When it comes to notetaking tools, I’ve always struggled with monogamy. After the initial excitement has worn off, I’m easily distracted by a more alluring alternative. Although my head has occasionally been turned, I’ve now been using Obsidian solidly for over three years. What’s different this time?

In this post, I’ll explain my six main reasons for using Obsidian, and why I’ve chosen it over some of the alternatives. Now, I’ve seen people expressing strong feelings in the notetaking world 🔥 I’m not saying the alternatives are bad or wrong, it’s just that Obsidian better serves my needs. At least for now.

Advantages of Obsidian

1. Offline access

As a catastrophist, I worry about (among many other things) being able to access my notes when the internet is down 🙀 Fortunately, I experience few outages, but Denial of Service attacks, AWS hiccups, and Cloudflare glitches can cause major interruption. This was the main reason why I stopped using Notion - everything was stored in the cloud. Notion does now support offline use, but that came way too late for me.

Obsidian is primarily designed to be used offline. Indeed, there’s no web-based version - which would be offputting for some people. Personally, I like my notes to live in my laptop. The desktop client works on Mac, Windows, and Linux.

2. Data protection

In Obsidian, you can create multiple vaults (like Workspaces in Notion). You choose where to store these vaults - entirely on your device, or with backup copies elsewhere. This makes it easy to maintain sensitive notes, such as client data, without worrying where they’re stored or who can see them. I have a mixture of vaults that are backed up to the cloud, and some that are only backed up to my external hard drive.

Obsidian is rare in providing a completely offline option. I’ll explain the syncing options under point 6.

3. Markdown

I’m now so used to Markdown, I get grumpy if I have to write any other way. As I use Hugo (a Markdown-based website generator) and Sli.dev (a Markdown-based presentation tool), it’s easy for me to copy ideas from Obsidian without having to change the formatting at all. Equally, I can store snippets from webpages and presentations in Obsidian. In short, my notes are portable. If Obsidian stopped working, I’d still have all the Markdown files organised in folders. There are dozens of other apps in which I could open them.

4. Extensibility

Thanks to some recent core upgrades, Obsidian is powerful out of the box. But there are thousands of community plugins to either enhance the Obsidian experience or connect it to other popular apps. I use the Readwise and AudioPen plugins to automatically import my reading highlights and transcribed voice notes into Obsidian.

Although Obsidian isn’t open source, the developers make it easy to extend its capabilities with your own code snippets, too.

5. Flexibility

If you prefer, you can use Obsidian as a basic notetaking tool with Wiki-style links and tags to hop between your notes. But there are many more ways of viewing your content.

  • Canvas: organise your notes visually, alongside images, PDFs, videos, audio and webpages. It’s like a multimedia mindmap.
  • Graph: visualise the relationships between your notes and find hidden patterns in your thinking. I find this helpful both for identifying important ideas and also tangents that aren’t going anywhere.
  • Bases: create a database-like view of your notes. Each Base can have its own view with different layouts and properties (this is similar to how Notion works). I use a Base for managing my reading notes and viewing books based on different criteria.

6. Cost

Obsidian is free! You only pay for a commercial license, cloud syncing, or early access to new features. Although you could configure your own cloud syncing, it’s not straightforward. So if you want your notes accessible across multiple devices, Obsidian Sync is the simplest solution. But if you only want to use Obsidian on one device, there’s no need to pay. If you use it a lot and can afford to do so, it’s always worth supporting independent developers. Cloud syncing costs $4 a month for 1 vault, or $8 for up to 10 vaults. You also get version control, which means you can roll back to previous versions of your notes.

Conclusion

Obsidian definitely isn’t for everyone. Because of the flexibility and extensibility, there’s a fairly steep learning curve at the beginning. You need to spend time understanding how to make it work for you. But that’s also an advantage: unlike other tools, Obsidian isn’t trying to make you fit your workflow to its caprices. If you live a more exciting life than me, working in different places and on various devices, it’s unlikely to be a good choice for you, though.

There’s no “one tool to rule ’em all,” despite what the marketing people tell us. It’s about assessing our needs and finding the best - not the perfect - fit.

I’m currently pondering whether to create a Getting Started with Obsidian online course. Add your email below if you’d be interested, then I’ll let you know if it goes ahead: