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Obsidian vs papaw

Obsidian

docs.obsidian.st

papaw

github.com

Side by side

FigureObsidianpapaw
Price from$4/moFree
Free planYesYes
Free trial——
Open sourceYes—
WindowsYes—
macOSYes—
LinuxYesYes
iOSYes—
AndroidYes—
Self-hosted—Yes
Plans published111
Spec score · Executable Packers9.2 (#2)7.9 (#8)
CompressionPro can optionally compress payloads with aPlib before encryption.Supported algorithms are LZMA2, LZMA1, Zstandard, and Deflate.
PurposeObsidian is a note-taking app for organizing thoughts and connecting notes.papaw is a permissively licensed packer for executables with statically linked third-party components, intended for devices with limited disk space.

Plans

Obsidian

  • Community EditionFree
  • ObsidianFree
  • Sync Standard$5 a month
  • Publish$10 a month
  • Sync Plus$10 a month
  • Catalyst$25, paid once
  • Sync Standard$48 a year
  • Commercial$50 a year
  • Publish$96 a year
  • Sync Plus$96 a year

Obsidian pricing →

papaw

  • papawFree

papaw pricing →

In their own words

Obsidian

Obsidian is a note-taking app for keeping thoughts in linked notes. It saves notes as plain-text Markdown files on your device, where they remain accessible offline. Its Graph view shows relationships formed by internal links, and Canvas provides an open space to arrange notes alongside attachments and web pages. The app includes core plugins and supports community plugins, themes, and an open API for customization. The Web Clipper is available for Chrome, Safari, Firefox, Edge, Brave, Arc, Orion, and Vivaldi. Obsidian has a free plan at free, with no sign-up required. Optional Sync plans cost $5 a month for Sync Standard or $10 a month for Sync Plus; their storage and file-size limits differ. Publish costs $10 a month and hosts a site up to 4GB. Obsidian says Sync uses AES-256 end-to-end encryption, and its security page lists third-party audits. Listed platforms include Android, iOS, Linux, macOS, and Windows, plus extension support.

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papaw

papaw is a Linux executable packer for programs that include statically linked third-party components, aimed at devices with limited disk space. It compresses executables and bundles them with a decompressor of about 15–40 KB. Supported algorithms are LZMA2, LZMA1, Zstandard and Deflate, and packed executables can replace themselves on disk when run. The project is free and unencumbered software under the MIT license, and can be self-hosted. It uses Meson and can be included as a Meson subproject; the README recommends `custom_target()` for running `papawify`. Prebuilt static binaries are available through GitHub releases, with example assets for aarch64, arm, armeb, i386, mips, mipsel and x86_64. To support portability, the project avoids machine-specific assembly and newer system calls such as `fexecve()`. Optional very basic anti-debugging protection is intended to discourage trivial reverse-engineering techniques. The payload is extracted to a temporary file; when run as root, papaw mounts a tmpfs filesystem and lazily unmounts it before extraction.

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