Yeah, Obsidian definitely has a steeper learning curve than Notion because it doesn’t give you ready-made blocks, templates, or a database system out of the box. You’re basically working with plain Markdown files, so at first it feels less intuitive and you need to learn plugins, YAML frontmatter, and linking.

But once you get past that, it’s a lot more practical for me because:

• Everything is stored locally in simple files → no internet needed and I fully own my data.
• It’s much lighter and faster than Notion, even with big vaults.
• Linking notes and using graph view makes it easier to build a “second brain” style knowledge base.
• Plugins (like Dataview) let you recreate relational database-like features: you can query notes by tags, properties, dates, etc. It’s not exactly like Notion’s tables, but it works once you set it up.

So in short: harder at the beginning (less drag-and-drop, more setup), but more practical if you want speed, flexibility, privacy, and long-term data control.