Obsidian

About Obsidian

Obsidian is a personal knowledge base and note-taking app that stores your notes as plain Markdown files in a local folder called a vault. Because the files live on your own disk rather than in a company's cloud, you keep full control and can back them up, sync them or edit them with any other tool. It is available for Windows, macOS, Linux, Android and iOS.

What sets Obsidian apart is how it links ideas together. You can connect notes with simple double-bracket links, and the app builds an interactive graph showing how everything relates. Backlinks reveal which notes point to the one you are reading, so a collection of small notes gradually becomes a web of knowledge rather than a pile of isolated documents. This makes it a favourite among students, researchers, writers and anyone building a "second brain".

Obsidian is highly extensible. A large ecosystem of community plugins and themes adds kanban boards, calendars, spaced-repetition review, diagramming and much more, while core features such as tags, search, canvas and templates work out of the box. Advanced users appreciate that the underlying data is just text files, so notes remain readable and portable for years.

The app is free for personal use. Optional paid services exist for end-to-end encrypted sync across devices and for publishing notes to the web, but they are never required, since you can sync the vault yourself with any file-sync method you already use.

Key features

• Local-first Markdown notes you fully own
• Bidirectional links and interactive graph view
• Backlinks, tags, search and canvas
• Large library of community plugins and themes
• Optional paid Sync and Publish services

System requirements

A desktop (Windows, macOS, Linux) or mobile (Android, iOS) device. Notes are lightweight text files, so storage and memory needs are minimal.

Tips

• Start with a single vault and add structure later rather than over-planning folders
• Install only the community plugins you actually need to keep the app fast