Productivity tools / Obsidian
Obsidian
The free and flexible app for your private thoughts.
Where it stands
4.3 / 5
Signals score
Not a hands-on test
Based on 2 of 3 signals
- Website health5 / 5 · weight 50%
Measured from the tool's public website
- Community4.4 / 5 · weight 20%
What people said in public discussions
Built only from what we can measure or quote without using the tool. How ranking works
Rank by signals
We have not run our own hands-on test on Obsidian yet. Facts checked 2026-11-08. How tests work
Disclosure: agathox makes some of the tools listed here. They are labelled and scored by the same method as every other tool.
Should you use Obsidian?
A quick read built only from what the tool's own pages state and from our tests, not from opinion. Facts checked 2026-11-08.
A good fit if…
- You want to use it without creating an account. Its own pages say none is needed.
- Your files must stay on your own device. Its own pages say they do.
- You want a free option. It states: “Obsidian is free without limits. The page says: “Free without limits.””
Check first
- Its pages do not state: pricing, signup, watermark. Check on the tool's site before you rely on it.
Does: Note taking
Measured signals
5 / 5 · measured 2026-11-08Read automatically from Obsidian's public website: how reliable, secure, private and open the site is. This is not a test of how well the tool does its job. How this is measured
- Reliability5 / 5The page answered and finished downloading in 187 ms.
- Security5 / 54 of 5 protective headers set (strict-transport-security, x-content-type-options, referrer-policy, x-frame-options).
- Privacy5 / 5No third-party tracking services found on the page.
- Transparency5 / 5Links a privacy policy; links a pricing page.
Community feedback
4.4 / 5 · 66 commenters92% of the 66 people whose comments we could classify were positive. Read automatically from public Hacker News threads about Obsidian; the classifier is simple and can misread sarcasm, so check the threads. How this works
- Positive
“Some options for syncing on mobile: Obsidian sells a first party syncing solution, which I hear works well: I do git syncing on Android via termux (It works most of the time, except when git decides to shit itself every…”
Read in the thread - Positive
“Obsidian is my favorite app, and my only missing feature is to enable better PDF support, similar to Logseq. Logseq allows me to embed the PDFs inside the app and annotate them with all the bells and whistles enabled by…”
Read in the thread - Critical
“My new year resolution is to move from Notion to Obsidian. I found Notion unreliable in some situations and tbh, I'm not using the mobile application at all.”
Read in the thread - Critical
“You're right in that Obsidian is not great for structured data right now, and for that purpose Notion or Airtable is much better.”
Read in the thread
Threads: Obsidian 1.0 – Personal knowledge base app (2022, 565 comments) · Show HN: Obsidian – A knowledge base that works on local Markdown files (2020, 477 comments) · Show HN: Obsidian Canvas – An infinite space for your ideas (2022, 387 comments) · Obsidian – A knowledge base from a local folder of plain text Markdown files (2021, 353 comments)
- Free tier
- Obsidian is free without limits. The page says: “Free without limits.”
- Paid plan
- Not stated.
- Signup
- Not stated.
- Watermark
- Not stated.
- Where files go
- Obsidian stores notes locally on the user's device. The page says: “Obsidian stores notes privately on your device, so you can access them quickly, even offline.”
From the tool's own pages, checked 2026-11-08. Sources: Pricing, Home. Prices and limits change; check the tool before you rely on them.
Read automatically by a program, not by a person. Each fact quotes the sentence it came from, and a fact is shown only if that sentence is on the page. Where a page did not say, it reads “Not stated.”
Get an email if Obsidian changes
We check its official pages every week. If they change, we tell you, so you can see if the price or limits moved. No other email, and one click stops it.
Are you the maker of Obsidian? Link to this page
Copy this into your site. The link goes to this page, and it does not change any score.
<a href="https://agathox.com/tools/obsidian">Obsidian on agathox: compared and tested</a>
Tasks and scores
- Note takingNot tested yet
Similar tools
Top signals in Note taking.
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