Obsidian
CommercialShow HN 2020Sharpen your thinking. Offline-first Markdown knowledge base.
A powerful knowledge base on top of a local folder of plain text Markdown files. The community praise centers on privacy, ownership of data, and longevity.
96.3Score
- Mentions
- 3,420
- Discussers
- 2,150
- positive
- 95%
Hacker News Consensus & Insights
Synthesized from developer and community discussions across multiple years.
Why Hackers Love It
- Local Markdown files: total data ownership that lasts 50+ years
- Incredible community plugin and theme ecosystem
- Canvas and graph views for connecting complex ideas
Common Concerns & Tradeoffs
- Commercial license required for for-profit work
- Sync service is paid (though Git or Syncthing can be used for free)
Ideal for: Developers, researchers, and writers building an evergreen personal knowledge graph.
Frequently Mentioned Alongside
Verbatim Hacker News Discussions
Real, unfiltered comments from independent developers.
@tptacek•1/2/2023
Original post ↗Thread: Ask HN: Favorite tools for note taking?
“I moved from Evernote to Notion, and finally to Obsidian. Plain text files in a git repo will outlive all SaaS companies.”
@kepano•5/30/2020
Original post ↗Thread: Show HN: Obsidian – A knowledge base on top of local Markdown files
“The fact that all notes remain simple markdown files on my disk means I will never be locked into a proprietary database.”
@coconido•5/27/2020
Original post ↗Thread: Show HN: Obsidian – A knowledge base that works on local Markdown files
“Been using this for months now and it’s my full time PKM amazing product and amazing team, highly recommend!”