Obsidian (long) review: another note-taking app?

Obsidian's value proposition is to let you create a knowledge base that's hosted locally. At its core, it's a markdown editor that can connect files together. It also features various graphical representations of your notes, such as a graph view and canvas view.

Pricing Model

Obsidian offers a one-time fee for support and maintenance. Additionally, a commercial plan is available for $50 per year. The company also provides additional services, including a cloud synchronization service for accessible notes across multiple devices, as well as a subscription option for publishing notes as a blog or public knowledge base.

Out of these plans, I could really only see myself buying the cloud sync so I can use it with any device. Otherwise, the free version seems like a steal to me.

Funding

Obsidian is a bootstrapped company, with no outside funding. Also based on their technology and business model, it's fair to assume that they are profitable.

Now into the app, we go…

UI

Off the bat, their UI is very clean and very simple. That's definitely one of its strong suits as it's very easy to use because of this. The base theme looks very minimalistic but also still unique.

Obsidian offers a community for themes and other plugins which makes the UI customizable for free. However buggy sometimes, it's easily an underrated part of the app.

While their design is very minimal, I can understand why someone would say it’s crowded or confusing. Although the idea is very simple, there is so much to explore which can be a bit daunting. I think they are still a few steps But to counter that, the fact that they have so much functionality in such a plain UI is very impressive.

UX

While I mentioned before that the app is very complex, it is still very easy to use. The key to this app is that if you want to use it casually, you can; And if you want to use it for research, you can. The high capacity of customization and plugins are what makes this app so powerful (But sometimes it’s hard to tap this potential).

The extensions and plugins are not very intuitive as it comes with a lot of extra work to actually get them activated. While I understand that Obsidian's main focus is not on the plugins, it would be nicer to have a more streamlined process to get them downloaded and activated.

As far as the note-taking experience, Obsidian nails it. Bi-directional links and hash-tagging work intuitively and once figuring out how double-brackets work, it’s basically a superpower.

Is it worth it?

I personally love the app as a piece of software; however, I can't seem to find a great use for it solely because the notes aren't inherently accessible from any device. The fact that I have to pay to just load my notes onto a database is a roadblock for me. While the app is an amazingly designed note-taking app, I don't think it's worth paying for a note-taking app as a casual user.

For a serious notetaker or researcher, this app should be perfect to use with the cloud sync plan. And unless you are a blog writer, I would not personally recommend the publishing plan as it doesn't really make sense for any private notes.

Considering Obsidian's main app is free, I would highly encourage giving it a download to see if that extra functionality is worth it for you.