Agenda vs Obsidian
Both are bought outright, both sit in writing, and both are bought by people leaving Notion, Evernote, Craft. Here is what actually differs — including what each price does not buy.
The short answer
- Obsidian is free; Agenda costs $34.99.
- Obsidian has the cleaner licence: free, against lifetime plan available for Agenda.
Side by side
 Agenda$34.99Lifetime tier |  ObsidianFreeFree | |
|---|---|---|
| What it is | date-based notes where unlocked features stay unlocked | local-first markdown vault, free with no feature gates |
| Price | $34.99 | Free |
| Licence | Lifetime plan available | Free |
| What you get | Normally sold as a subscription, but a genuine one-time lifetime option exists. | No licence to buy. |
| The catch | The one-time unlock covers today's features plus one year of new ones, not everything after that | Multi-device sync is $48 a year unless you wire up iCloud or git yourself |
| Macs per licence | not established | not established |
| Account required | no | optional |
| Works offline | yes | yes |
| Apple Silicon | Yes | Yes |
| Free trial | Yes | No |
| On Setapp | No | No |
| Minimum macOS | not established | not established |
| App Store rating | not established | not established |
| Last updated | not established | not established |
| Price checked | 2026-09-22 | 2026-09-22 |
Apple’s public API reports a rating for only a small minority of Mac apps, and returns zero for most of the rest even when the store page plainly shows reviews. A blank here means we could not read a number, never that an app is unrated or disliked.
In their own right
Agenda
Notes organised along a timeline and tied to calendar events, with a premium unlock you keep permanently even if you never pay again.
Obsidian
A markdown editor over a folder of plain files on your own disk, with backlinks, a graph view, Canvas and a very large plugin ecosystem. Free for any use, personal or commercial, with no account required.