Progress vs Obsidian

A private local vault you write alone in vs. a shared workspace where notes sit next to the work.

Obsidian and Progress are both, in part, about notes — but they're built for different situations. Obsidian is a local-first vault of linked markdown files, built for one person thinking on their own machine. Progress is a shared project workspace where notes are one piece alongside the board, real-time chat, a synced calendar, meetings, and the client-facing tools a team actually needs. If your work is solo and offline, Obsidian's vault is hard to beat. If your notes need to live where your team and clients already are, Progress gives them company.

Notes

4 notes

Today

Edited 5 min ago

Wednesday May 14

Ship Stripe webhook fix

Review Owen's SOW edits

Pair with Maya on bottom-nav

Need a final call from @Owen on the press-release embargo.

	Progress	Obsidian
Notes storage	Cloud-hosted, synced automatically across devices	Local markdown files on your device
Real-time collaboration	Multiple people can edit and comment together live	Single-user by design; sync moves files, it doesn't merge live edits
Note version history	Built in on every note	Via community plugins or your own backup habits
Notes next to the actual work	Same workspace as the board, chat, calendar, and meetings	A standalone vault; connecting it to tasks or calls means other apps
Sharing with clients or teammates	Publish docs, book calls, sign, and meet — no account needed on their end	Via Obsidian Publish, a separate product for static pages
Extensibility	Focused feature set, nothing to configure	Deep plugin ecosystem for people who like building their own setup

Progress

Obsidian

Notes storage

Cloud-hosted, synced automatically across devices

Local markdown files on your device

Real-time collaboration

Multiple people can edit and comment together live

Single-user by design; sync moves files, it doesn't merge live edits

Note version history

Built in on every note

Via community plugins or your own backup habits

Notes next to the actual work

Same workspace as the board, chat, calendar, and meetings

A standalone vault; connecting it to tasks or calls means other apps

Sharing with clients or teammates

Publish docs, book calls, sign, and meet — no account needed on their end

Via Obsidian Publish, a separate product for static pages

Extensibility

Focused feature set, nothing to configure

Deep plugin ecosystem for people who like building their own setup

What Obsidian does well

Obsidian stores your notes as plain markdown files on your own device, so there's no lock-in and no server between you and your writing — it even works fully offline. Backlinks and the graph view make it genuinely good for connecting ideas over time, and its plugin ecosystem is enormous, letting people who like tinkering shape it into almost anything. For a single person building a long-term, private knowledge base, it's a well-loved, capable tool.

Where Progress is different

Progress starts from the project, not the vault. Notes and documents live inside the same workspace as the kanban board, real-time chat, a Google-synced calendar, meetings with AI notes, files, and e-signatures — so what you write down is already sitting next to the work it describes and the people it's for. Multiple people can edit and comment together, every note keeps version history automatically, and nothing needs a plugin to work: it's one connected workspace per project instead of a personal vault you'd have to open up to a team.

This is the real thing

Actual screenshots from a live Progress workspace — not mockups. Every project ships with all of it.

Project notes and documents in Progress — Notes and docs live inside the project, next to the work they describe.

The Progress kanban board with real cards, labels, and checklists — The board — drag-and-drop kanban with labels, checklists, and card templates.

Progress team chat with channels, threads of conversation, and reactions — Chat — channels and DMs that sit one tab away from the board.

Looking for an Obsidian alternative?

If what you actually want is your notes living with the rest of the work — visible to the team that needs them, attached to the calls that produced them, feeding into the board they turn into — Progress is a different kind of Obsidian alternative. It isn't a bigger vault; it's a shared workspace where notes are one connected piece instead of a private file tree. Obsidian stays the stronger choice for personal, offline, endlessly customizable note-taking. Progress is built for teams and client work where notes need to talk to everything else.