Obsidian Review: Who It’s For and Who It Isn’t

A grad student with three years of reading ahead and a guy who just wants his grocery list, the dentist's address and last week's lunch costs in one place can both download Obsidian on the same afternoon. They'll have very different weeks with it.

What Obsidian actually is

Obsidian is a local-first notes app. Your notes are plain Markdown files on your own device, and a Vault is simply the folder they live in. Because they're ordinary files and not rows in a closed database, that means in practice:

• Everything works offline
• You fully own your data
• Any text editor can open your notes
• Nothing depends on one company or cloud service sticking around

Why the grad student loves it

For her, the killer feature is linking. As she writes about a paper she links it to the three others it argues with, and Graph View draws the web of those connections, so a lecture note from March turns out to connect to something she read last week. That's what people mean when they call Obsidian a Second Brain. By the end of the semester she's added a citation plugin and a daily-notes template. Thousands of notes in, with images, tables, Canvas boards and PDFs embedded all over, the thing still opens in a blink.

Getting there wasn't free, and these are the costs anyone should expect:

• A learning curve for links, Graph View, plugins and Vault layout
• Sync you set up yourself, by paying for Obsidian Sync or using iCloud, Dropbox, Syncthing or Google Drive
• Plugins for reminders, budgets, maps and timers, each with its own file access to check
• A personal workspace, not one for editing with a team in real time

For years of research she owns outright as plain text, that's a fair trade.

Why the other guy gives up

He opens the same app on his phone in a parking garage to save the bay number, and it's a blank Markdown page that wants to know which folder this goes in. A reminder for the dentist means finding a plugin, and so does adding up lunch, and so does putting the dentist on a map, and each plugin wants access to his files. He isn't building a knowledge graph. He just wants to remember things, and Obsidian is also a solo tool, so sharing a list with his partner isn't really what it's for.

Where Memory Chat fits

For him, Memory Chat is the easier Obsidian alternative for everyday life. The grocery list goes in a Checklist Box with a reminder, lunch goes in a Budget Box that keeps the total, and the dentist gets a pin in a Places Box, each one a Memory Box that's built in rather than a community plugin. Notes live in a local SQLite database, so the app opens fast and works 100% offline, as we explain in our guide to the best offline note-taking apps. Sync runs in the background on every plan instead of costing extra (see Obsidian Sync vs. Memory Chat), and on Super Memory or Ultra Memory he can lock the app with Face ID or a fingerprint.

If you're somewhere in between, try putting this week's errands in each app and see which one your thumb goes to on Thursday, and if a bigger system is what you're after, our piece on a second brain without the overwhelm is a good place to start.