rest?

- **Peerdraft** is the easiest to start: one-off "fleeting" sessions are free, unlimited and end-to-end encrypted directly between the two machines. Persistent shares go through Peerdraft's server, and the free tier allows 10 of them. Only the person who starts a share pays for Pro.
- **Vault Rooms** works only on the same local network. Its own README says the relay "handles plaintext" and that it is not end-to-end encryption. It is a good fit for an office, not for a remote team.
- **DoMD** is macOS only and runs through a separate desktop app.
- **Mood Collab** adds comments and mentions, which the others lack, but it is proprietary, needs a server your organisation provides, and publishes no pricing.
- **screen.garden** used to be on this list. The service has shut down.

## What do all of them have in common?

They sit on top of Obsidian, so they inherit Obsidian's model of a vault. Three consequences follow from that.

**The permission model is the plugin's, not Obsidian's.** Obsidian Sync gives every collaborator the owner's rights. A plugin can add folder roles on its own server, but Obsidian itself does not know about them, so a vault synced both ways can have two sets of rules.

**AI tools do not go through the plugin.** An MCP server for Obsidian reads the vault on one person's machine with that person's key. A folder the plugin hides from a teammate is still readable by the assistant running on the owner's laptop. We went through that gap in [an MCP server for team notes has to know who is asking](/blog/mcp-server-team-notes).

**Two layers can both be syncing.** Obsidian's help warns against syncing one vault through two services at once. A collaboration plugin plus Obsidian Sync, iCloud or Git on the same folder is exactly that, so pick one carrier for the shared folder.

## When does a plugin stop being enough?

For a small group that wants to keep Obsidian and its plugins, a collaboration plugin is the right answer, and Relay is the safe pick. It stops being enough when the access rules have to hold everywhere: in the editor, on every synced copy, and for every AI tool that touches the notes.

That is the case Baalda is built for. It is a separate desktop app rather than a plugin, the vault is still a folder of `.md` files, and live editing, per-file Can edit, Can view and No access, and MCP access all run through the same server, so an assistant connected with your token can only read what you can. The trade is that you leave Obsidian's plugin ecosystem, which for many teams is the reason to stay. The wider decision is laid out in [Obsidian for teams](/blog/obsidian-for-teams), and the plain answer to whether Obsidian can do this on its own is in [does Obsidian have live collaboration](/blog/obsidian-multiplayer-realtime-collaboration).

## FAQ

### What is the best Obsidian collaboration plugin?

For most teams, Relay. It has 219,344 downloads on Obsidian's own plugin stats, more than every other live-editing plugin combined, and it was last released on 9 September 2026. It is free for up to 3 users, Hobby is $5 a month in total, and private folders start on Starter at $6 per user a month.

### Is there a free, self-hosted Obsidian collaboration plugin?

Three. EVC Team Relay runs on a server you deploy with Docker Compose and gives viewer or editor roles per shared folder. Live Share runs on your own relay server, encrypts end to end with AES-256-GCM and supports read-only guests. Synqra runs on your own relay with a room password and adds shared Excalidraw. All three are free and MIT licensed for the plugin.

### Are Obsidian collaboration plugins end-to-end encrypted?

Mostly not. Live Share is the only one that encrypts all sync end to end. Peerdraft encrypts its one-off fleeting sessions end to end, directly between peers, but its persistent shares go through Peerdraft's server. Vault Rooms states plainly that its relay handles plaintext. The others do not claim end-to-end encryption.

### Will Obsidian add real-time collaboration itself?

It is on the roadmap. Obsidian lists "Multiplayer: Share notes and edit them collaboratively" on its public roadmap, with no date. Today its help page says it "does not yet support collaborative live editing on the same file".