Obsidian

Overview

Excellent personal information or knowledge management application. If you write, code, or just generally need a way to track lots of primarily text-based content, Obsidian is an extremely flexible and well made application that can act as a second brain.

Review

What I use it for: As my primary writing and data organization application Obsidian is is central to my life at this point. It handles journaling, fiction writing, worldbuilding, and general ideation, as well as backlog and technical specifications and the organization and management of all of the above. All the content on this website originates in notes in my Obsidian vault so it is also functionally the content backend for my website. The core functionality is great, clean and well thought out with a focus on function but attention to form. If Obsidian can't do something out of the box it has an enormous library of plugins (https://obsidian.md/plugins) made by the community that can extend it further. I've tried lots of different personal knowledge management tools, from plain text in Notepad++ to Word documents to Keynote (https://github.com/dpradov/keynote-nf), to Notion, Joplin, and many many more. Obsidian is the first one that stuck for me.

Pros:

• Intuitive interface but deep well of optional functionality means it's easy to learn but there's lots of room to learn more and adapt it even more to your use case
• Flexible for numerous use cases. A functionally infinite digital notebook or personal wiki
• Markdown first notes means your data is always accessible and not locked in a proprietary format. If you ever stop liking it or the company that makes it, it's easy to take your data elsewhere
• Standard markdown syntax and wiki style linking
• Embed images, use the Canvas system to create integrated whiteboards, or the Bases system to create databases so you're not stuck with just text
• Integrated transclusion (note embedding) which allows you to organize your info in a DRY way (iykyk)
• Countless configurable settings to make it look and work the way you want
• Extremely customizable, from CSS for style to Plugins for new functions and integrations
• Content is all plain markdown with optional YAML frontmatter for metadata. Open formats means its easy to learn, easy to use, easy to modify, and infinitely portable
• The relationships between notes can be viewed and navigated as a graph which can be fun
• Excellent performance for both desktop and mobile Apps
• Secure and private with syncing functionality between devices (Subscription service) using AES-256 end-to-end encryption. Otherwise data is just kept on your device
• Theme system with dark mode and community made themes. Make your own if you want!
• Parent company, Dynalist.inc is Canadian, based out of Oakville

Cons:

• Easy to get distracted tinkering with it, adding new features and plugins or customizing it and with 2,000+ plugins there are usually multiple plugins for any given purpose so its up to you to decide which one to use
• Cross-device synchronization is paywalled but the price is reasonable and there are workarounds if that's important

Buy/Try if:

• You need a way to organize a lot of information and want a personal knowledge base or wiki
• You are tired of managing discrete files for notes and need something more organized
• You have tried other PIM software and are looking for an alternative
• You're not onboard for the mandatory integration of LLMs into your notetaking app (e.g. Notion)
• You want something that focuses on a solid set of core features and performance and easy to learn but also want something that can be tinkered with and extended as needed

Other Recommended Options:

• Joplin: https://joplinapp.org