Obsidian

Obsidian is a desktop and mobile note-taking app built around local-first, plain-text Markdown files. Developed by a small independent team co-founded by Shida Li and Erica Xu in 2020, it's free to use without sign-up and offers optional paid add-ons for sync and publishing. The core principle: your data belongs to you. Notes live on your device, never on Obsidian's servers, in open file formats that prevent lock-in.

What It Is

Obsidian is a personal knowledge management (PKM) tool for creating, linking, and organizing notes in a local vault of Markdown files. It sits in the "second brain" category alongside Notion, Roam Research, and Logseq, but its architecture is entirely local: no account required, fully offline-capable. Optional cloud services (Sync and Publish) exist as paid add-ons but aren't needed for core functionality.

Core Features and Architecture

Obsidian's feature set is built around a few foundational ideas:

• Bidirectional linking: Notes link to each other with [[wikilinks]], and Obsidian tracks backlinks automatically, letting users build a personal wiki.
• Graph view: An interactive visual graph shows the relationships between notes in a vault, surfacing hidden connections.
• Canvas: An infinite, freeform workspace for brainstorming, diagramming, and laying out ideas visually.
• Bases: A built-in database view that turns notes into structured, queryable tables.
• Plugins: Thousands of community plugins extend Obsidian's capabilities — Calendar, Kanban, Dataview, Tasks, and AI-focused plugins like Smart Connections that bring semantic search and chat over your vault. An open API lets developers build their own plugins and themes.
• Web Clipper: A browser extension for saving web content and highlights directly into Obsidian.
• CLI: A command-line interface for controlling Obsidian from the terminal.

Add-On Services

Two optional paid services extend Obsidian beyond local use:

• Obsidian Sync provides end-to-end encrypted synchronization across devices, version history for every note, and shared vault collaboration. Includes one year of version history and fine-grained control over which files sync to which devices.
• Obsidian Publish turns notes into a public website — wiki, knowledge base, documentation site, or digital garden — with customizable themes, custom domains, password protection, graph view, and full-text search. The Obsidian Help site itself is powered by Obsidian Publish.

Privacy and Data Model

Obsidian's manifesto centers on four principles: notes are yours (stored locally), durable (open formats, no lock-in), private (no telemetry, no data sold, end-to-end encryption for sync), and malleable (highly customizable). From the pricing FAQ: "Obsidian is a private and secure space for your thoughts. You can use our apps without sharing any personal information, and your data is stored locally on your device, making it inaccessible to us. Additionally, our apps do not collect telemetry data, and we never sell user data."

Commercial Adoption and Independence

More than 10,000 organizations have purchased commercial licenses to support Obsidian's development. Named license holders include Amazon at the Diamond tier and Capital One, Meta, Shopify, and the UK Government at the Topaz tier, among many others. Obsidian describes itself as "100% user-supported, not investors" — the commercial license is framed as optional support, not a required enterprise product.

Update: Version 1.12.7

The homepage references version 1.12.7 as the current release (as of data collection), indicating active development. The changelog lives at obsidian.md/changelog and a public roadmap at obsidian.md/roadmap.