Obsidian

Obsidian is a personal knowledge management app from Dynalist Inc. (Toronto), built by Dynalist founders Erica Xu and Shida Li and launched in 2020. Its core idea is deliberately simple: your notes are plain Markdown files in a folder on your device, called a vault, and Obsidian is a fast editor layered on top. Notes connect through bidirectional links, and the graph view renders the whole web of connections as an explorable map. Canvas adds an infinite whiteboard for spatial thinking, and Bases (2025) turns groups of notes into filterable, sortable database-like views backed by the same local files.

The core app is free for personal and commercial use — the commercial license became optional in February 2025 — and paid add-ons are Obsidian Sync (end-to-end encrypted cross-device sync, around $4–5/user/month) and Obsidian Publish (notes as a website, around $8–10/site/month), plus a $25 one-time Catalyst tier for insider builds. A community plugin ecosystem of 2,000+ plugins (Dataview, Templater, Excalidraw, Tasks, Copilot, spaced-repetition tools) extends it into task management, research databases, and AI chat over your vault. Independent analysis estimated 3–4 million users in early 2025, though the bootstrapped ~18-person company does not track users itself and has been profitable for years. There are no published independent benchmarks for its speed claims; they are provider-stated but widely consistent with user experience. Honest tradeoffs: no native real-time collaboration, the mobile app lags the desktop experience, and plugin quality varies — popular plugins are not always maintained.

Download the installer from obsidian.md for Windows, macOS, Linux, iOS, or Android. Create a vault (a folder) anywhere on your device — no account required. Optionally enable community plugins in Settings, then browse and install plugins from inside the app. For cross-device sync, either use the paid Obsidian Sync add-on or point your vault at iCloud, Dropbox, Syncthing, or Git.