Productivity · Reviewed over 44 days
Best data ownership
Obsidian review: your notes stay as files on your disk, and that is the entire argument
Plain Markdown in a folder you control, free for personal use, with no account required. The plugin ecosystem is both the best and worst thing about it.
Plain Markdown in a folder you control, free for personal use, with no account required. The plugin ecosystem is both the best and worst thing about it.
What earned the money
- Notes are plain Markdown files in a folder you chose — readable in any text editor, forever, with or without Obsidian
- No account required to use it at all, which in 2026 is close to unheard of
- Free for personal use, and the paid add-ons are genuinely optional rather than load-bearing
- Local search is fast even across a few thousand notes
What did not
- The plugin ecosystem invites you to spend a weekend configuring instead of writing
- Mobile is competent rather than good — editing long notes on a phone is a chore
- Sync costs money, and the free alternatives (iCloud, Syncthing) each have sharp edges
- No real collaboration story; this is a single-player tool
I moved about two thousand notes into Obsidian and lived in it for six weeks, including the part where I tried to make sync work without paying for it.
The argument is the file format
Your notes are Markdown files in a folder you picked. That is it. You can open them in TextEdit, grep them from a terminal, back them up with anything, and read them in twenty years whether or not Obsidian still exists.
Almost every competitor stores your writing inside their service in a format only they can read. That is fine until the company is acquired, changes its pricing, or shuts down — and note-taking is a twenty-year activity, so those are not hypothetical risks.
No account is required to use it. In 2026 that is close to unheard of, and it is the second reason I would put a decade of thinking in here.
The thing that ruins it for most people
The plugin ecosystem.
There are thousands, and they are genuinely powerful, and they will eat a weekend. I watched myself do it: I spent a Saturday building a system of templates and dataview queries and wrote nothing at all that day.
The honest advice is to run it plain for a month. No plugins, no templates, no graph view. Add something only when you hit a problem you can state in a sentence. The people who get value from this app are mostly not the people with elaborate setups.
Sync is where the free version gets awkward
Obsidian Sync costs money and works properly. The free alternatives all work and all have edges:
iCloud is the easiest on Apple devices and has a habit of being slow to propagate, which produces conflicted copies if you write on two devices in quick succession.
Syncthing is free, private and excellent, and requires you to be the kind of person who enjoys configuring Syncthing.
Dropbox works and is not great on iOS, because the mobile app cannot reliably keep a folder synced in the background.
I ended up paying for Sync, and I want to be clear that it was a convenience purchase rather than a necessity.
Mobile is the weak half
It works. Editing a long note on a phone is a chore, the interface is cramped, and I stopped trying to do real writing there after the first week.
For capture on the go it is adequate. For composition it is not, and that is a reasonable division of labour for a desktop-first tool that does not pretend otherwise.
Where I landed
Kept, and it is where my notes will stay. The file-format argument is the kind of thing that sounds abstract until the first time a service you relied on changes its terms.
Who should install it
Anyone who intends to take notes for a long time, anyone who wants to own their data in a literal sense, and anyone who has been burned by a note app shutting down.
Who should not
Anyone who wants sync to be invisible and free — Apple Notes does that better. Anyone who needs real-time collaboration. And anyone who knows they will spend the weekend configuring it, because they will.
Also consider
| App | Why it might suit you better |
|---|---|
| Apple Notes | Free, installed, syncs invisibly, and good enough for most people. Your notes live in Apple's format rather than yours. |
| Logseq | Also file-based and outline-first rather than document-first. Better if you think in bullets. |
Asked and answered
Is Obsidian really free?
The app is free for personal use with no account, and that is not a trial. What costs money is Sync, which moves notes between your devices through Obsidian's servers, and Publish, which puts them on the web. Both are genuinely optional — you can sync a vault with iCloud, Dropbox or Syncthing for nothing, with more setup and more sharp edges.
What happens to my notes if Obsidian shuts down?
Nothing. They are Markdown files in a folder on your disk and they stay readable in any text editor. That is the single strongest argument for it and the reason I would recommend it to somebody who intends to take notes for twenty years. Almost every competitor stores your writing in a proprietary format inside their service.
Do I need plugins?
No, and I would spend the first month without them. The ecosystem is enormous and it is the main way people fail with this app — a weekend spent building a system is a weekend not spent writing anything down. Add a plugin when you hit a specific problem you can name, not before.
Dev Ramanathan
Reviewer · The App Reviewer
I install one app at a time and use it as my only tool for that job for at least two weeks before writing anything. I pay retail for every subscription I review and I cancel most of them. No sponsorships, no affiliate links, no review copies.