Obsidian

Obsidian is a highly extensible, cross-platform Markdown editor that stores its files in a folder locally on your machine (i.e., not in the cloud). I’ve been using Obsidian for several years as my main writing tool. What makes Obsidian so great?

Rich community plugin ecosystem allowing you to customize its functionality to your specific use cases.
File over app philosophy, meaning all my files are stored in flat plaintext Markdown files on my machine, not in some database somewhere. Any simple text editor can read my files, so if Obsidian goes away or becomes enshittified I still have access to my notes. (see Portability of Data)
Local storage, so I don’t need an internet connection to access my notes and I can take comfort in the fact that my notes aren’t in a cloud somewhere where my sensitive info can be hacked, leaked, or otherwise viewed by anyone besides myself.
Support for wikilinks, allowing you to easily link your notes to each other and visualize these links on a graph.
Infinite canvas for laying out notes and drawing relationships between them. This is very useful for chaining together atomic notes or zettels in the process of drafting something, for example.
It’s fast, even with vaults comprised of tens-of-thousands of notes.
It’s free! That said, Obsidian does offer a couple of paid services, one of which is for syncing notes between devices, another is for easy publishing notes to the web.
It’s being actively developed with new features being released all the time.

I’m not going to go in-depth on Obsidian’s features and capabilities here. If you’re curious to learn more you can refer to the Obsidian website, the official forum, the subreddit, and the Discord channel. There are also countless Youtube videos about Obsidian if you’re curious about how people are using it. Obsidian is a very popular option for managing a PKM system, with some people using it to manage everything from their to-dos, to cataloging their media collections, managing their calendar, or even tracking their finances. Because of the breadth of things you can do with Obsidian through the use of plugins, some people use it to manage and track every aspect of their lives, creating a LifeOS of sorts.

Limitations and Downsides of Obsidian

Although it is free, the code itself is closed source.
Because it conforms to the Markdown standard, there are limitations to how you can format text. It’s not designed to be a replacement for Microsoft Word or Google Docs, for example.
Since the files you create with Obsidian are local on your device, you need to provide your own solution for syncing notes between devices, or else you can subscribe to their sync service to manage this for you.
It’s an Electron app, and as a result it does require a chunk of RAM to run (idling around 900MB on my machine). On the plus side, because it’s Electron you can customize it with CSS snippets very easily.
Due to its extremely flexible and customizable nature, if you lack self-discipline you may find yourself playing with your setup more than actually writing.
Limited support for block-based editing. You can kinda treat paragraphs like blocks by naming and referencing them, but it’s not perfect and probably never will be.
“Vanilla” Obsidian doesn’t really support collaboration in any way, but there are some plugins that can enable collaborative features if you need them.
Lack of quick capture is a major weakness of Obsidian. Even on the mobile app, pulling up Obsidian takes at least several seconds to load. It’s not convenient for capturing thoughts on the fly, in my opinion, although there are some companion apps that solve this problem.

How Do I Use Obsidian?

I use Obsidian for any and all kinds of writing, managing my zettelkasten, my notes, and journaling (including tracking daily metrics). I have experimented with using it to track tasks, and it can work very well for that, but I prefer TickTick for task management due to some of its advanced features that are difficult to replicate in Obsidian. While I don’t use the Publish service from Obsidian to publish my notes, I have tested it and it’s very slick and easy to use.

Read about the Obsidian plugins I use in my vault.

Obsidian Alternatives

There’s nothing quite like Obsidian on the market today in terms of extensibility and power, although there are other apps that can do similar things, depending on your use case. This list is far from exhaustive, as there a million apps out there for PKM, notes, writing, and task management. Instead, I focused on apps that I have personal experience with that cover the main use cases that Obsidian covers.

Auxiliary Tools

There are a number of other applications I use in combination with Obsidian to manage my productivity and workflow. Over time, I have simplified a lot to the point where I primarily use Obsidian and TickTick for 90% of what what I do, but there are some additional tools that work behind the scenes that I consider indispensable.

Readwise

Readwise is kind of hard to explain. Primarily it is a tool/service for gathering highlights from various sources, like Kindle and other e-readers. It then provides the ability to resurface those highlights using spaced repetition through daily highlight reviews. Additionally, it provides the ability to export these highlights automatically to various PKM applications (including Obsidian). In addition to this, Readwise subscribers get access to Readwise Reader, which is a cross-platform e-reader app that can also function as a read-it-later app like Pocket. You can upload pretty much any kind of e-book, and you also get an email address you can forward articles to or use for newsletter subscriptions if you want. Readwise isn’t cheap, but they do offer a generous student discount if you contact them.

Snipd

Snipd is a podcast app that uses AI to transcribe podcasts. It provides the ability for you to “highlight” passages from podcasts by simply pushing a button on your headphones while listening. It then automatically exports these highlights to Readwise. In addition to providing the full text transcript as a highlight, it also uses AI to summarize key points from the highlighted passages. In addition to all the features you would expect in a first-class podcast app, it does a bunch of other neat things:

Lists any books mentioned in the podcast
Search for podcast episodes by guest
Upload your own audio files, such as ebooks, and have them transcribed
Transcribe Youtube videos for highlighting

The biggest downside to Snipd is its cost — it has a hefty monthly subscription fee. I keep trying to convince myself to cancel it to save money, but once you get used to it it’s hard to go back to any other podcast app.