Obsidian
Free tierThe free and flexible private note-taking app that sharpens your thinking
Free tier available·All audiences·API available
Key strengths
Local-first storage with full privacy — notes never leave your device unless you chooseBidirectional linking and graph view to visualize knowledge connectionsThousands of community plugins and themes for deep customizationOpen file formats (plain-text Markdown) ensuring long-term data ownershipEnd-to-end encrypted sync and one-click publishing via Obsidian Publish
Free tier + paid plans
Founded 2020
Self-hostable
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- Building custom productivity workflows with community plugins — leverage Dataview for SQL-like queries over note metadata, Tasks for cross-vault task tracking, and Templater for dynamic note templates.
- Version-controlled knowledge base with Git — because notes are plain Markdown files, developers can manage vaults with Git for full history, branching, and collaboration via GitHub.
- Automated note creation via URI and CLI — trigger Obsidian to create or open notes from scripts, CI pipelines, or external tools using
obsidian://URI scheme or the CLI wrapper. - Plugin and theme development — use the open TypeScript API and CodeMirror 6 editor integration to build and publish custom plugins to the community marketplace.
- Internal team documentation with Obsidian Publish — deploy a fast, SEO-optimized documentation or knowledge-base site directly from a shared vault with custom domains and password protection.
- Web content capture and processing — use the Obsidian Web Clipper browser extension to clip articles, highlights, and pages into the vault for later processing and linking.