Obsidian
Obsidian makes a free, flexible app for private thoughts and personal knowledge. Its principles are that tools should help people think clearly, preserve data in durable open formats, protect privacy, remain malleable and be independent/user-supported.
At a Glance
- Individuals and personal knowledge workers
- Students, researchers and writers
- Developers and technically sophisticated users
- Creative professionals and hobbyists
- +2 more
AI Tools by Obsidian
(2)
Pele
Mermaid to SVG Rendering Library
Obsidian
Local First Markdown Notes App
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Latest News
Obsidian October 2026 launches with the State of Obsidian survey and community project initiative
Obsidian Sync audits by Cure53 and Trail of Bits published
The future of Obsidian plugins: new Obsidian Community site and developer dashboard; 120 million plugin downloads
Obsidian October 2025 community build event
Products & Services
Free, flexible local-first note-taking and personal knowledge-management app using Markdown files, backlinks, graph views, plugins, themes and a community ecosystem.
Paid, end-to-end encrypted synchronization for vaults across devices, with version history, selective syncing and support for notes, attachments, themes, snippets, plugins and settings.
Paid publishing platform that turns Obsidian notes into websites with hosting, collaboration, custom domains, themes/CSS/JavaScript, SEO and accessibility features.
Free infinite canvas for research, brainstorming, diagrams and visual organization of notes and media; files use the interoperable JSON Canvas format.
Market Position
Obsidian competes with Notion, Roam Research, Evernote, Logseq, RemNote, Craft and similar personal-knowledge and note-taking tools. It differentiates through local-first Markdown files, ownership and portability of data, offline operation, privacy/no analytics, deep plugin/theme extensibility and a user-supported bootstrapped model; unlike cloud-first tools such as Notion, the source of truth is on the user’s devices.
Leadership
Founders
Shida Li
Co-founder and CTO; engineer and long-time entrepreneurial partner of Erica Xu. Li and Xu previously built Dynalist and met while studying at the University of Waterloo.
Erica Xu
Co-founder and COO; previously co-built Dynalist with Shida Li. She started Obsidian in 2020 during quarantine to build the ideal note-taking app for her own notes; she and Li studied at the University of Waterloo.
Executive Team
Steph Ango
CEO
Designer, writer, entrepreneur and toolmaker; previously founded Lumi and Inkodye, with Lumi acquired by Narvar. He was an Obsidian community contributor and user before joining full-time in 2023.
Shida Li
Co-founder and CTO
Engineer responsible for making Obsidian work well and fast; previously co-built Dynalist with Erica Xu.
Founding Story
Obsidian began in 2020 during the COVID-19 quarantine, when Dynalist co-founders Erica Xu and Shida Li started building the note-taking app they wanted for themselves. The initial vision was a private, local-first ‘IDE for thought’ based on durable Markdown files, linked notes and extensibility rather than a locked-in cloud database.
Business Model
Revenue Model
Freemium and user-supported: the core Obsidian app is free; revenue comes primarily from paid Obsidian Sync and Obsidian Publish subscriptions, plus optional Catalyst early-access licenses and Commercial licenses/donations. Obsidian says it has been profitable since day one.
Pricing Tiers
Free without limits; no account required.
1 GB storage, 5 MB maximum file size and 1 month version history.
10 GB storage, 200 MB maximum file size and 12 month version history; upgradeable to 100 GB.
Hosting for a site up to 4 GB, with publishing, custom domains and customization.
Optional supporter/early-access license.
Optional commercial/support license; no longer required for workplace use.
Target Markets
- Individuals and personal knowledge workers
- Students, researchers and writers
- Developers and technically sophisticated users
- Creative professionals and hobbyists
- Small teams and enterprises
- Government, cybersecurity, healthcare and finance organizations
- Personal knowledge management and second-brain workflows
- Writing, research and evergreen notes
- Project planning and task management
- Journaling and daily notes
- Academic and professional research
- Visual brainstorming, diagramming and mind mapping
- Amazon
- More than 10,000 organizations use or support Obsidian for work