Engram vs Relay

What is the difference?

Relay makes an Obsidian vault multiplayer: several people editing shared folders at once, with live cursors, the way a collaborative document works.

Engram makes an Obsidian vault answerable: synced across your own devices, indexed for search, and reachable by any AI over MCP.

Those are different problems. If you came here expecting one to be a replacement for the other, it is worth knowing up front that they are not, and that plenty of people run both against the same vault.

Where Relay wins, plainly

Relay ships live co-editing today and Engram does not. Shared folders, multiple people, real-time. If you need two humans typing in the same note at the same time, Relay does that and we do not. This is not a close call and we are not going to spin it.

They also have a team story we do not: seat-based plans with role-based access control and SSO on their paid tiers, and a self-hostable relay server if you want the document content on your own infrastructure.

Side by side

	Relay	Engram
Live multiplayer editing	Yes	No
Shared folders between people	Yes	No
Team seats, RBAC, SSO	Yes, on paid tiers	No
Sync your own devices	Yes	Yes, real-time with 3-way merge
AI access over MCP	No	Yes, hosted endpoint with OAuth
Server-side search index	No	Keyword, semantic, hybrid
Web app with an editor	No	Yes
Mobile	Via Obsidian mobile	Via Obsidian mobile, plus the browser
Self-host	Yes	Yes, whole stack
Pricing	Free up to 3 users, then seat-based	Free tier, then $7 or $14 per month

Why we do not ship collaboration yet

Not because it is uninteresting. Because of encryption.

Engram encrypts every note at rest under a per-user data encryption key. A shared vault needs the same note readable by several people, which means a content key wrapped separately for each member, plus the key rotation and membership-change machinery that comes with it. That is real cryptographic work, and doing it badly is worse than not doing it.

So shared vaults are a committed direction rather than a shipped feature, and we would rather say that than imply otherwise. If collaboration is your requirement this quarter, Relay exists and works.

Why Relay does not do the AI part

Also not an oversight. Live co-editing is a sync problem: keep several people’s edits convergent in real time. AI access is a retrieval problem: chunk and embed a corpus, run keyword and vector search over it, serve it to a client over a protocol, from a host that stays up when the laptop closes.

Different stacks, different costs. Relay solved theirs well. We built ours.

Can I use both?

Yes. They operate on the same markdown files on disk and neither one owns the format. A reasonable setup is Relay for the folders your team edits together and Engram for indexing the whole vault and exposing it to your AI.

Worth knowing: both are syncing the same files, so give each one a clear job rather than pointing both at the same folder and hoping. Relay for the shared folders, Engram for the vault as a whole.

Which should you pick?

Relay, if the problem is two or more people editing the same notes, or you need seats, roles, and SSO.

Engram, if the problem is that your notes are invisible to your AI, or that they only exist on one machine, or that you want to search them by meaning rather than by filename.

Both, if you have both problems, which many small teams do.

Summary

Relay is collaboration for Obsidian. Engram is memory and retrieval for Obsidian. We do not ship live co-editing and they do not ship AI access. On the day that changes for either of us, this page gets updated rather than quietly rewritten.