Switched from Onenote to obsidian. There was a small learning curve and I had to install some plugins, but I love it. It looks amazing and runs so much faster than OneNote ever did.
this post was submitted on 20 Feb 2025
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I don't necessarily like a few takes in the comments here.
Vibes wise the Obsidian team seems to be great and they don't seem to have shown any reason why I should distrust them. I love FOSS but gifting others my work doesn't put food on my table, so in that sense they need to have a lucrative business model which they seem to have established.
I could use SyncThing, Git or other solutions to do synchronisation between my devices but I choose to buy their Sync offer, since I want to support them (they also have EU servers, which need to be GDPR compliant by law afaik).
The closest comparison I could make is NextCloud. NextCloud open sources their software, but they sell convenience. Sure, you could self host it, but paying them to do so for you may be more attractive. In comparison Obsidian is not really complicated to set up or maintain. It's literally just a MD-editor. So the only convenient thing to sell is synchronisation if you don't want to put a price tag on the software.
If they open source all their code, some tech wizard will implement a self hosted obsidian sync server with the same convenience as theirs in a day, and the company will lose their revenue stream.
We've all been burned by tech bros in one way or another, but I think it's ok for people to profit off of their IP. And they seem to be doing so with a positive vision. Feel free to let me eat my words if they ever go rogue, but that's my 2 cents.
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I assume this means free for local use? Not any kind of backups?
Why would they donate server space to you on top of giving you free (beer) software?
The way some of you think is very odd to me.
Back up your own shit or pay for sync.
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I mean all the plug-ins should work
Use Logseq. It’s amazing IMO. And OSS
It's a very, very different approach having everything as a bullet point though.
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I thought this was about a different obsidian lol
Same. I've never heard of the Obsidian in the OP, so I was hoping they somehow left Microsoft and were looking for a game designer or something.
This is the same conversation they had with reddit for years. It's being developed for everyone and we'll make it open some day. Now look what happened.
I use obsidian but only with the bare minimum knowing that I may have to jump ship at any moment.
It's regrettable that Obsidian isn't open source. But the nice thing about it is that its data store is just a bunch of markdown files in a folder structure, and very easily migrated to any other application. They may have the code but they don't take the data hostage like a lot of commercial software does.
Agreed, I use it with as few options and extensions as possible. I don't want to start creating a complex system of notes that will rely on anything specific. I try to stick to the core functions without any extras because of the worry of eventually falling into a proprietary black hole. I keep my foot in just enough to get my uses but not so much that I might get stuck with the software.
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I couldn't get work to pay for it so I found a better, cheaper alternative, Notesnook. It's open source (client and sync server), you can publish notes, and it's end-to-end encrypted.
The community plugin “Google Drive Sync” is free, open source, and lets you (clunkily but effectively) bypass Obsydian Sync. One less server to manage.
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Thanks for sharing I didn't know about this one and it's robust as keep
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It’s always been free for me using Mobius Sync…
Not the point here. Using it in a commercial environment for free was a violation of the terms, now it's not anymore.
Ah got it, thanks for the clarification.
SyncThing for me, but yeah.
Yup! I should have been more specific, Mobius Sync uses syncthing on iOS.
Now that it's free, are its users the product?
Seems they'll just keep making money on sync.
Doesn't appear so but there is that potential in a future update as they're in control of what the software actually does. If data is indeed stored in plain text files then hopefully an alternative software could be made to display that data.
Obsidian files are just Markdown, so there is plenty of software out there today that can parse them. The only thing you might miss is plugins that don't exist outisd of obsidian.
The canvas built in is the easiest UI I’ve used to make mind maps, I’d surely miss it if I had to migrate.
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Essentially, just a giant W.
Nothing else is changing. No account required, no ads, no tracking, no strings attached. Your data remains fully in your control, stored locally in plain text Markdown files. All features are available to you for free without limits.
What's the catch?
If you want to sync your notes between devices, Obsidian Sync is $48 a year. But since it's all just markdown files anyway, you could just use dropbox to sync them anyway.
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Still closed source.
"...until we have a large enough userbase to start monetizing and enshittifying..."
At least if/when that happens all your files are in markdown, owned and controlled by you so migrating to another tool is pretty easy.
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