Obsidian review

A folder of Markdown files, with an app on top

Obsidian is a note app that points at a folder on your disk and treats every Markdown file in it as a note. There is no database, no account required, and no sync unless you ask for it. You get wiki-style links between notes, automatic backlinks, a graph view, an infinite canvas, and a community plugin library with well over a thousand entries covering everything from Kanban boards to spaced repetition.

The plugin ecosystem is the part people underestimate. Most feature requests you would file against a cloud note app have already been solved by someone as a plugin, and installing one takes about fifteen seconds.

Who should be building a vault

• Anyone building a long-term personal knowledge base they expect to still own in ten years
• Writers and researchers who want their notes in files, not in someone's database
• Developers and tinkerers who will actually use the plugin system
• People who have been burned by a note app changing its pricing

The app is free; Sync, Publish and commercial use are priced

As of July 2026, the app is free for personal use with no limits at all: unlimited notes, unlimited vaults, every core feature, all plugins and themes, on desktop and mobile. Nothing is held back for a paid tier.

Money comes in three places. Obsidian Sync starts at $4 per user per month billed annually ($5 monthly) for 1 GB of storage and 1 month of version history, with Sync Plus at $8 per user per month billed annually for 10 GB and 12 months of history. Obsidian Publish is $8 per site per month billed annually. And if a company of two or more people uses Obsidian for work, each user needs a $50 per year commercial license. Students, faculty, and nonprofit staff get 40 percent off Sync and Publish.

The commercial license, and four more limits

• The commercial license is easy to miss. Personal use is free, but team use at a company of two or more is not, and $50 per user per year is real money at scale
• It is not open source, so you cannot self-host or fork it if the terms change
• Real-time collaboration does not exist. Obsidian is a single-player app with sync, and shared vaults are not a substitute for co-editing a doc
• The blank-start problem is real. Out of the box it is an empty folder, and the setup rabbit hole (themes, plugins, folder structures) eats a weekend if you let it
• Free sync via iCloud or Dropbox works, but mobile file sync conflicts are a known annoyance, which is exactly what the paid Sync service is selling

We rank it first, and the one objection we accept

We rank Obsidian first because it removes the question every other tool here leaves open: what happens to my notes later. They are Markdown files in a folder, so the answer is nothing. The app being closed source is a fair objection, and if that matters to you Logseq or SiYuan is the better fit. For everyone else, Obsidian gives you the most capable free note app in this list with the lowest lock-in, as long as you check whether your use counts as commercial.