Ulysses III vs Obsidian md

A few themes are baked in and a big selection of user-contributed styles to choose from are available on the Ulysses Style Exchange.

Ulysses has a clean, unobtrusive, easy to overview interface that allows focusing on writing. By default it's split up in 3 panes with sidebar, sheet pane and content pane from left to right. Unnecessary panes can be hidden.

Markdown formatting can be applied from the right-click menu, with keyboard shortcuts or from an optional markup bar. Necessary elemants to links, images, and footnotes are added by filling in a popover.

Pasted rich text and imported Word documents keep their formatting when converted to Markdown.

Attachments such as images, text notes, keywords and writing goals can be added to content. And to organize them keywords can be added.

Ulysses saves everything in the app so there's no file management outside of the editor involved. It organizes content in groups (folders) and sheets (files), has a powerful, easy to use search and allows adding keywords to attachments to help them be organized and found quickly.

Groups can have an unlimited amount of subgroups and the title of subgroup shows up in the pane view. Sheets can be split up, merged, glued together and easily moved around in the sheet pane by dragging and dropping. Great for splitting up larger documents into manageable chunks while still keeping an overview of the whole project and having the ability to move sections around quickly.

Contents of a group can be filtered by text, keywords or change date within headings, code blocks, images or any other marked up text. Filters can contain a combination of conditions and be saved to make a new group. Saved filters can be moved around to different groups and will return filtered results for that group. Selecting multiple groups will show the combined sheets of those groups.

You can operate Ulysses via keyboard only. No need for mouse.

The editor can export to Plain Text, RTF, Word, HTML, ePub and PDF with customizable styles for each option. It can also preview HTML directly in the browser.

There's no live-preview pane or an external previewer necessary. Ulysses displays styling inline.

Ulysses has options for highlighting current line, showing line numbers and enabling typewriter mode. Typewriter mode defines a place on the screen where the cursor should be so eyes are kept focusing in one place on the screen.

Content can be synchronised across devices via Apple's iCloud.

Ulysses comes with an excellently written documentation that covers everything there is to know about the software, including an extensive list of keyboard shortcuts as well as short and sweet introduction to Markdown and its benefits.

Ulysses is available for both macOS and iOS. This, combined with the cloud syncing allows users to work on their projects using any Apple device they have at the time.

The editor tracks statistics that shows how many characters, words, sentences, paragraphs, and pages a document contains and estimated reading time for slow, average, and fast readers. The statistics display in a popover that can be torn-off so it's constantly visible.

Goals such as how many characters, words, sentences, paragraphs, lines or pages should be written can be set to help get motivated.

Groups, tagging, and notes for each document.

Staff is helpful in answering questions on how to use the app.

A time (10hrs) and usage limited demo for Ulysses III is available.

Everything is stored in your device. You can back them up, encrypt and process however you want to. Works completely offline. Read your notes anytime, anywhere.

Variety of settings, and community themes & plugins, available from built-in marketplace. Every community plugin is open-source which means you can learn from it and develop your own.

This allows you to link notes back and forth really easily.

It's becoming more powerful everyday, it seems like they add many functions within several days.

Linking notes is a game changing feature. Very easy to use and link notes. Their implementation of markdown doesn't deviate from the standard form of markdown and so the same files can be used by other markdown programs without any consequence.
While renaming note link still works.

A Vault in Obsidian is like a database. Internal links and files are not shared across Vaults. Each Vault is opened with a separate instance of Obsidian. Each Vault can have its unique app settings and plug-ins. Useful if you have distinct/unrelated projects or "data spaces" requiring different workflows and data relations.

Ability to tag-as-you-write and find each occurrence of a tag in the entire vault makes it very easy to organize and retrieve notes. Supports nested tags.

In Obsidian, pane = window = note = page

Obsidian allows you to open as many notes as you can fit concurrently in your screen. You can split a pane horizontally/vertically. You can lock/link panes so they scroll in sync, useful for and edit & preview modes.

Also open for anyone to develop their own extensions/plugins.

Daily Notes plug-in, when clicked, generates a new note with the current date. Great for journaling and reduces friction in your writing habit.

You can create a custom template for your Daily Note.

The Graph view is more than an aesthetic gizmo. It allows you to grasp and recognise clusters of information, follow branches and easily filter out what you don't want to see. The "animate" option shows how your notes and links have grown organically. With a bit of tweaking to the visuals and the proper theme, your graph might even start to look like a disturbingly "alive", eerie thing.

A plugin that, when clicked, surfaces a random note from your vault.

This is a big difference, as having to read through long-form texts laden with [[links]] gives friction.

Easily turn your notes into simple yet sleek powerpoint-style presentations by enabling the Slides plugin and adding the --- separator.

Hotkeys can be customized in settings.
Can switch on or off Vim key bindings in the editor settings.

The onboarding consists of well-written help documentation (saved as a vault) served in small chunks and organized systematically so that you become familiar with all its features as well as get hands-on experience in real time.

Due to the tool being very developer-friendly, there are tons of cool developments being made to it by 3rd party devs.

When you hover on an internal [[link]], you get to preview the note without opening it on a new pane.

Page preview plugin must be enabled.

The app doesn't frustrate the user - the built-in help is excellent.

Variety of file formats are directly embedded in the markdown preview, e.g. markdown, image, audio, video and PDF files.

Allows exporting your markdown files as PDFs rendered with all of your plugins.

Daily and Weekly notes with Calendar Plugin.

A pretty, alternative way to represent links between your notes.

A feature unseen in other tools.
From the help doc, "This can be useful when modifying a lot of lines in the same way, for example putting - at the beginning of multiple lines to turn them into a list, or appending [[ to a series of links you’ve copied from elsewhere."

Supports extended searching by default. Community plugin called "Vantage" allows to make more advanced queries.

Version Control for your vault with Obsidian Git plugin.

Allows to refer to a note with multiple names.

There's a Discord server and a forum. Join the community!

No lock-in to a certain company - just markdown files on disk.

Available as a plugin.

Uses MathJax.

Allows to create templates with built-in plugin. There's also powerful community plugin called "Templater".

Uses Mermaid.

You can link to a block - e.g.: paragraph, blockquote, heading.

Add a custom metadata to a note with YAML front matter.

With Excalidraw.

Supports Citations and provides inserting from Zotero.

Advanced queries for the data-obsessed with Dataview Plugin.

Saving and loading workspaces.

With other options like notion, we can not see how the data is actually stored.

Use HTML in a note.

Variety of planning and organization plugins, such as Kanban boards or Day Planner.

Supports importing from tools such as Notion, Evernote, OneNote, Apple Notes, Bear, Zkn3, TiddlyWiki 5, and Roam Research. Refer to Obsidian Help for more info.

Translations are made by the community at GitHub repository.

Update your Discord status to show your friends what are you working on with Discord Rich Presence plugin.

When taking notes, you can just grab a print screen from your clipboard and paste into the notes without having to do any file management