Comparison

An Obsidian alternative for the files that were never in a vault

Obsidian is a strong knowledge base and a heavy way to read one file. It wants a vault before it opens anything, it has no Finder preview, and it downloads at 203.5 MB. Glance opens a single .md the way Preview opens a PDF, renders it on Space, and comes to 9.8 MB.

Glance vs Obsidian

	Glance	Obsidian¹
Pricing²	Free to read, $9.99 to edit	Free
Opens one loose .md file³
Setup before the first read	None	Create a vault
Preview on Space in Finder⁴
Reading and editing in one view
Writes nothing beside your file
Download size⁵	9.8 MB	203.5 MB

The vault comes first, and that is the design

Obsidian indexes a folder so that backlinks, search, and the graph have something to work on. That index is the product. A file sitting outside every vault has nowhere to live in it, so the app has no way to open it, and the answer on the forum has stayed the same for years.

It is the right architecture for a body of linked notes you keep coming back to. It is the wrong one for the file in your Downloads folder. Creating a vault to read one README is a strange amount of ceremony, and it leaves configuration behind on disk afterwards.

Space, in Finder, on any .md file

Obsidian ships no Quick Look extension, so pressing Space on a Markdown file in Finder gives you the plain-text fallback: the syntax, unrendered, in a small window. To see the document you launch the app, and the app wants to know which vault you mean.

Glance registers a Quick Look extension the first time you open it. Select any .md in Finder, press Space, and the document renders with tables, syntax-highlighted code, Mermaid diagrams, and LaTeX math. Press Return and it opens in a window you can type in. Full steps are on the Finder preview guide.

Finder Quick Look previewing a rendered Markdown file

Open one file, keep your vault

Download for macOS

Free to read, Pro to edit · v0.2.2 · 9.8 MB · macOS 14+

One view instead of two

Obsidian separates reading from editing and gives you a shortcut between them, and you learn to hit it all day. The document you are looking at and the document you can change are two states of one window, and you are regularly in the wrong one.

Glance has a single state. The rendered page takes typing: click a sentence and fix it, select two words for a formatting toolbar, click a table cell and Tab across the row, or rewrite a Mermaid diagram over the diagram it draws. Type ## at the start of a line and it becomes a heading as you type. If you want the raw Markdown, ⌘\ puts it in a pane beside the page, scrolling in step and editable from either side.

203.5 MB against 9.8 MB

Obsidian 1.12.7 downloads at 203.5 MB. Glance is 9.8 MB. The difference is mostly what each app is: Obsidian runs the same code on Windows, Linux, iOS, and Android, and carrying a browser engine to do that is the honest cost of the reach. Glance is a macOS app that draws text with Core Text and diagrams with Core Graphics, so there is no engine to ship.

The number matters because of what it predicts: a Quick Look preview has to draw before you lift your finger off the Space bar, and there is no engine to start first.

Keep Obsidian

This is not an argument for leaving it. A vault is the better tool for linked notes, daily journals, and search across years of writing, and Glance offers nothing in that direction: no backlinks, no graph, no plugins, no sync, one document at a time. Obsidian is also free for personal use, runs on five platforms, and does not require the commercial license it offers, where Glance is macOS only and needs macOS 14 on an Apple Silicon Mac.

Glance covers the Markdown that never belonged in a vault: a README in a cloned repo, a spec someone emailed, a changelog you want to skim and close, the CLAUDE.md and AGENTS.md files your coding agent keeps rewriting.

The general version of this argument is opening a Markdown file without a vault. For Quick Look background, see Markdown Quick Look for macOS. Comparing others? See Typora, MarkText, and MarkEdit, or the roundup of Mac Markdown apps.

FAQ

Not on its own. Obsidian works on vaults, which are folders it indexes for links, search, and the graph, so a file outside any vault has no home in that model. It is an architectural choice rather than a missing feature, and it is why people keep asking for it.

No. It ships no Quick Look extension, so pressing Space on a .md file gives you the plain-text fallback macOS provides. Glance bundles a Quick Look extension and registers it the first time you open the app, so Space shows the rendered document with tables, code, Mermaid diagrams, and LaTeX.

No, and it is not trying to be. Obsidian is a knowledge base: backlinks, graph view, search across thousands of notes, and a plugin ecosystem Glance has nothing like. Glance opens one document at a time. Most people who use both keep the vault for notes and use Glance for the Markdown that was never in it.

Not in Glance. Obsidian gives you a reading view and an editing view with a shortcut between them. Glance has one view: the rendered page accepts typing, so you click a sentence and fix it. Command-backslash adds the raw Markdown in a second pane if you want to see it.

No. Glance saves plain Markdown back to the same path and writes no index, no sidecar, no dot-folder, and no front matter you did not type. A file you fix in Glance opens in your vault afterwards as an ordinary file.

Glance is a 9.8 MB download against 203.5 MB for Obsidian 1.12.7, measured 30 July 2026. Glance is a native macOS app rather than a cross-platform one, which is most of the difference.

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