Obsidian

A versatile writing app tailored to your thinking

4.9•175 reviews•

4.4K followers

A versatile writing app tailored to your thinking

4.9•175 reviews•

4.4K followers

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Note and writing apps

Store notes on your device, so you can access them quickly, even offline. Use hundreds of plugins and themes, to fit your way of thinking.

Obsidian Reviews

The community submitted 175 reviews to tell us what they like about Obsidian, what Obsidian can do better, and more.

4.9

Based on 175 reviews

Review Obsidian?

Reviewers see Obsidian as a fast, flexible markdown workspace that gives them real control over their notes through local files, links, backlinks, and a huge plugin ecosystem. Many use it as a “second brain” for research, writing, planning, and AI context, and founders of Second Brain for AI and NextPhone say it fits technical, documentation-heavy workflows especially well. The main complaints are a steep setup curve, plugin overload, uneven mobile writing, and search that can miss ideas unless you remember the exact words.

+172

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Pros

community plugins (45)

local storage (33)

customization (31)

markdown support (25)

second brain (24)

graph view (16)

privacy (15)

fast performance (13)

cross-platform (12)

free tier (7)

Cons

learning curve (12)

sync feature cost (4)

customization (3)

closed source (2)

markdown support (2)

Pros

Cons

Reviews

All Reviews

Most Informative

Founder Reviews (60)

Other Reviews (115)

Lore Machine

•11 reviews

What's great

free tier (7)markdown support (25)community plugins (45)customization (31)local storage (33)second brain (24)

I am terrified to admit this but I think the Obsidian taught me to love my second brain more than my first. Ultimately, I think why is that it's batting 1000 on left brain AND right brain. I feel equally at home building a multi-chapter sci fi universe as I day organizing the codebase components for Lore Machine. Last thing I'll say: light FRICKING weight. I love that it operates like a framework through which I can sharpen my thinking. Thank you Obsidian, THANK YOU.

What needs improvement

I'd love suggestions for what plugins might be used. 16k community plugins is a lot. But that's just me being lazy. And I fear that even if Obsidian took me up on this it would get annoiying. We're basically in no notes territory here.

vs Alternatives

I was looking for a world building app to complement what we're building at Lore Machine - something I could suggest to users balancing story worlds that contain hundreds of characters, locations and narrative data points. There are a few very RPG oriented ones that shall go remain nameless. But they did too much. Deep in a Reddit thread one night, a voice of reason suggested: "Just use Obsidian." And like that, it was on.

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79 views3mo ago

Fuser

•7 reviews

I’ve been using Obsidian daily for over a year now. There’s no onboarding funnel, no update pop-ups, no pressure to upgrade. It just works, and it keeps working. You let some tools into your life without thinking too hard about it. Obsidian was like that, although I did spend probably an entire week customizing it, iterating upon a template until I figured out how to structure my daily notes versus larger long-term projects. I mean, I was not really just getting into a note-taking app, I was actually looking for a new way to structure my thoughts and create meaningful habits around journaling. I really like that Obsidian doesn't get in the way once you customize it how you like. It's usually the first thing I open in the morning, so I can plan the whole day ahead of me, journal my thoughts, and take notes for my meetings without it being overly complicated.

What's great

simplicity (3)customization (31)

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146 views1yr ago

NLX

•6 reviews

I've been using Obsidian for the past three years now. I moved over from Bear in order to have a cross platform experience and haven't missed it all. Interface and sync combined with plugins makes for a powerful organization tool and lightweight markdown behind the scenes makes it easy to backup and share notes through the filesystem. There is a small learning curve to get obsidian to work the best for you, however it's more than usable out of the box.

What's great

cross-platform (12)markdown support (25)community plugins (45)

What needs improvement

learning curve (12)

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65 views1yr ago

•8 reviews

What's great

fast performance (13)markdown support (25)community plugins (45)second brain (24)

There is a moment in every workflow where you realise a tool is not just useful, it is foundational. Obsidian was that moment for me.

Before making the switch, I was living inside Apple Notes. It worked well enough for quick personal reminders and short captures, but the moment content got complex, the cracks showed. Formatting would break, structure was hard to maintain, and anything I wanted to reference later was buried somewhere with no real logic holding it together. For light personal use, Apple Notes is fine. For building a serious knowledge system, especially one designed to work alongside AI, it simply was not built for that job.

Obsidian was. The difference was immediately clear. The seamless experience it delivers is not accidental. It is the result of a product designed around how information actually connects, rather than just how it gets captured. The folder structure, the linking between notes, the way everything sits in clean readable formats, it all adds up to something that feels genuinely intelligent in its design.

What changed everything for me was realising that Obsidian is not just a note-taking app. It is a notebook for AI. Whenever I need to reference anything inside a conversation with Claude, Codex, or any other model, it is all there, structured and ready. My phone and my Mac both have it installed, and the cloud sync means that wherever I am working from, I am always pulling from the same brain. That freedom to move between devices without losing context is something I did not fully appreciate until I had it.

What needs improvement

learning curve (12)

Obsidian asks you to think about structure from the beginning. You need to decide how you want to organise your folders, how you want to categorise your notes, and what system you are building toward. For someone who enjoys that kind of design thinking, it is one of the most satisfying parts of using the product. For someone who just wants to open an app and start typing without thinking, it might feel like homework at first.

But that structure is also exactly what makes it so powerful. Obsidian rewards the effort you put into it. The more intentionally you build inside it, the more useful it becomes, especially as a knowledge layer that sits beneath everything else you are building with AI. It has become one of those tools I cannot picture working without.

vs Alternatives

Apple Notes

Apple Notes was my previous home, and the comparison tells the whole story. Apple Notes is comfortable, native, and genuinely good for keeping a handful of personal things in one place. But it does not format content well for anything beyond simple text, it has no real folder depth for complex organisation, and it was never designed with AI workflows in mind. Once I started using Obsidian as the backbone of my AI note system, going back to Apple Notes felt like going back to sticky notes on a wall.

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167 views4mo ago

•3 reviews

What's great

local storage (33)

The thing that made me stay is unglamorous: it is a folder of markdown files on my disk. Every other notes app I tried before this one, I eventually had to think about how I would get my notes out of it. With Obsidian that question never comes up, because there is nothing to get out of. They are already just files.

That sounds like a small thing until you have been burned once. I have moved machines, changed editors, and started reading my own notes programmatically from scripts, and none of that required Obsidian's permission or an export flow.

The second thing, which I did not expect: it turned out to be the best place to keep context for AI tools. Because it is plain text in a predictable structure, anything can read it. My agent setup reads the same vault I write in by hand. No sync layer, no API, no format negotiation. That was never a feature they advertised to me, it just falls out of the file-based design.

Where it is genuinely weak: search. It finds strings well and ideas badly. If I remember roughly what I thought but not what I typed, I am stuck browsing. And the plugin ecosystem is a real strength that is also a real tax, because a vault held together by nine community plugins is a vault that breaks in nine ways.

Still the tool on my list I would replace last.

What needs improvement

Search is the big one. It matches text, not meaning. If I remember the shape of a thought but not the words I used, there is no path from one to the other except scrolling. For a tool whose whole pitch is that it holds everything you know, not being able to ask it a fuzzy question is the gap I hit most often.

Second, the plugin situation cuts both ways. The ecosystem is genuinely why the tool is flexible, but a vault assembled from a dozen community plugins has a dozen independent maintainers and a dozen ways to break on an update. Some notion of a stable, supported core set would let people build on it with less anxiety.

Smaller: mobile is fine for reading and not fun for writing anything structured, so in practice my vault is a desktop thing that I occasionally glance at on a phone.

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96 views3mo ago

•1 review

What's great

free tier (7)fast performance (13)privacy (15)markdown support (25)community plugins (45)customization (31)local storage (33)second brain (24)

Coming from Logseq, it took me a few months to realize that the daily entry way of doing things is actually not great to organize your data at all. I could write a book about how to organize your vault… But once you nail it, it's so incredibly powerful. I'd never go back to the "journaling" paradigm.

What needs improvement

mobile app (1)sync feature cost (4)

The mobile app experience is not great. I think it shouldn't try to just replicate the desktop experience and focus instead on quick entry and easy retrieval.

vs Alternatives

Logseq

The flexibility and customization is truly amazing. And now, with AI, it's so quick to write your own plugin if there isn't one out there.

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35 views2mo ago

•4 reviews

What's great

open source (3)markdown support (25)community plugins (45)customization (31)local storage (33)second brain (24)

Lightweight
Supports markdown, which is faster than using cursor-based text changes
Supports a variety of command-based interactions, which is preferable
It's free
Community plug-ins
Wide customizability

What needs improvement

sync feature cost (4)

File structure isn't always the easiest way to interact with vault
UI can get cluttered when you use a lot of community plug-ins

vs Alternatives

Notion

Anytype

Markdown language acceptance, preference for keyboard control of applications, command-centred UI, scale for customisation and community plug-ins

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277 views10mo ago

•4 reviews

What's great

It opens, it works, and it never nags me to upgrade or sign up for anything, which honestly feels rare now. And it bends to however I already think instead of forcing me into someone else's idea of how notes should work.

What needs improvement

learning curve (12)customization (3)

The flexibility is also the trap. It's so endlessly customizable that I've lost whole afternoons tweaking plugins and themes and calling it "setting up my system" when I was really just avoiding the writing.

vs Alternatives

Apple Notes

Google Keep

I bounced between Apple Notes and Google Keep for a while, and they're both great for quickly jotting something down. But neither one let me actually build anything on top of the notes, so things just piled up and went nowhere.

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55 views3mo ago

•2 reviews

What's great

free tier (7)note-taking (2)cross-platform (12)open source (3)privacy (15)markdown support (25)cross-device syncing (1)strong community (2)community plugins (45)customization (31)graph view (16)local storage (33)second brain (24)

After I started using Obsidian, my whole way of thinking and working changed.

It is not just a notes app for me anymore. It became the place where I plan, write, connect ideas, structure projects, and keep my brain from scattering across ten different tools.

Then I started taking my Obsidian projects into the IDE, and that moved everything to another level.

In this agentic era, notes are not just notes. They become context. They become instructions. They become project memory. A well-structured vault can guide an AI agent much better than random prompts ever could.

Obsidian gave me the thinking layer. The IDE gave me the execution layer. Together, they turned my ideas into a working system.

The graph view and visual thinking side of Obsidian also had a real effect on me. Seeing ideas connected in space changed the way I organize thoughts. It made planning feel less like filling boxes and more like building a living map of what I am working on.

Since I started using Obsidian, my productivity has gone up massively. I think more clearly, return to old ideas faster, and build long-term projects without losing context.

It has a learning curve, but that is also part of why it is powerful. Obsidian does not force a workflow on you. It gives you the raw material to build your own operating system for thinking.

For anyone who writes, builds, researches, codes, plans, or works with AI agents, Obsidian is one of the rare tools that actually becomes more valuable the longer you use it.

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45 views5mo ago

•1 review

What's great

simplicity (3)local storage (33)second brain (24)

Really interesting how you can connect all of the sub-files and keywords within different documents. I started using it to study different books, but now I'm just applying other features to other areas of my life

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37 views5mo ago

•5 reviews

What's great

I started using this on a friend recommendation from Product Hunt. It has become the place where I can see my thinking actually living. It doesn't integrate with much and that is part of the point, it stays out of the way and lets me keep notes, drafts, and half-formed ideas in one connected space that I control. What I appreciate most is how the linking between notes works over time, the second and third connection usually surfaces something I would not have thought to search for.

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21 views3mo ago

•1 review

Infinitely customizable - if you want to make it an incredibly stripped down snippet collector, Zettelkasten, or series of shower thoughts with nothing but Markdown, you can. If you want to install 60 community plugins and move on to the ones that aren't in the Community store yet, customize it with CSS, and have a widget-y dashboard with buttons and dropdown menus, you can do that too. (I'm somewhere in between.) But more to the point, it's a heck of a lot better than spreading all my notes to myself between 30232340 notepad .txt files in different folders, Notion, Docs and Notes on my phone. Has it fixed the ADHD and the tendency to pick up every new productivity software? Nope, but that's my own issue. Has it greatly helped with consolidating and getting me into a routine? It sure has -- and it also has the really cool bonus of encouraging wikilinks within notes, which scratches a hypertext itch I forgot I had. (Also, there's a really robust TTRPG community within the Obsidian forums/Discord and a whooole subsection of user-made tips for GMs and players, so that's a nice little bonus for those of you into that hobby.)

What's great

note-taking (2)community support (1)markdown support (25)strong community (2)community plugins (45)customization (31)

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167 views1yr ago

•3 reviews

Obsidian is a powerful knowledge management and note-taking application that stands out due to its unique approach to organizing information. Obsidian uses Markdown for formatting, allowing users to create rich text documents easily. The app enables users to create links between notes, fostering a network of interconnected ideas. Users can visualize their notes and connections through an interactive graph view, which helps in understanding relationships between concepts. Obsidian stores notes locally on your device, providing users with full control over their data. The app supports various plugins and themes, allowing users to tailor the interface and functionality to their needs. Available on Windows, macOS, and Linux, with mobile versions for iOS and Android, ensuring accessibility across devices. Pros • Flexibility: Users can structure their notes in a way that suits their workflow, whether for personal use, research, or project management.  • Community Support: A vibrant community contributes plugins and themes, enhancing the app's capabilities.  • Privacy: With local storage, users can keep their notes private and secure, unlike cloud-based solutions. Cons • Learning Curve: New users may find the interface and features overwhelming at first, especially if they are not familiar with Markdown.  • Limited Collaboration: While great for individual use, it lacks real-time collaboration features found in some other note-taking apps.

What's great

cross-platform (12)privacy (15)markdown support (25)community plugins (45)customization (31)graph view (16)local storage (33)

What needs improvement

limited collaboration (1)learning curve (12)

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35 views1yr ago