Yes, you can use Obsidian for work with your teammates. Many advanced teams are already doing so with Relay.
There are significant advantages to using Obsidian+Relay over traditional tools like Google Docs and Notion. There are also drawbacks.
This guide explains what you need to know.
Knowledge workers want to use Obsidian at work for the same reasons they use it personally:
They want the best knowledge tools at work where the stakes are high.
What's missing from Obsidian is multiplayer.
You can use Obsidian Sync or Google Drive, but you'll risk collisions and lost data if two people edit offline or at the same time. You can use Git, but you'll deal with merges. In either case, you won't get live presence and real-time cursors.
The ideal would be a Google Docs-like collaboration UX, inside Obsidian.
That's what Relay does. Using CRDT technology (Yjs), it lets everyone work on local files simultaneously while guaranteeing they'll converge to the same document.
Yes, it's real-time, and our users frequently report being surprised at how fast it is. If you and your collaborators are online and editing at the same time, you can watch one another's cursors move with each keystroke.
Each user works with a local file (the Obsidian way), which means you don't need to receive anything from a remote location in order to work. Relay streams your updates in the background. The result is you never have to wait for a connection to make edits, and you have live presence with your collaborators as long as you're both online.
Relay has excellent support for offline editing.
Whether you're offline or not, Relay tracks every change as an operation and stores them in a local database. When you're back online, operations stream up to the server and then are relayed on to collaborators. CRDT operations are commutative (any order) and idempotent (duplicates are fine). So you can work offline as much as you like, and the CRDT ensures that when you come back online and sync your operations, everyone will converge to the same document.
CRDTs are 'conflict-free' in the technical sense — they make all merges automatically — but they can't resolve social disagreements.
For example: suppose a project brief says "Deadline: Friday". While offline, you change it to "Thursday" while a teammate changes it to "Monday". When you come back online you'll get something like "Deadline: ThursdayMonday". Changes merged automatically and you're guaranteed to see the same document — but you'll have to settle the deadline with your teammate.
Files can also change on disk while Relay isn't running, for example from Claude Code or a local script. When Relay starts again, it detects the changed file, works out what changed since the version everyone last agreed on, and merges that with your collaborators' edits. In the rare case when the file on disk and a collaborator changed the same lines in different ways, Relay marks the note with a local conflict and asks you to choose what to keep. See Resolve local conflicts.
These are local files. We recommend you use Git for version history. The Git plugin for Obsidian is excellent and can be set to commit every five minutes. In addition, Obsidian has a core File Recovery plugin that can be used to recover past versions of a file. For backup options, see Back up your Obsidian vault.
Obsidian alone is private — like a house with no windows or doors. Add collaboration and that changes: your edits need a way to reach your teammates, and each teammate keeps a copy of the shared notes on their own machine. Relay uses a server to pass edits between those copies. So the questions apply to the server and to your teammates' machines alike: who controls them? Are they trustworthy? What can they see if trust isn't enough?
Relay is built to be self-hosted, and self-hosting is free on every plan. If you'd rather not run a server, we can host it for you.
Self-hosted
Cloud (we host)
For exactly what data reaches which servers under each hosting option, see What Relay can see.
See Hosting options and Pricing for details.
For comments, use Relay Comments, in beta. Select text and add a comment, reply in a thread, or suggest edits that the author can accept or reject. Comments are stored in the note itself as plain CriticMarkup, so they sync with the note and stay readable in any editor.
Obsidian doesn't have native notifications. We handle this socially: if someone updates a doc and wants it seen, they ping in Slack or add a line to the next day's standup agenda. Individuals can also have a local coding agent set up file watchers and alerts.
With plugins like TaskNotes, Dataview, and Bases, some teams manage projects entirely in Obsidian.
Relay has a free plan, and paid plans for larger teams. See our pricing page for details.
Install from Obsidian community plugins. You can start with our free plan to check it out, and invite your team when you're ready.
If you have questions about deployment, security, or enterprise features, contact us.