About Obsidian

Obsidian is a powerful and extensible knowledge base that works on top of your local folder of plain text files.

GRAPH VIEW

The graph is your knowledge at a glance. Explore, observe, and stay motivated. With group, filter, and display options, see things your way. Local graph shows connections around you. Get inspired while writing.

BACKLINKS

Converge your thoughts. Broaden your view to see this note in other contexts. Link relevant pages with one click.

OUTGOING LINKS

Diverge your thoughts. See all existing and potential links from this note. Turn mentions into links with one click.

YOUR KNOWLEDGE BUILDING BLOCKS

Obsidian is built to be extensible from the ground up. We want you to build your own system, play with it, tweak it, until you're happy. Obsidian is a versatile toolbox: with 25 core plugins, 650 community plugins, and 131 themes, plus custom styling, you can tweak Obsidian to work and look exactly how you want it.

MIX AND MATCH

Some community plugins do a single thing extremely well, like Calendar and Kanban. Others unlock endless possibilities: Dataview and Templater are great examples. They are super easy to grab: the built-in plugin marketplace lets you install them with one click. And the sum of the parts is greater than the whole: some plugins work even better together.

DO IT YOURSELF

Looking for something unique? There's no need to wait for someone else to make it! Whether you have programming experience or not, you can try your hands at making your Obsidian plugin. All community plugins are available on GitHub if you like to study them. Our developer community is also here to help!

FUTURE-PROOF FORMAT

Obsidian uses Markdown. Markdown is widely used by sites like Reddit and GitHub and not going away anytime soon. Markdown is designed to be human readable. It's not obfuscated by encoding; you can directly edit the source files with Markdown editors, or edit them automatically with scripts.

TOTAL CONTROL

Your notes live on your device, period. You can encrypt them or back them up however you want; it's your decision, not ours. Plain text files let you do various sync, encryption, and data processing on top of it. Obsidian plays nice with Dropbox, Cryptomator, and any software that works with plain text files.

ALWAYS AVAILABLE

No internet? No problem. Obsidian works completely offline, internet or service issues will never be your problem. Enjoy reading and working on your notes anytime, anywhere.

LEARN TOGETHER

Our community is extremely friendly and helpful to new members. Got a question? Ask away! We also share our graph view, our notes, and our learning journey with each other.

CREATE TOGETHER

Most of the community plugin and theme developers also hang out in our community. Learn together and make something awesome! Teamwork makes the dream work.

INTERNATIONAL COMMUNITY

Obsidian is translated in to 22 languages and counting. Our Discord has channels for speakers of many languages—you don't have to talk about Obsidian and ask questions in English!