Short answer
Four ways. Obsidian Sync shares the whole vault, but every collaborator needs their own subscription and gets the owner's permissions. Publish is read-only. A shared folder or Git copies files and loses simultaneous edits. The Relay plugin adds live editing. To share one folder with one person at a chosen level, you need per-file permissions.
Two questions hide inside this one. The first is about transport: how do the files reach the other person. The second is about authority: what they are allowed to do once they have them. Every method you will find answers the first, and settles the second for you without asking.
Can you share an Obsidian vault with someone?
Yes, and there are four routes, which are not variations on one idea. Obsidian Sync shares a whole vault with named people. Obsidian Publish puts a vault on the web for readers. A shared Dropbox or iCloud folder, or a Git repository, copies the files. A community plugin such as Relay adds live multi-user editing inside Obsidian itself.
What separates them is not speed or price. It is how much of the vault travels, and how much power the other person ends up with. Obsidian's own sharing is vault-shaped and close to all-or-nothing. Baalda, which is the app this site is for, is the case where sharing is written per folder and per person instead. The rest of this post is what each one actually costs you.
| Route | What you share | What they can do | Price |
|---|---|---|---|
| Obsidian Sync shared vault | the whole vault | everything the owner can, except invite | $4 per user per month, each person |
| Obsidian Publish | a vault, as a website | read it | $8 per site per month |
| Dropbox, iCloud or Git | a copy of the files | anything, in their copy | free to cheap |
| Relay plugin | selected folders | edit, live, together | free up to 3 users |
| Baalda | any folder or file, per person | view, edit, or nothing | $10 per vault per month |
What does an Obsidian Sync shared vault actually give the other person?
More than most people expect. Obsidian's own help page is direct about it: "All collaborators receive the same permissions as the vault owner, with one exception: only the vault owner can invite collaborators." There is no viewer role and no per-folder scope. If your vault has a client folder, a salary note and a half-written resignation letter in it, the person you invited to help with meeting notes has all three, with edit and delete rights.
Three more facts from the same page are worth knowing before you invite anyone:
- "All collaborators must have an active Sync subscription to access a shared vault." You cannot pay for them. Each person buys their own.
- "The maximum number of collaborators on a shared vault is 20 users."
- "Obsidian does not yet support collaborative live editing on the same file." Edits appear after they sync. You will not see a cursor.
That last one surprises people who assumed a shared vault meant Google Docs for markdown. It does not, and the reasons are structural rather than a missing feature. We wrote that up separately in multiplayer Obsidian.
One piece of good news, also from Obsidian: "Joining a shared vault does not count towards your vault limit." So a collaborator on Sync Standard, which allows one synced vault, can still sync their own.
What about Publish, a zip, Dropbox or Git?
Each of these is the right answer to a narrower question than the one you asked.
- Obsidian Publish ($8 per site per month billed annually, $10 monthly) turns a vault into a website. It is the correct tool if the other person needs to read and nothing else, and if you are comfortable with the pages being on the web. It is not a way to let someone write.
- Zipping the folder and sending it is genuinely the right move for a one-time handoff. It is free, it takes a minute, and nobody has to install anything. It gives them a copy, frozen at that moment, which then drifts from yours forever.
- Dropbox, iCloud or Google Drive keep a copy in step, and they replace whole files when they do. Two people editing the same note at once produces a conflicted copy or a silent loss. It is workable when you take turns and painful when you do not.
- Git gives you history and review, which prose rarely needs and which most teammates will not learn. Merge conflicts in a paragraph are worse than merge conflicts in code.
A note on licensing, since people ask: sharing a vault at work does not require you to buy anything from Obsidian. Obsidian's licence page says the app is "free for all purposes, including personal, commercial, and non-profit use", and describes the $50 per user per year Commercial License as an optional way to support development.
Can you share one folder with one person and nothing else?
This is the question underneath the original one, and it is the one Obsidian's own sharing does not answer. You usually do not want to share a vault. You want to share the two folders that concern this person, at the level you choose, and keep the rest.
That needs permissions attached to folders and files rather than to the vault, which is what Baalda does. Access is set per resource and per audience, in three modes:
- Can edit, the open mode
- Can view, read-only
- No access, private
The audience is either everyone in the vault or a named list of people, and the resource is a folder, a file, or the whole vault. Over MCP the same thing is one call, which is the clearest way to show the shape:
{
"tool": "manage_access",
"resources": [{ "resourceType": "folder", "resourceId": "<folder id>" }],
"audience": { "type": "users", "userIds": ["<their user id>"] },
"mode": "readonly"
}Read that as a sentence: this folder, this person, view only. Nothing else in the vault moves. The same call takes up to 1000 resources at once, and it is restricted to the vault owner and admins.
For the smallest case, one note going to one person who is not in your team at all, there is a read-only public link per note. The token is 24 random bytes, the page is served no-store so revoking takes effect immediately, and the link carries no-referrer so it cannot leak through an outbound click. It is the "send someone a note" case without making them an account.
Underneath, the files are still plain .md on your own disk, and two people can type in the same paragraph without clobbering each other, because edits merge at the keystroke rather than the file. That is the part Dropbox cannot do and Sync does not claim to.
What does sharing cost once more than one person joins?
The two pricing shapes diverge, and this is where most of the money is.
Obsidian Sync is per user. Sharing a vault with one colleague means two subscriptions, because each of you needs an active one: $8 a month at the $4 annual rate. Six people on the vault is $24 a month. Twenty, the ceiling, is $80 a month.
Baalda's Team plan is $10 per vault per month, or $97 a year, and it is not priced per seat. Baalda itself is Apache-2.0 and free to run locally or self-host, so the $10 buys the managed backend rather than the software.
| People on the vault | Obsidian Sync Standard, annual | Baalda Team |
|---|---|---|
| 2 | $8 per month | $10 per month |
| 6 | $24 per month | $10 per month |
| 20 | $80 per month | $10 per month |
At two people Obsidian is cheaper. The lines cross at three.
Which one should you pick?
Honestly, by what you are optimising for.
Stay with Obsidian Sync if everyone already pays for it, you trust each other completely, and you take turns on files. It is the least new software, and that is a real advantage.
Use Relay if staying inside Obsidian matters more than anything else. It is the genuine multiplayer answer for the Obsidian app: real-time editing with live cursors, free up to 3 users, $5 a month total for 6 on the Hobby tier, and role-based access control with private folders from the Starter tier at $6 per user per month. The Relay server and plugin are open source, though the control plane is not. If your constraint is "my team will not leave Obsidian", Relay beats us and we would rather say so.
Use Publish or a zip if the other person only ever reads, or only needs it once. Do not buy a collaboration tool for a handoff.
Use Baalda if the sharing you want is partial and uneven, which it usually is once more than two people are involved, and if you want per-file view and edit levels, live editing, and a price that does not climb with the team. The honest limit: Baalda is a different application, not an Obsidian plugin. Your files come across as-is because they are the same markdown, and they leave the same way, but it is a new app for everyone to open. If that is a dealbreaker, the answer above this one is yours. We lay out the rest of the differences on the Baalda and Obsidian comparison page, and the wider case for a shared vault in what is a team second brain.