I had plenty of good reasons to switch from Notion to Obsidian, but I always missed how easy Notion makes it to create and edit tables. You can click New, get an editable row instantly, and switch between multiple view types.

Obsidian’s new Bases plugin finally closes this gap. It’s a core plugin that turns your notes into an editable, filterable, and sortable table. For the Notion holdouts who stayed because of tables, Bases removes their biggest excuse.

Why Obsidian’s tables have always fallen short of Notion’s

The table gap that made Notion hard to leave

Obsidian has always been great at handling free-form text, but tables were a weak spot. Native Markdown tables are static. You can’t click into a cell and edit it on the fly, and there’s no “new row” button to quickly add an entry the way Notion lets you.

For most Obsidian users, the workaround was Dataview, a community plugin that lets you query your notes and display results as tables. It’s powerful, but it comes with a steep learning curve. Dataview requires you to learn its own query language, which many people find difficult. And once your vault grows past a few thousand notes, Dataview can visibly struggle to render results, lagging or glitching as it tries to pull everything together.

This table gap has been one of the biggest reasons people hesitate to leave Notion. Notion’s database is built for structured work: you get independent databases for people, projects, and finances, each with its own views and properties. Obsidian, on the other hand, was designed more for thinking and writing than for managing rows and columns. This kept a lot of people stuck between two apps, using Notion for anything table-shaped and Obsidian for everything else.

What Obsidian Bases does

A built-in database that reads your existing notes

Bases is a core plugin that shipped with Obsidian 1.9. It reads the YAML properties already in your notes, the tags, dates, custom fields, and turns them into an editable table.

You pick which properties you want as columns, drag them to reorder, and apply filters to narrow down which notes appear. A filter like “where tags contains #draft” takes your entire vault and shows only your in-progress notes. If you need to fix a tag or update a property, click the cell in the table and edit it directly. The change writes back to the note file behind the scenes, so you never have to open each file individually.

Bases is also fast. It builds a table from thousands of notes almost instantly. Dataview doing the same thing with a large vault would visibly choke.

Bases vs. Dataview: do you still need both?

When to use which, and when to let go

If you’ve been using Dataview for years, the practical question is whether Bases replaces it—the short answer: mostly.

Yes, Bases can handle around 80% of what people used Dataview for. Book lists, reading trackers, project tables, maps of content, even the kind of dashboards that keep a vault organized- all of that works in Bases without writing a single line of code. The remaining 20% is where Dataview still wins. Dataview supports JavaScript mode for complex custom queries and advanced logic that Bases can’t replicate yet.

A simple test can help you decide if Obsidian’s new offering can replace Dataview for you. Try rebuilding an existing Dataview table as a Base and see what breaks. If nothing does, you probably don’t need Dataview for that use case anymore. Keep it installed for the edge cases, but don’t feel like you have to reach for it first.

Bases also has limits compared to Notion. It now supports table, card, and list views, plus a group-by feature added in Obsidian 1.10, but it still doesn’t offer the one-click “add new row” button that makes Notion’s databases feel so fluid. And Notion lets you create many independent databases, while Obsidian treats your whole vault as one big dataset with different filtered views on top. That may be a design decision, but it means Bases isn’t trying to fully replace Notion’s database. It’s bringing structured filtering to a tool that was always better at thinking than organizing.

Getting your first base set up

Enable the plugin and build your first table

Setting up Bases takes a few minutes. Here’s how to get started:

1. Go to Settings > Core plugins, find Bases in the list, and toggle it on.

2. Press Ctrl/Cmd + P to open the Command Palette and search “bases.” Pick Create new base for a standalone base file, or Insert new base to embed one inside a note you’re already working in.

3. Your base starts by pulling in every note in your vault. Click Properties in the side panel and select the properties you want as columns, such as tags, author, or genre.

4. Click Filter and set a rule like “where tags contains #drafts” to narrow the table down to just your draft notes.

5. Click Add view to create variations within the same base. You could set up a fiction view and a non-fiction view inside one book base, each with its own filters, so you can flip between them without duplicating work.

From there, you can edit properties right from the table, drag columns to reorder them, and even embed a live base inside another note using the “Insert base” command. Useful for something like a project dashboard or a digital garden homepage that updates itself.

Bases makes switching from Obsidian easier

Bases isn’t trying to turn Obsidian into Notion, and that’s fine. Notion’s database is built for managing work: tasks, pipelines, project boards. Obsidian’s strength has always been in connecting ideas and letting you think in plain text. What Bases adds is a third way to discover information inside your vault, alongside the graph view for relationships and canvas for freeform thinking, but this time through structured filtering. You can pull up every note tagged with a low priority score, or every book note missing a genre, and spot patterns you’d never catch by scrolling.

It’s still an evolving feature, with new plugins already building on top of it and more layout types on the roadmap. But even in its current form, Bases closes the one gap that made Notion hard to walk away from. That’s enough to make the switch less of a compromise and more of a choice.