Obsidian appeared in 2020, created by Shida Li and Erica Xu — the same team behind Dynalist, an outliner app. It quickly became a favorite among developers, researchers, and knowledge workers who wanted full control over their notes.
The app stores everything as plain Markdown files on your local disk. There’s no proprietary format, no vendor lock-in, and you can open your notes in any text editor. This approach resonated strongly with users who’d been burned by Evernote’s closed ecosystem.
Obsidian’s standout feature is bidirectional linking. You can connect notes to each other and visualize those connections in a graph view. This makes it well-suited for building a personal knowledge base or “second brain,” a concept popularized by Tiago Forte.
The plugin ecosystem is massive — there are over 1,500 community plugins covering everything from task management to spaced repetition. Themes are similarly abundant, letting users customize the look and feel extensively.
Obsidian is free for personal use. Commercial use requires a paid license at $50/user/year. Sync and Publish are optional paid services for those who want end-to-end encrypted cloud sync or want to publish notes as a website.
The team is small — under 20 people — and they’ve been intentionally bootstrapped with no venture capital. The community around Obsidian is active and passionate, with a busy Discord server and forums.
