Short answer
Obsidian for teams is four things: an optional $50 commercial licence, deployment guidance, shared vaults on Obsidian Sync at $4 per user a month, and Publish. A shared vault holds up to 20 people, all with the owner's permissions, and has no live co-editing yet. It suits small teams who edit different notes.
Obsidian for teams is a section of Obsidian's help docs, not a separate product. It covers four things: an optional commercial licence, deploying the app across a company, syncing a shared vault, and publishing from one. What a team actually works in day to day is the shared vault, and that is where the limits are.
This page sets out what each of the four gives a team, what it costs at two, six and twenty people, and the three things a team usually needs that Obsidian does not yet do. Every Obsidian fact below is quoted from Obsidian's own help pages and pricing, checked on 13 October 2026.
What is Obsidian for teams?
Obsidian's teams page opens with one line: "Obsidian can be used as a note-taking application for individuals, and as a collaboration tool for your team." It then links to four pages, and those four are the whole offering.
| Part | What it is | Price |
|---|---|---|
| Commercial licence | Optional support licence, no extra features | $50 per user a year |
| Deploy Obsidian | Instructions for installing and configuring the app across a team | free |
| Syncing for teams | A shared vault on Obsidian Sync | $4 per user a month on Standard, billed yearly |
| Publishing for teams | A Publish site several people can publish to | $8 a month per site, billed yearly |
There is no admin console, no user directory and no single sign-on on any of those pages or on Obsidian's roadmap. Obsidian's deploy page says the way to stop people changing shared settings is "blocking edit access to the .obsidian folder", which is an operating-system permission rather than a setting in the app.
Do you need a commercial licence to use Obsidian at work?
No. Obsidian's licence page says the app is "free for all purposes, including personal, commercial, and non-profit use", and calls Commercial Licenses "optional licenses that help keep Obsidian 100% user-supported". They have been optional since February 2025. A licence does not include Sync: Obsidian's teams page states that "Obsidian Sync is not included with the Commercial license and must be purchased separately."
So for a team, the licence is a donation and Sync is the bill.
How does a shared vault work for a team?
Through Obsidian Sync. The vault owner invites people by email, and Obsidian's help page sets four rules for everyone in it:
- "All collaborators must have an active Sync subscription to access a shared vault." The owner cannot pay for them.
- "The maximum number of collaborators on a shared vault is 20 users."
- "Fine-grained permissions are not supported yet. All collaborators receive the same permissions as the vault owner, with one exception: only the vault owner can invite collaborators."
- "Obsidian does not yet support collaborative live editing on the same file. You will not see the other user's cursor, and their edits will only appear once the changes are synced."
When two people do change the same note between syncs, Obsidian Sync "merges the changes using Google's diff-match-patch algorithm" for markdown files. For everything else, canvases included, it uses "last modified wins": the newer file replaces the older one. Since version 1.9.7 you can switch a device to create a conflict file instead of merging.
Version history depends on the plan. On Standard "notes are retained for 1 month", on Plus "they are kept for 12 months", and older versions of attachments are kept for two weeks.
We went through the sharing options one by one, including Git, Dropbox and Publish, in how to share an Obsidian vault with others.
What does Obsidian for teams cost?
Sync is per person, and every person in the shared vault needs their own subscription. Standard is $4 per user a month billed yearly ($5 monthly), with 1 synced vault, 1 GB of storage and a 5 MB file limit. Plus is $8 per user a month billed yearly ($10 monthly), with 10 synced vaults, 10 GB of storage and a 200 MB file limit.
| People in the vault | Sync Standard, yearly | Sync Plus, yearly | Optional licences |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2 | $96 a year | $192 a year | $100 a year |
| 6 | $288 a year | $576 a year | $300 a year |
| 20 | $960 a year | $1,920 a year | $1,000 a year |
Twenty is the ceiling. A team of twenty-one cannot share one vault on Sync at any price.
For comparison, Baalda's managed backend is free for 2 people and 1 synced vault, then $110 per seat a year on Team with a minimum of 3 seats, which is $660 a year at six people and $2,200 at twenty. Sync Standard is cheaper per head from three people up. What the difference pays for is in the next section, and if you would rather run your own server, Baalda's backend is Apache-2.0 and has no plan limits when you self-host it.
What can't Obsidian for teams do yet?
Three things, and all three are documented by Obsidian itself rather than inferred.
Two people writing in the same note at the same time. Obsidian lists "Multiplayer: Share notes and edit them collaboratively" on its public roadmap, with no date. Until then a shared vault is for taking turns. Community plugins add live editing inside Obsidian, and we compared them in Obsidian collaboration plugins.
Different access for different people. Every collaborator has the owner's rights, minus inviting. There is no read-only member, no private folder inside a shared vault, and no way to share one client folder with one contractor. Publish can make a site read-only, but "Individual password protection for published notes is currently not supported", so it is one password for the whole site. We covered why this matters most for a knowledge base in can Obsidian be a team knowledge base.
More than twenty people. The cap is per vault, so a larger team splits its knowledge across vaults.
When is Obsidian for teams the right choice?
When the team is small, everyone may read and edit everything, and people work on different notes rather than the same one. A research group of four, a pair of founders, a writing team where each person owns their own drafts: Sync handles all of these well, it is cheap, and the vault stays plain markdown on every machine.
It is also the right choice if your team depends on Obsidian's plugin ecosystem, Canvas or Bases. Those are Obsidian's, and no alternative carries them over.
What do teams use when they outgrow it?
The usual move is to Notion or Confluence, which solves live editing and permissions by moving the notes into a hosted database. That trades away the plain files, which is often the reason the team picked Obsidian.
Baalda keeps the files. Notes stay .md files in a folder on each person's disk, and the same vault folder opens in Obsidian if you want it to. On top of that it adds the three things above:
- Live editing. Several people in one note with live cursors, merged as they type through a CRDT rather than by file.
- Per-person access. Each person gets Can edit, Can view or No access on the vault, on folders and on single files, and private folders stay private inside a shared vault.
- No collaborator ceiling. Team is priced per seat with no cap on people.
It also gives the team's AI tools the same files over MCP, scoped to each person's own access, so an assistant cannot read a folder its user cannot open.
Where Baalda is the wrong pick: it is desktop only (macOS, Windows and Linux) with no mobile app yet, it has no plugin ecosystem, and it has no databases. If your team lives in Obsidian plugins or works mostly from phones, stay on Obsidian. The full side by side is on Baalda vs Obsidian.