Obsidian is described as “A second brain, for you, forever”. It is a desktop app (available for Windows, Mac and Linux) that acts as a knowledge base working on top of a local folder of plain text Markdown files.
The app is developed by the hugely talented Licat (Shida Li) and Silver (Erika Xu) who also brought us the delightful Dynalist (an outliner note-taking tool similar to Logseq).
The app is offered as a free download, although sponsoring the devs is possible by upgrading your license through a one-time payment (USD 25+). By upgrading the license, we gain insider builds (early releases) and access to the exclusive dev channel on Discord.
Why Obsidian?
Your notes are saved locally on your machine in plain text markdown format, allowing you to easily transfer your notes to other apps or open them with Notepad, in essence, there is no vendor lock-in. You are in complete control of your notes and files and can use Google Drive, GitHub, Dropbox etc. to sync your notes between different machines.
Having control over my notes gives me peace of mind. I am free to do what I want with them, and even though with the Obsidian app I can use various functions (backlinks, graph view, etc.) I know that should the app disappear, the content is mine and will forever be mine.
The ease of using the app could not be more straightforward. Once downloaded and installed, you are greeted with a welcome screen similar to the one below:
