Obsidian Publish alternatives: 6 ways to put a vault online

TL;DR. Obsidian Publish costs $8 a month per site and does one thing well: a read-only copy of your vault on the internet. Quartz, the Digital Garden plugin, and Flowershow do the same for free with more setup, and MkDocs does it for documentation. If the people reading the vault also need to edit it, publishing is the wrong tool entirely — import the vault into a team wiki instead. There's a free plan to test that with your real notes.

Obsidian Publish is the one part of Obsidian that ships with an invoice. Eight dollars a month, per site, billed annually, to make a folder of Markdown readable by people who are not you. Which is why "obsidian publish alternatives" is a crowded search: half the people typing it want the same thing for free, and the other half have quietly noticed that read-only was never what they needed. This post covers both halves. (Obsidian is volcanic glass. The pricing is the edge people cut themselves on.)

What the $8 a month actually buys

Obsidian Publish is the official way to put a vault online. You pick the notes, it hosts the site: graph view, backlinks, full-text search, a custom domain, optional password. No build pipeline, no Git, no YAML archaeology. For a personal digital garden it is the zero-effort option, and zero effort is a real feature.

Its limits are structural. The price is per site, so a second vault is a second subscription. And visitors can only read. There are no editors, no roles, no comments — the person who owns the subscription writes, and everyone else consumes. Keep that limitation in mind; it decides which half of this post applies to you.

The free crowd: Quartz, Digital Garden, Flowershow

Quartz is the closest feature match — graph view, backlinks, wikilinks, search — as a free, open-source static site generator. You clone a repository, point it at your vault, and deploy to GitHub Pages or Cloudflare. It is free the way a puppy is free: no invoice, some upkeep. If you're comfortable running npx and reading a deploy log, this is the community's default answer, and the community is right.

The Digital Garden plugin publishes from inside Obsidian itself: toggle a property on a note and it syncs to a site via GitHub and Netlify or Vercel. The one-time setup is fiddlier than Publish; the day-to-day is nearly identical. Best fit for note-by-note publishing where most of the vault stays private.

Flowershow renders Markdown faithfully with a self-hosted open-source path and a paid cloud option. It respects Obsidian-style frontmatter and stays out of your syntax's way.

All three produce read-only sites. Your readers get a nicer view of your notes; they still can't fix your typos.

MkDocs and the static-site route

If your vault has quietly become documentation — hierarchy, versioned procedures, a table of contents that means something — MkDocs with the Material theme is the grown-up answer. It's free, Python-based, unglamorous, and extremely reliable, which is also a fair description of most good documentation.

Beyond that sit Hugo, Jekyll, and Eleventy: maximum control, maximum yak. Choose them because you want a website project, not because you want your notes online this afternoon.

Side by side, with real prices

Tool	Price	Setup	Readers can edit	Best for
Obsidian Publish	$8/month per site, billed annually	none	no	zero-config personal garden
Quartz	free	Git + Node + deploy target	no	tinkerers' gardens
Digital Garden plugin	free	GitHub + Netlify, once	no	publishing selected notes
Flowershow	free self-hosted; paid cloud	low to medium	no	Markdown-faithful sites
MkDocs (Material)	free	Python + a build step	no	real documentation
Raccoon Page	Free plan; Team $8/user/month	10-minute vault import	yes	teams that read and write

Eight dollars is apparently the going rate for Markdown. The difference is whether it buys you readers or editors.

Sharing an Obsidian vault with a team is a different problem

Here is the half of the search the publishing tools can't serve. Every option above assumes one writer and many readers. A team is many writers — and the moment a second person needs to fix a runbook, a published garden becomes a suggestion box without the box.

The usual workarounds strain fast. A vault in Git means teaching merge conflicts to people who didn't sign up for them. Obsidian Sync moves files between your own devices well, but it doesn't referee two people in the same note and it has no concept of roles. A vault on a shared drive produces the classic runbook (conflicted copy) genre of literature.

The honest answer is that a shared, edited vault is a wiki, and the move is to import it into one. Raccoon Page's Obsidian importer is on the Free plan: folder hierarchy preserved, images preserved, [[wikilinks]] intact, most vaults in under 10 minutes. After that it behaves like what your team actually needed — simultaneous editing, page permissions, search that lands before the question is over. If part of the vault should stay public, public spaces put pages on the open web too; our own company wiki runs that way, no sign-up needed to read it.

Import fidelity is a thing we are professionally twitchy about. During our first export-format smoke tests, Bandito — imports and batch operations — found pages where the raccoon emoji came out the other side as a rabbit, courtesy of a "small mammal normalisation" table inherited from third-party code. The fix was one line added, one deleted; the policy that fell out of it — review adopted code like it's trying to change your animals — is permanent. Your vault comes through as itself.

The opinion we'll defend here: the migration is the moat. An importer that moves a real vault in ten minutes is the only thing that lets a team actually switch tools. Every other feature is theoretical until the content is in. It's also reversible — export comes back out as an Obsidian-compatible vault on every plan, so the door you came in through stays open.

And the honest boundary: if what you want is a public digital garden with a graph view and your name on the domain, use Quartz and keep your money. Raccoon Page doesn't render constellations; it renders a wiki your team edits. If you're weighing a bigger move than publishing — leaving the vault format entirely — that's its own post.

When to pick which

1. Zero-config personal site — pay the $8; Obsidian Publish.
2. Same result, free, comfortable with Git — Quartz.
3. Publish a few notes from inside Obsidian — Digital Garden plugin.
4. Vault is really documentation — MkDocs with Material.
5. A team needs to read and edit — import the vault into a wiki; publishing tools stop here.
6. Team wiki plus public pages — a wiki with public spaces covers both at once.

Things people actually ask

Is there a free version of Obsidian Publish? No. Publish has one tier: $8 a month per site, billed annually. The free routes are static-site tools — Quartz, the Digital Garden plugin, Flowershow — which do the same read-only publishing with more setup. If the readers are your own team, a wiki with an Obsidian importer on its free plan is the other free route.

How much does Obsidian Publish cost? $8 a month per published site, billed annually. That's separate from Obsidian Sync, which is its own subscription. The app itself stays free for personal use — Publish is the only part of the vault that comes with an invoice.

How good is Obsidian Publish? For a zero-config personal digital garden, genuinely good: hosted, graph view, backlinks, search, custom domains, no build pipeline. Its limits are structural, not qualitative — visitors can only read, and the price is per site.

Can I share an Obsidian vault with my team without publishing it? Yes, and if teammates need to edit, you should. Git and Sync move files but don't referee simultaneous edits or offer roles. Importing the vault into a team wiki keeps the folders, images, and wikilinks, and adds real multiplayer editing and permissions. Most vaults import in under 10 minutes.

What is the best self-hosted Obsidian Publish alternative? Quartz, if you want the closest feature match — graph, backlinks, search — and you're comfortable with Git and a deploy step. MkDocs with the Material theme, if your vault is really documentation and wants hierarchy and a build pipeline.

Can I get my vault back out of Raccoon Page? Yes. Per-space zip export produces an Obsidian-compatible Markdown vault — frontmatter preserved, attachments included — on every plan. Import is not a one-way door.

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If your readers are three coworkers rather than the internet, run the ten-minute test: import the vault on the Free plan — three users, one space, 50 pages, no card. If a wikilink comes through broken, tell us. Bandito keeps a list. The list is short, and he intends to keep it that way.