Obsidian - A powerful knowledge base that works on local Markdown files

It's actually kinda ridiculous how frequently Obsidian is posting updates and releases. If you like owning your content and/or markdown then this is a great tool to manage your notes and documentation. Now I just need it on my phone so that it's available wherever I am!

Hi Product Hunt! 👋 Obsidian is going into public beta today! 🎉 We made Obsidian to be your long-term second brain and personal knowledge base. As you put in more notes and make more connections, the knowledge base gets more valuable, so we think it's important that you can 100% own your data and not rely on any cloud services. We believe you second brain should work similarly to your own brain and connections are crucial in thinking. Obsidian supports [[internal links]] between your notes out of the box, and provide a powerful graph view and backlink pane to help you understand your knowledge. We also noticed how personal note-taking and knowledge management is, so we built Obsidian to be very extensible from the start, and let you put together your own workflow with plugins like daily notes and page preview as building blocks. This leads to our three fundamental values of Obsidian: 1. Local-first, Markdown plain text based; 2. Link as first-citizen. 3. As extensible as possible. Obsidian is a powerful front-end for your knowledge, like an IDE for your notes. Learn more about Obsidian's features: https://obsidian.md/features Read the story of the project and the team: https://obsidian.md/about

Co-maker here, just want to add that we have an active discord server open to anyone who wants to discuss about Obsidian or knowledge management in general: https://discord.com/invite/9CGnTWD We also have a forum to keep track of feature requests and bug reports: https://forum.obsidian.md/

In the cluttered space of note-taking apps, Obsidian has become "one to watch" for me as it marries the simplicity of local text files and some of the powerful linking features we see in Roam and others. There is still a ways to go, and there will be plenty of challenges ahead, but this is a solid foundation for moving forward and I have begun using this tool daily. Keep up the good work @erica_xu and @shida_li !

Open development, open standards, and ridiculously fast paced updates in what is probably the slickest and most intuitive networked thought tool out there. Believe the hype!

Obsidian is crazy good for how new it is. And the team is moving extremely fast. It seems like they really know what they want out of this product. I've tried dozens of knowledge management tools and settled on TiddlyWiki a couple years ago. It took a lot of customization to get anywhere close as useable as Obsidian is out of the box. Here's what I love about Obsidian: - Local files, syncs via iCloud/Dropbox/etc - Markdown with [[ ]]] bidirectional links and - [ ] checklists. - Automatically updates all old links if you rename a file(!) - Compatible with 1Writer on iOS - Really nice keyboard shortcuts - Runs as its own app (in a wrapper), but can be styled via custom CSS - Automatically parses external URLs (don't necessarily need to use the markdown format for simple .com URLs) - Great editing experience, e.g. auto indenting bullets - Autocomplete for everything (tags, linked pages) - Lots of extra nice touches like graph view and the pane system to open multiple files at once

For me the biggest benefits of Obsidian over several other PKM (Personal Knowledge Management) tools are that it uses Markdown files rather than outlines/blocks, and that it is locally stored instead of hosted. It still has bi-directional linking, graphing, and bubbles up unlinked resources like Roam. The pace and responsiveness of the developers is remarkable, and the community has been so friendly and helpful. No egos! I'm using iCloud for my vaults which allows for very fast syncing and the ability to edit on iOS using any Markdown app.

Well, I'm between sharing Obsidian and also keeping to myself. So precious! 😑 It's one of the tools I'm so glad to stumble over this year and even from short amount of time, it became one of the core ones in my workflow, for my research, notes and already acting as my second brain, getting stronger each day. With lovely folks behind the development, a sincere, welcoming community sharing everything they know without hesitation, I feel Obsidian will be loved with many as it is going into public beta today. Which I believe it is ready for a wider audience, as they are working around the clock to improve it, fixing bugs with constantly collecting user feedback. In my opinion they are creating a game changer product, with better developed functionalities, and shows how designing a product would be better if you listen to your users and gain early feedback while developing, not just showcasing through youtube videos with an elitist approach, which as we saw from others that never works. I wish them best in their journey, and will be following along the way.

I absolutely love Obsidian. It’s perfect for Zettelkasten!

Amazing product with an even more amazing team and community!