Obsidian Publish is Obsidian's own way to put notes on the web, and it is good at what it is built for: a public website made from part of your vault. Many people looking for an alternative want something different. They have one note, a plan or a report, and they want three specific people to read it, or to edit it, without sending a PDF. That is a different job, and it needs a different tool.
Two different jobs
- Publishing a site: many notes, public, linked together, findable on Google, read by people you do not know. Obsidian Publish, Quartz and Digital Garden do this.
- Sharing a note: one note, sent to named people, often private, sometimes edited by them. Share Note, Google Docs, Notion and myone.page do this in different ways.
Decide which job you have before comparing prices.
Comparison
As of October 2026. Prices are in US dollars.
| Price | Share one note with specific people | Readers can edit | Edits come back into the vault | End-to-end encrypted | Setup | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Obsidian Publish | $8/site/month yearly, $10 monthly | No: public site, or one password for the whole site | No | No | No | Built in, minutes |
| Share Note plugin | Free, no account; self-hosting possible | Anyone with the link | No | No | Yes, by default (note text; attachments are not) | Install plugin, one click |
| Quartz | Free software; hosting often free | No: public static site | No | No | No | Git, a build, a host; an hour or more |
| Digital Garden plugin | Free software; Vercel or Netlify hosting | No: public site of notes you mark | No | No | No | Plugin plus a GitHub repo and host |
| Notion (copy-paste) | Free plan; Plus $10/seat/month yearly | Yes, as guests (10 on Free) | Yes | No: it is a copy | No | Paste, then fix formatting |
| Google Docs | Free for personal accounts | Yes, by email | Yes | No: it is a copy | No | Import the .md file or paste |
| myone.page | Free for 3 shared pages; unlimited from $1.99/month | Yes: emails, a whole @domain, or anyone (paid) | Yes, in the browser | Yes, within about 60 seconds | Yes, AES-256-GCM, key in the link | Install plugin, click share |
The options, briefly
Obsidian Publish
Choose notes in Obsidian, click publish, and they appear on a hosted site with your theme, navigation, graph view and search. It handles Obsidian's own syntax and supports custom domains. Access control is one site-wide password: Obsidian's help says per-note passwords are not supported. Visitors read; they cannot edit.
Share Note
A community plugin by Alan Grainger. One command uploads the current note with your theme and copies a link. Notes are encrypted by default, with the key in the part of the link after #. Notes can expire on their own, and you can run your own server. Its documentation describes no account and no paid tier. Readers get a read-only page; there is no per-person access, and replies come back by message.
Quartz and Digital Garden
Both are free and open source and build a public website from your notes. Quartz is a static site generator you run yourself and deploy to GitHub Pages, Netlify, Cloudflare Pages or similar. The Digital Garden plugin publishes notes you mark with dg-publish: true to a site hosted on Vercel or Netlify. More setup than Publish, no monthly fee, full control. Still public and read-only.
Notion and Google Docs
Both make real collaboration easy: comments, suggestions, simultaneous editing. Google Docs can import a Markdown file (File, Open, Upload) and paste Markdown once you enable it in Tools, Preferences. The cost is that the shared version is a copy. From the first comment, the team works in the Doc or the Notion page and your note goes stale, unless you copy changes back by hand. For the longer comparison, see myone.page vs Notion.
myone.page
A free Obsidian plugin that opens a note as a styled page (stat tiles, cards, tables, charts, timelines) and shares it from the note itself. You list who may edit or read in the note's frontmatter: email addresses, a whole company domain, or anyone with the link on a paid plan. Readers sign in with Google or an email link, without Obsidian, and edit in the browser. Their edits come back into your note within about a minute while Obsidian is open on one of your devices. Pages are end-to-end encrypted: the key is in the link after #, and the server stores only ciphertext.
Where it is narrower: it shares pages, not a site. There is no navigation between notes, no graph, no public index, and shared pages are kept out of search engines on purpose. It renders its own page format (Markdown with a few callouts), not every Obsidian plugin's output.
When Obsidian Publish is the better choice
- You want a public website. Documentation, a knowledge base, a course, a portfolio.
- You want a knowledge garden. Many notes linked together, with backlinks, graph and search for visitors.
- You want search engines to find your notes. Publish sites are made to be indexed; myone.page pages and Share Note links are not.
- You want no setup and no servers. Publish is built into Obsidian and maintained by the Obsidian team. If you would rather not run Quartz, it is the simplest way to a site.
If one of those is your job, use Publish (or Quartz, to avoid the fee and keep control).
When something else fits better
- One note, read-only, quickly: Share Note.
- A team that already works in Notion or Google Workspace and will own the document from now on: paste it there and let it live there.
- One note, specific people, and you want their edits in your vault: myone.page. Install the free plugin and share your first three pages free.
For step-by-step instructions for each method, see how to share an Obsidian note with someone who does not use Obsidian.