How does it compare?

Digital Garden + Forestry.md next to the other Obsidian publishing options, feature by feature, including where they win.

Already self-hosting on Vercel, Netlify or GitHub Pages?

Tools like Vercel, Netlify, or GitHub Pages work, but they require you to manage a GitHub repo, deal with build pipelines, and troubleshoot deploys yourself. Forestry.md is purpose-built for Obsidian, so you get one-click publishing, a visual design lab, draft previews, and custom components out of the box: no repo, no build steps, no terminal. You can switch your publish platform in the plugin settings to try it, and switch back anytime.

Feature comparison of Obsidian publishing options
Feature	Forestry.md + Digital Garden plugin open source plugin	Obsidian Publish official hosted paid	Quartz 4 self-hosted SSG self-host	Flowershow hosted / self-host freemium	HTML Export local plugin open source
Setup & hosting
No-code setup	Yes via forestry.md	Yes	No	Yes	Yes
One-click cloud hosting	Yes via forestry.md	Yes	No	Yes	No
Self-hostable	Yes	No	Yes	Yes	Yes
Free tier available	Yes	No	n/a	Yes	n/a
Obsidian feature support
Canvas support	Yes	No	No	No	Yes
Obsidian Bases support	Yes	No	No	beta	No
Wikilinks	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Dataview queries	Yes	No	Yes via Quartz Syncer plugin	No	Yes
Callouts / admonitions	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Transclusion / embeds	Yes	Yes	Yes	partial	Yes
Frontmatter properties	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Obsidian themes	Yes	Yes	No	No	Yes
Embedded Gists	Yes	No	No	No	No
Site features
Stacked pages	No	Yes	No	No	No
Password protection	No	Yes	No	No	No
Customizable UI text	Yes	No	Yes	No	No
Graph view	Yes	Yes	Yes	No	Yes
Backlinks	Yes	Yes	Yes	No	Yes
Full-text search	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Custom domain	Yes Pro	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Selective publishing	Yes	Yes	Yes via Quartz Syncer plugin	manual	manual
Draft / preview mode1	Yes Pro, via forestry.md	No	No	No	No
Page link previews	Yes	Yes	Yes	No	No
Comments	Yes	No	plugin	Yes	No
Custom CSS / styling	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Technical
Static output	Yes	No	Yes	Yes	Yes
Open source	Yes	No	Yes	partially	Yes
LaTeX / math	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes

Swipe sideways to compare all five options.

¹ Preview your entire site with unpublished changes (notes, settings, and themes) before going live.

Where it all started

The Digital Garden plugin was the original open-source Obsidian-to-website plugin. Its code has since become the starting point for Flowershow's Obsidian plugin, Quartz Syncer and Enveloppe.

Free to start, no GitHub account needed. Switch back to self-hosting anytime.

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