Obsidian

Updated 2026-04-09

A local, file-based note-taking app for networked notes. It is built around the idea of File over App: all data lives as plain-text Markdown .md files on your own device, with no mandatory cloud, no subscription requirement, and no lock-in. Created by Steph Ango and Erica Xu, and fully user-funded.

What Makes Obsidian Special

Unlike Notion (cloud database), Roam (graph-first and more complex), or Apple Notes (simple but weak on linking), Obsidian leans on:

  • Local files — your vault is just a folder on your machine, openable with any editor.
  • Wikilinks — ideas are connected, not merely collected. The result feels like a personal Wikipedia.
  • Graph View — a visual map of how ideas relate, useful for spotting clusters and gaps.
  • Plugin ecosystem — hundreds of community plugins for different workflows, such as Dataview, Templater, Marp, and Canvas.
  • Speed — everything stays local, so there is no cloud latency.

Business Model

The core product is free. Paid add-ons include Obsidian Sync (end-to-end encrypted) and Obsidian Publish (a website from your vault). No VC, no ads, no selling user data. Obsidian belongs to its users, not to investors.

Important Plugins

  • Dataview — SQL-like queries over notes (LIST FROM #person)
  • Templater — powerful templates with JavaScript logic
  • Marp — render Markdown notes as slides
  • Canvas — a visual whiteboard inside the vault

The Team Behind It: An Argument Against VC

Obsidian is built by a tiny team. As of 2026, it is still roughly three engineers plus a few additional people. That is not an accident; it follows directly from the architecture. Because Obsidian stores everything locally, user growth does not scale with server cost. A million new users barely change infrastructure cost, whereas Notion still needs more cloud resources for every marginal user.

The ratio makes the point stark: Obsidian serves about 1.5 million active users with around 7 people, while Notion serves 100 million users with around 1,200. Obsidian is more efficient because of architecture, not because of austerity.

kepano (Steph Ango) puts it this way:

“More teams will likely look like Obsidian in the future because modern tools give you the leverage to do so.”

Obsidian was built by two Waterloo alumni during COVID quarantine, without venture capital. Their job post about growing from three to four engineers reached millions of views because the leverage ratio made the internet collectively stop and stare.

Weaknesses

  • No true real-time collaboration in the Google Docs sense
  • The mobile app is good, but not perfect
  • Flexibility creates a learning curve for new users

Capture Layer: Web Clipper + Interpreter

Obsidian is no longer just the place where notes sit. With Obsidian Web Clipper and Interpreter, it also becomes an ingest system: page content gets extracted precisely, turned into Markdown, and optionally summarized or reshaped at capture time.

The interesting point is not “AI in notes,” but precision. A YouTube transcript or a defined DOM section is far more useful to a knowledge system than a full reader dump. That is exactly why Obsidian works so well for an LLM Knowledge Base setup.

Role in This Wiki

Frontend and IDE. The agent writes, you read. The Web Clipper fills /Clippings/, the agent polishes the root, and everything remains visible inside Obsidian.

For the server-side workflow, see Obsidian Headless.

Sources