Last updated 14 October 2026
Getting an article into your vault takes about ten seconds. Getting it in cleanly — without the cookie banner, without a broken table — is the part that decides whether you'll still be doing this in a month.
Before changing tools: test the one you already have. Find a page with a table and a code block, clip it, paste it into Obsidian. Five minutes, and it tells you more than any comparison article — including this one.
Almost all clipping damage happens to four things, and none of them are visible until you look at the note in Obsidian:
js or python
marker costs you syntax highlighting. For anyone clipping technical writing, this is the
difference between a useful note and a wall of grey text.
Select the article, Ctrl/Cmd + C, paste into Obsidian. Obsidian reads the
HTML flavour on the clipboard and converts it to Markdown for you.
Good for: a simple article with no tables. It's genuinely fine, and for
occasional use there's no reason to install anything.
Fails at: anything structured. Tables arrive as plain text, and you'll
spend longer fixing them than the original clip saved.
Obsidian ships an official clipper. It's free, has no clip limit, is open source, and supports templates and per-site rules. It integrates the way a first-party tool should.
If Obsidian is your only destination, start here. We're not going to pretend otherwise — paying someone for a second clipper makes no sense if the free official one already covers your needs. Test it on the hard cases (tables with blank cells, code samples) before deciding you need anything else.
Where a second tool does earn its place: when your notes don't all live in one app. If some articles go to Obsidian, some to Notion, and some to a plain-Markdown folder, you're otherwise maintaining one clipper per destination — each with its own settings, and each re-extracting the same page.
A clipper that isn't tied to a single app can write to Obsidian, Notion, or plain Markdown, and you pick the destination per clip. The practical differences that matter:
| What to look for | Why it matters in practice |
|---|---|
| Tables come out as real Markdown tables | Blank cells must keep their separator, or columns silently misalign |
| Code blocks keep their language tag | Otherwise there's no highlighting, and the note is much less useful |
| It remembers your vault | Re-picking the destination on every clip is the main reason people stop clipping |
| Extraction happens locally | Article text shouldn't have to pass through someone's server to reach your own note |
We built a clipper test page for exactly this. It's a single page containing the content that breaks clippers: a table with a blank cell, a table with a wide header, code blocks in several languages, nested lists, and a blockquote with a link.
Clip it with whichever tool you're considering, paste into Obsidian, and compare against the expected Markdown shown on the page. It's the fastest honest evaluation you can do, and it works on any clipper — including ours.
We make Clipperry, a Chrome extension that clips to Notion, Obsidian or plain Markdown. It's built specifically around the four failure modes above: it strips page clutter first, exports tables as real Markdown tables with blank cells preserved, keeps code language tags, and remembers your Obsidian folder so you don't re-select it. Content is extracted in your browser — nothing is sent to our servers.
When it isn't worth it: if everything you clip goes into Obsidian and you're happy with the official clipper, keep using it. Our free tier is 50 clips a month if you want to compare on the test page before spending anything.