The short answer
Obsidian Publish is the native way to put a vault on the web: you pick notes inside Obsidian, press publish, and the site keeps your wikilinks, graph view and full-text search, for $8 per site per month billed annually or $10 monthly. Birta reads none of that. It takes a folder of plain markdown files, renders each as a readable page with index.md as the start page, and lets anyone with the link pin remarks on a paragraph without an account. The deciding question is who the site is for: readers browsing your knowledge, or people who should react to a document before it is final.
What Obsidian Publish gives you
The pricing page lists Publish at "$8 per site / month, billed annually" or "$10 billed monthly", with "a customizable theme, graph and full-text search" and priority support. It is sold per site and separately from Sync.
Inside that price, according to Obsidian's help pages:
- Your own domain. "You can set up a custom domain or subdomain for your Obsidian Publish site", with Cloudflare recommended to manage DNS (help: domains).
- A site password. "Individual password protection for published notes is currently not supported", so one password covers the whole site; several passwords can be issued (help: security).
- Analytics and indexing switches. A Google Analytics code field, available on custom domains, and a toggle that disallows search engine indexing (help: sites).
- Limits. Files up to 50 MB, and plugins that render through a code block, Dataview among them, "will not work by default in Publish" (help: limitations).
The strongest part is invisible on that list: Publish understands Obsidian. Wikilinks, embeds, callouts and the graph come across because the publisher is the same program that wrote them. No outside tool can match that fidelity.
What Birta does with the same folder
Birta treats .md and .markdown files as pages. A version can be made of nothing but notes and images; index.md in the root becomes the start page, and an index.md inside a subfolder opens at that folder's address. Headings, lists, tables, quotes, code blocks and images render in one readable layout that Birta chooses. A link from one note to another opens that note's page on the same version, and every heading gets an anchor.
You do not upload the folder by hand. Describe the job in the chat in Birta's panel, attach the notes or a zip of the vault folder, and Birta's agent writes them into a draft and publishes it. If you already work in Claude Code or Cursor next to the vault, connect that agent instead and it pushes the folder from your disk.
Three things in an Obsidian vault are not standard markdown, and this is where the agent earns its place:
- Wikilinks.
[[Project plan]]means nothing outside Obsidian. Ask the agent to rewrite them as ordinary links,[Project plan](project-plan.md), and they work between pages. - Embeds, callouts, Dataview. These are Obsidian syntax. The agent can flatten an embed into the text and turn a Dataview query into the table it currently produces, but nothing on Birta re-runs the query.
- Frontmatter. The properties block at the top of a note is hidden on the page, not shown as a table. HTML written inside a note displays as text, and Mermaid diagrams do not render.
So the site you get is your notes as plain, clean documents. No graph, no site search, no theme of your own: Birta picks the layout and the owner does not restyle it.
Review, versions and the second reader
Publish answers "let people read my notes". Birta answers a different job: "let these three people read the plan and tell me what is wrong with it".
Every version, draft or published, has its own permanent address. Send it, and the reader opens a review bubble on the page, clicks the paragraph, table row or list item they mean, and leaves a remark pinned to that block. Guests need no account and get a nickname. Your agent then reads the threads with the file path and the original text of each block, edits the same notes, publishes again at the same address, and resolves each thread with a note on what changed.
Versions stay. Every publish is kept, any earlier one goes live again with its original files, and each downloads as one archive. That matters for notes that act as decisions: a specification, a policy, a client brief. What a reader approved last Tuesday is still at its address.
Obsidian's help pages for Publish describe no rollback of a published site and no comments; Sync keeps version history of notes on your devices, which is a different thing from versions of the public site.
Price and plan
Obsidian Publish is a paid add-on with no free tier: $96 a year per site at the annual rate.
On Birta the notes site, its review links, versions, a password set through the agent and your own domain all run on Free. Team is the step when a group shares the project, its materials and decisions next to the pages, or when the site must go out without the Birta mark. Enterprise covers organisations with their own requirements.
Which one fits
| Job | Better fit | Why |
|---|---|---|
| A public digital garden people browse | Obsidian Publish | Graph, wikilinks, search and embeds survive as written |
| Notes that depend on Dataview, canvas or plugins | Obsidian Publish, or a static generator | Birta renders plain markdown only |
| A plan, spec or brief others must mark up | Birta | Remarks pinned to blocks, guests need no account |
| A document set that changes by approved releases | Birta | Every publish kept, any one restorable |
| A notes site at zero cost with your own domain | Birta, or Quartz if you host it yourself | Birta Free includes the domain |
| One password over the whole site | Either | Both protect the site, not single notes |
Free open-source options sit between the two. Quartz builds a static site from a vault with backlinks and a graph, and you host it yourself on GitHub Pages or similar; Flowershow offers a hosted version that reads Obsidian syntax. Both keep the vault look without review or versions.
If the vault is your second brain and the site is its window, stay with Publish. If a folder of notes is work that other people have to read, question and sign off, that loop is what Birta is for.
Publish the folder for review
Attach the notes in Birta's chat and its agent publishes them as pages with an address to send. Or connect the agent you already use next to your vault.