BrainShare vs Obsidian Publish
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01KRKY02CMP7WY2NPB4ZVS4XYZBoth let you put Obsidian notes on the web. The short version: Obsidian Publish is a polished $96/year SaaS run by the Obsidian team. BrainShare is a free, MIT-licensed plugin plus a Cloudflare Worker you run on your own account, with an API, per-recipient gating, and a forkable renderer.
At a glance
| Feature | Obsidian Publish | BrainShare |
|---|---|---|
| Price | $10/month or $96/year per site | $0 |
| Hosting | Obsidian's servers | Your Cloudflare account |
| Self-host | No | Yes (one wrangler deploy) |
| Source available | No (closed) | Yes (MIT, ~3000 lines TypeScript) |
| Public API | No | Yes (/api/search, /api/wraps/{id}, /api/feed.xml) |
| Per-recipient gating | No | Yes (JWT tokens, expirable, revocable, view-capped) |
| Public sharing | Yes | Yes |
| Password protection | Yes | Yes (via JWT or wrap config) |
| Custom domain | Yes (DNS) | Yes (DNS + worker route) |
| Renderer extensions | No | Yes (fork the worker) |
| Canvases | Yes | Yes |
| Backlinks, graph, full-text search | Yes | Yes |
| Mermaid, callouts, properties | Yes | Yes |
| RSS | Yes | Yes (Atom) |
| Vendor | Dynalist Inc. (Obsidian) | Community (MIT) |
| Track record | Stable, multi-year | New, launched 15 May 2026 |
When to choose Obsidian Publish
Pick Obsidian Publish if you want zero ops, official support from the Obsidian team, and a single-click experience inside the app. It is a known quantity, has been running for years, and you do not need to think about deploys, workers, or KV namespaces. If $96/year is not a constraint and you do not need an API or per-recipient gating, Obsidian Publish is the smoother path.
When to choose BrainShare
Pick BrainShare if you want $0, you want to self-host on infrastructure you control, you want per-recipient JWT-gated sharing, you want to call your published vault from an AI agent or another app via a real API, or you want to fork the renderer and add your own behavior. The tradeoff is that BrainShare is new (16 days of development as of launch), requires basic comfort with deploying a Cloudflare Worker, and has no support contract.
Pricing
Obsidian Publish: $10/month or $96/year per published site, billed by Obsidian.md (https://obsidian.md/publish).
BrainShare: $0. The plugin is MIT-licensed (https://github.com/MachoMaheen/brainshare). The Cloudflare Worker runs on Cloudflare's free tier, which covers 100,000 KV reads/day, 1,000 writes/day, and 1 GB storage. If you exceed those limits, Workers Paid is $5/month and BrainShare itself stays free.
Self-hosting
Obsidian Publish: not supported. The renderer and storage live on Obsidian's servers.
BrainShare: self-host is the only model. One wrangler deploy puts the worker on your Cloudflare account, you set the worker URL in the plugin, and you own the stack. End-to-end takes about 60 seconds. Walkthrough is in Install BrainShare in 60 Seconds.
Per-recipient sharing
Obsidian Publish: a published site can be public or password-protected, but the password is global. You cannot revoke access for one viewer without locking out everyone.
BrainShare: each slice can be gated with JWT tokens, one URL per recipient. Tokens can have an expiry, a view count cap, and can be revoked individually. The wrap descriptor stores the token policy; the worker verifies on every request.
Extending the renderer
Obsidian Publish: the renderer is closed. You get what Obsidian ships, plus a small set of theme options.
BrainShare: the renderer is one TypeScript file in the worker. You can fork it, add your own callout types, change the chrome, plug in additional API endpoints, or strip out features you do not want. The current renderer covers wikilinks, backlinks, callouts, tags, properties, canvases, mermaid, full-text search, Atom RSS, and a knowledge graph (Sigma.js + d3-force). Every URL is queryable by an AI agent at the same URL a human reads.
Bottom line
If you want polish, zero ops, and official support, Obsidian Publish is the right pick. If you want $0, full control, an API, per-recipient gating, and the ability to fork the renderer, BrainShare is the right pick. They are not the same product. The choice is not "which is better" but "which one matches what you need".
Last updated: 15 May 2026
Related: BrainShare FAQ, A letter for my fellow viewers, How BrainShare Works (Behind the Scenes), Install BrainShare in 60 Seconds.
Maheen 15 May 2026