Obsidian — The Complete Guide: A Local Knowledge Base for Projects, Design Decisions and Lessons
Obsidian stores notes as plain Markdown files in a folder on your computer and lets you link them, see the connections in a graph view and search all content. Engineers use it as a personal or team knowledge base: project summaries, design decisions, digests of standards and lessons learned on site.
Obsidian
Obsidian
A local knowledge base of Markdown files with links and a graph view — for project notes, design decisions and lessons learned.
Get it from the vendorWhat you get
- Links between notes — every project, detail or standard is a page linked to others.
- Graph view — a visual map of how topics connect.
- Full-text search — across the content of every note.
- Hundreds of plugins — community plugins that extend the program.
- Open files — plain Markdown that opens in any text editor.
Licence: what is free and what is paid
The app is free for every purpose — personal, commercial and non-profit — with no time limit; a commercial licence is optional and exists to support development. Paid and optional: Obsidian Sync for syncing between devices, Obsidian Publish for publishing to a website, and a Catalyst licence for early builds. The program itself is closed source, but your notes are open files, and you can also sync the folder with Syncthing.
Related tools
For an open-source, outliner-style alternative with a daily journal — Logseq. For encrypted notes with sync — Joplin. For Markdown writing with citations — Zettlr.
Logseq
Logseq
Outliner-style notes and a daily journal kept as local text files — for meeting notes, tasks and technical know-how.
Get it from the vendor
Joplin
Joplin
Notes and to-do app with encrypted sync — site diaries, checklists and project documentation.
Get it from the vendor
Zettlr
Zettlr project
A Markdown editor for technical writing and theses — Zotero citations, LaTeX equations and export via Pandoc.
Get it from the vendorTrilium Notes
TriliumNext community
A hierarchical knowledge base for large engineering notebooks — code, canvas, diagrams, encryption and self-hosted sync.
Get it from the vendorThe bottom line
Obsidian is a powerful knowledge notebook that is free even for a commercial office. The files stay with you; you only pay if you want the official sync or publishing services.