How to save a web page into ObsidianObsidian Web Clipper vs. MarkDownload vs. Page Scanner

The quickest way to get a web page into Obsidian is Obsidian's own Web Clipper: a browser extension that turns the article into a Markdown note in your vault, with the properties and layout a template decides. That is the right answer for most notes. What it does not give you is the page as it looked, since a Markdown note keeps the words and links and leaves the layout behind. If you want that too, Page Scanner's Obsidian plugin saves the whole page as a PDF with a note beside it that embeds the PDF under the page's text. MarkDownload, an older extension, sits between them and still works where your browser can run it.

Three tools at a glance

✓ yes, ✗ no. An empty cell is one the product's own pages do not answer.

A note, or a PDF and a note

A Markdown note is the page's words, re-set in your theme, searchable with the rest of the vault and editable like anything you wrote. That is what a vault is best at. What a note cannot hold is the page's layout: the table that only made sense in its columns, the pricing grid, the thread exactly as it stood. A PDF can, and a note can embed it. The choice is not really between the tools. It is between keeping the words and keeping the page, and you can do both. Web clipper or page capture? goes into that difference outside Obsidian.

Obsidian Web Clipper

This is Obsidian's own: "a free browser extension that lets you highlight pages and save web content to your vault". Click it on a page and it keeps the main content, using Defuddle, which Obsidian's troubleshooting page admits "sometimes it can be overly conservative". A selection overrides it, and so do highlights, which stay visible on the page when you come back to it. Templates shape the note's properties and body, with variables and filters, and can apply themselves to a site automatically, so a recipe and a paper come out shaped differently. The Interpreter lets you say in plain language what to capture from the page, through a model provider you choose; Ollama runs on your own computer and needs no API key.

Images are the one thing to know about: they "link to their web-based URL" rather than being saved, so a note opened offline shows none until you run Obsidian's Download attachments for current file. It runs in Chrome, Firefox, Safari (on iPhone and iPad too) and Edge, it is MIT licensed, and Obsidian says "Your data is not collected, and we do not gather any usage metrics."

Verdict: the default. Nothing else here does highlights, per-site templates or a phone.

MarkDownload

MarkDownload is "an extension to clip websites and download them into a readable markdown file", built on Mozilla's Readability and Turndown, and nearly every detail of the Markdown is a setting. For a vault it has two useful ones: images can be downloaded beside the note and embedded as ![[image.jpg]], and a disallowed-characters list that defaults to []#^, "these characters can cause issues with Obsidian". Its Send Tab to Obsidian works through the Advanced URI community plugin, which you install in the vault.

It does not run in current Chrome. Its manifest is Manifest V2, which Chrome's own timeline says is disabled for "all users on all channels" from Chrome 138, and its latest release still uses it. Firefox's add-ons site still lists it, and the Safari version is paid.

Verdict: worth it on Firefox if you want the pictures in the vault as files.

Page Scanner's Obsidian plugin

I build Page Scanner. Its plugin adds Scan a browser tab into the vault to Obsidian's command palette and a button to the ribbon. It lists the tabs open in your browser, the one in front first; type to filter by title or address, press Enter, and the tab is scanned. Two files land in the folder you set (Page Scanner by default), named after the page's title:

---title: "Markdown - Wikipedia"source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Markdown"captured: 2026-09-25T11:02:41.000Z---![[Page Scanner/Markdown - Wikipedia.pdf]]# MarkdownMarkdown is a lightweight markup language …

The PDF is the whole page as a vector file, its text selectable and searchable; the note is the page's text as Markdown, with headings, lists, tables and links, and the PDF embedded under the properties. Settings choose A4, US Letter or one long page, the theme, the page width and whether clutter is hidden, or leave those to the extension's own settings.

What it costs is setup, and it is the plugin's biggest drawback next to the Web Clipper. The capture is done by the Page Scanner extension in your browser, through the page-scanner command, and Obsidian's community plugins may not install anything for you. So you install Node.js and then the command yourself:

npm install -g @page-scanner/cli

The plugin's settings open on four steps (Node.js, the command, Install helper, and Connect in the extension's settings), each marked done or to do and checked again every few seconds. After that, one command does it.

Its limits are real. It saves the whole page, always as a PDF with its Markdown: no crop, no marks, no PNG, none of the editor's output choices. The note's text has no pictures (they are in the PDF) and is never tidied, so a site's menus and footer can be in it. The file name is the page's title, with no template. It is desktop only; it has been used on macOS and is written for Windows and Linux, which have not been tried yet. While the scan runs, Chrome shows its "started debugging this browser" bar.

Nothing goes over the network beyond your computer: the command listens on 127.0.0.1, and the page is captured by your own browser. The extension does send anonymous counts of which features are used, which its settings can switch off.

Verdict: the one to use when you want to keep the page itself, not only its words, and still find it by searching the vault.

Which should you use?

Use Obsidian Web Clipper if you are taking notes from articles. It is Obsidian's own, it needs nothing else installed, and highlights and templates make every note start in the right shape.

Use MarkDownload if you are on Firefox and want each note's pictures saved into the vault as files.

Use Page Scanner's plugin if you want a faithful PDF of the whole page in the vault with its text beside it, for a page whose layout matters or one you may need to show later exactly as it was.

Use both if you want both. Clip the article with the Web Clipper for your notes, and scan the same tab with the plugin when the page itself is worth keeping. For a crop, marks or a redaction first, scan with the extension, export from its editor, and drop the file into the vault; the editor's Markdown export also keeps the pictures, as described in how to convert a web page to Markdown.

Frequently asked questions

Why does Page Scanner's plugin need Node.js and npm? It runs the page-scanner command, and Obsidian cannot run it with its own runtime. Obsidian's community plugins may not install anything for you, so the plugin never runs npm itself; its settings tell you what is missing.

Can I clip on my phone? With the Web Clipper, yes: it runs in Safari on iOS and iPadOS and in Firefox Mobile. Page Scanner's plugin needs Obsidian on a desktop and the extension in a desktop browser.

Can I keep the pictures in the vault? With the Web Clipper, run Download attachments for current file on the note. With MarkDownload, turn on Download Images. With Page Scanner's plugin they are in the PDF; the editor's Markdown export puts them inside the .md file itself.

Where this comes from

• Obsidian: the Web Clipper page, the help pages Web Clipper, Clip web pages, Interpreter and Troubleshoot, and the repository.
• MarkDownload: the repository and its user guide, and the Firefox listing.
• Chrome for Developers, the Manifest V2 support timeline.
• Page Scanner: the Obsidian plugin documentation, its questions in the FAQ, and the plugin's listing in Obsidian.