Obsidian Review 2025: Your Notes Should Outlive the App

The Case for Owning Your Own Notes

There is a movement in software right now -- you might call it local-first -- that starts with a deceptively simple question: what happens to your data when the company behind your tool disappears? Or changes their pricing? Or gets acquired and pivots the product into something you did not sign up for?

If you have been using productivity tools for any length of time, you have probably felt this already. Remember when Google killed Google Reader? Or when Evernote went through its slow decline and people had to figure out how to export years of notes? Or more recently, when various companies jacked up their prices and users realized they had no good way to leave without losing their organizational structures?

Obsidian takes the opposite approach. Your notes are plain Markdown files sitting in a folder on your computer. There is no proprietary format. There is no server dependency. If Obsidian disappeared tomorrow, your notes would still be there -- readable in any text editor, movable to any other tool that understands Markdown. Which is basically all of them.

I find this philosophy genuinely appealing, and I think it matters more than most people realize. But I am also aware that philosophy alone does not make a good product. So let me talk about whether Obsidian actually works well as a note-taking and knowledge management tool, independent of the ideological appeal of local-first software.

How I Actually Use It

I have been maintaining an Obsidian vault for about eighteen months now. It has somewhere north of 900 notes. Here is what my typical day looks like with it.

I open Obsidian in the morning and start a daily note. The Periodic Notes plugin creates this automatically from a template I set up -- it has sections for tasks, a log area, and a section for things I want to remember. Throughout the day, I write in this note. When something connects to another topic, I create a [[link]] to a note about that topic. If the note does not exist yet, Obsidian creates a placeholder that I can fill in later.

Over time, these connections accumulate. My note about a programming concept links to a project where I used it, which links to a decision I made about architecture, which links to a conversation I had with a colleague. The graph view shows these connections as an interactive web, and occasionally I browse it and notice clusters of ideas that I had not consciously connected. That is genuinely useful. It has led me to insights I would not have had in a linear note-taking system.

The Dataview plugin deserves special mention because it transforms Obsidian from a note-taking app into something much more powerful. Dataview lets you write queries against your notes' metadata -- dates, tags, properties in the YAML frontmatter -- and generate dynamic tables and lists. I have a "dashboard" note that uses Dataview to show me all incomplete tasks across my vault, all notes I created this week, and all notes tagged with the project I'm currently focused on. It updates automatically. It is like having a lightweight database built on top of text files.

The Plugin Ecosystem: Where Things Get Wild

Obsidian has over 1,800 community plugins. That number alone tells you something about the community -- this is a tool that attracts people who like to tinker, customize, and build. And the quality of the top plugins is genuinely impressive. Dataview, as I mentioned, is practically a product unto itself. Templater goes way beyond basic templates -- it lets you run JavaScript within templates, which means you can automate complex note-creation workflows. The Calendar plugin links beautifully to daily notes. Excalidraw gives you a full drawing canvas inside your vault. The Kanban plugin turns notes into task boards.

But the tricky part is that this power comes with fragility. Plugins are maintained by community members in their spare time. Updates can break things. Some plugins stop being maintained altogether. I had a workflow that relied on a plugin called "Natural Language Dates" that broke after an Obsidian update and was not fixed for three weeks. During that time, my daily note template did not work correctly. It was annoying but not disastrous -- I could still use Obsidian, just without that particular convenience.

There is also the time-sink problem. With 1,800 plugins available, it is extremely easy to fall into a rabbit hole of installing, configuring, and tweaking instead of actually taking notes. I've spent entire evenings setting up a new plugin when I should have been writing. Obsidian gives you incredible power to customize your setup. Whether that power is a gift or a curse depends entirely on your self-discipline.

Syncing: The Elephant in the Room

Local-first is great in principle. But most people use more than one device. I take notes on my laptop at work, on my desktop at home, and occasionally on my phone. The notes need to be in all three places.

Obsidian offers their own sync service -- Obsidian Sync -- for $4 per month billed annually. It is end-to-end encrypted, works across all platforms, includes version history, and in my experience it is reliable. Notes sync within a few seconds on a decent connection. I have used it for about a year and had zero data loss incidents. It just works.

But $4 per month for sync feels like a lot when cloud-based tools like Notion include sync as a fundamental part of the product. You can work around it by syncing your vault through iCloud, Dropbox, Google Drive, or even git. I used iCloud for a while and it mostly worked, but I had occasional sync conflicts where the same note was edited on two devices before syncing. Those conflicts were not disastrous but they were annoying to resolve manually. Some people use Syncthing, which is free and open-source, but it requires setup and technical comfort.

This is the honest trade-off of local-first: you own your data, but you also own the problem of keeping it in sync. Obsidian Sync solves it cleanly but adds recurring cost. Free alternatives work but with more friction. There is an argument for and against each approach, and I'm not going to pretend there is one right answer.

The Graph View: Beautiful, But Is It Useful?

Obsidian's graph view is the feature people screenshot and share on social media. It is an interactive visualization of your vault where each note is a dot and each link between notes is a line. It looks amazing. It looks like you are peering into the neural network of a genius.

But is it actually useful? I'm honestly not sure. For the first few months, I looked at it regularly and found it interesting -- I could see clusters of notes forming around topics, and occasionally spot orphan notes that were not connected to anything. But after a while, I stopped opening it. The graph becomes less legible as your vault grows. With 900+ notes, my full graph is a dense mess of overlapping nodes that does not reveal much at a glance.

The local graph view -- which shows only the connections of the note you currently have open -- is more useful. It gives you context. "This note connects to these five other notes." That is valuable for navigating your knowledge. But I find the backlinks panel just as useful for this, and it is easier to scan. So the graph view lands in a weird spot for me: it is cool, it represents a genuine philosophical idea about networked thought, but in practice the backlinks panel does most of the same work with less visual noise.

Canvas: Spatial Thinking in Markdown Land

Canvas is Obsidian's built-in visual workspace -- an infinite canvas where you can arrange notes, images, and new cards in freeform layouts. I use it for project planning and for organizing my thoughts when I'm trying to figure out how a bunch of related ideas fit together. It is not as full-featured as something like Miro, but the integration with your vault is the key advantage. You can embed existing notes as cards on the canvas, and changes to those notes are reflected on the canvas automatically.

I built a canvas for planning a long piece of writing recently -- about 25 notes arranged in clusters with connections drawn between them. Being able to see the spatial relationships helped me figure out the structure in a way that a linear outline did not. Would I use Canvas for team brainstorming? No, because Obsidian does not have collaboration. But for solo thinking? It is a nice tool to have in the box.

Theming and Customization

I should briefly mention that Obsidian is one of the most customizable apps I have used. The Minimal theme, which I use, transforms the default interface into something clean and distraction-free. There are dozens of other community themes that range from information-dense research interfaces to cozy writing environments. You can add CSS snippets to tweak individual elements. You can rearrange every panel. You can create multiple workspace layouts and switch between them.

The customization is deep enough that two Obsidian users might not even recognize each other's setups. My Obsidian looks like a code editor with a dark theme and a side panel of backlinks. My partner's Obsidian looks like a journal with a cream background and cursive headings. Same app.

Pros and Cons

What It Costs (It Is Mostly Free)

The core app is free. Entirely free. No ads, no limits, no trials. You get everything -- all plugins, all themes, all core features. This is worth emphasizing because it is rare in software.

Obsidian Sync is $4/month if billed annually ($5 month-to-month). End-to-end encrypted sync across all your devices with version history. Worth it if you use multiple devices and want something that just works.

Obsidian Publish is $8/month annually. It turns selected notes into a website with your own domain, password protection, and even graph view on the published site. Niche, but nice for people who want to share their knowledge publicly.

Commercial license is $50 per user per year. Required if you use Obsidian for work. That is absurdly cheap for business software.

The optional Catalyst supporter tier ($25+ one-time) gives you early access to insider builds and supports development. It is entirely optional and there is no pressure to buy it.

Obsidian vs. The Alternatives

Where I Am Not Sure About the Future