Benchmark

All benchmark results are recorded here, see deep dive: benchmarking for benchmarking details. Sync Engine welcomes everyone contributing benchmarking results as long as it follows the steps specified in the spec.

Apparent Statistics

Metrics	Sync Engine	Remotely Save	Nextcloud Sync	Nutstore Sync	Google Drive Sync	Easy Sync
Version	3.3.4	0.5.25	1.0.13	1.6.0	3.1.1	1.6.5
Transparent[1]	✅	⚠️[2]	✅	⚠️[3]	✅	✅
Startup time[4]	27.2 ms[5]	251 ms	20.2 ms	298ms	6.6ms	60.8ms
Plugin size	158 KB	4050 KB	595 KB	4230 KB	31.3 KB	1840 KB
Sync hidden files[6]	✅	⚠️[7]	⚠️[7:1]	✅	⚠️[7:2]	⚠️[7:3]
Move detection[8]	✅	❌	⚠️[9]	❌	❌	✅
Chunked transfer[10]	✅	❌	❌	❌	❌	❌
Metadata syncing[11]	✅	⚠️[12]	✅	❌	❌	❌
Encryption[13]	✅	✅	❌	❌	❌	❌

WebDAV Performance

• Obsidian version: 1.13.4
• Operating system: NixOS 26.11
• CPU single core score: around 1700
• Backend: Self-hosted Nextcloud WebDAV^[9:1]
• Average ping: 400 ms
• Average upload speed: 3 MiB/s
• Average download speed: 5 MiB/s

Item	Sync Engine	Remotely Save	Nextcloud Sync
Version	3.0.0 + webdav module 0.1.7	0.5.25	0.7.38
2000 files upload	9.43 min	16.4 min	17.95 min
2000 files download	5.87 min	13.68 min	5.22 min
Daily simulation (Original, 10 rounds)	Min: 1.04 s Median: 1.44 s Max: 48.56 s	Min: 99 s Median: 129 s Max: 326 s	Min: 1.27 s Median: 2.75 s Max: 60.55 s
Daily simulation (Replica, 10 rounds)	Min: 1.06 s Median: 1.72 s Max: 3.49 s	Min: 111 s Median: 117 s Max: 204 s	Min: 0.4 s Median: 3.94 s Max: 55.33 s
Correctness validation	0 errors	0 errors	98 errors

In terms of syncing performance, Sync Engine is visibly faster than Remotely Save in terms of full upload and download. In the more realistic daily sync test, Remotely Save fails catastrophically and Sync Engine is around 100x faster than Remotely Save.

Although claimed to be optimized for Nextcloud, Nextcloud Sync still shows visible disadvantage in terms of performance compared with Sync Engine. More importantly, it fails to sync 98 original files or changes to the replica, and many errors appeared during the testing process.

S3 Performance

• Obsidian version: 1.14.5
• Operating system: NixOS 26.11
• CPU single core score: around 1700
• Backend: Self-hosted RustFs 1.0.4^[9:2]
• Average ping: 401.87 ms
• Average upload speed: 2.79 MiB/s
• Average download speed: 4.55 MiB/s
• S3 pricing standard: AWS S3 us-east-1, publication 2026-10-15

Item	Sync Engine	Remotely Save[14]
Version	3.3.4 + S3 module 0.2.3	0.5.25
2000 files upload	3.95 min	6.30 min
2000 files download	2.42 min	3.87 min
Daily simulation (Original, 10 rounds)	Min: 0.37 s Median: 0.7 s Max: 7.63 s	Min: 2.16 s Median: 3.1 s Max: 76.12 s
Daily simulation (Replica, 10 rounds)	Min: 1.4 s Median: 1.71 s Max: 6.17 s	Min: 1.87 s Median: 2.68 s Max: 32.4 s
Correctness validation	0 errors	0 errors
Total S3 Cost	$0.0585	$0.0702

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1. Whether the author has made every controllable component that affects the plugins functioning free and open-source. ↩︎

2. Entire sync core is proprietary but source code is available. ↩︎

3. Nutstore server and the SSO sign-on dependency are not transparent. ↩︎

4. The time by which the plugin delays the cold start of Obsidian App. ↩︎

5. Measured with a module loaded. ↩︎

6. Can (be configured to) sync arbitrary files in directories with a leading dot, such as the Obsidian config folder .obsidian/. ↩︎

7. Only specific files under .obsidian can sync. ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎

8. Correctly detects file movements instead of delete + download / upload. ↩︎

9. During local testing, the connection is delayed and bandwidth is limited to simulate middle-to-low network quality. ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎

10. Downloads / uploads large files in chunks so that the machine doesn't crash when dealing with large files. ↩︎

11. Preserves modification and creation time across devices. ↩︎

12. Only works on OneDrive. ↩︎

13. Supports encrypting files before uploading. ↩︎

14. "Generate Folder Object" is enabled to match the benchmark's correctness first standard. ↩︎