Obsidian

Obsidian stores notes locally as plain-text Markdown files, so it works offline. If you ever switch to another program, your notes stay where they are, in a folder on your computer, and you can open them without Obsidian. You connect notes with links, and an interactive graph shows which ones are related. There are thousands of plugins and themes: plugins add features, and themes change how the app looks.

The app is free for personal and work use and requires no account. Organizations can choose to buy a commercial license to support the app’s development. You pay only for the optional add-ons: syncing notes across devices and publishing them online.

In my articles

In the third episode of my series on building a second brain, I use Obsidian to read a wiki that a language model maintains. The model writes the pages to a folder, and Obsidian simply displays them, so any other program that can open Markdown files can replace Obsidian.

Sources

• Obsidian, home page (opens in a new tab)
• Obsidian, pricing and licenses (opens in a new tab)