Obsidian Review: Is this your NEXT note-taking app? (2024)

obsidian is a powerful notetaking application it has grown really fast over the last couple of years many people moving from OTE over to obsidian today we're going to review obsidian see whether it's right for you and whether it's worth it as you choose your note-taking application we're going to look at the pho appap concept the many features that obsidian has and the pricing and free nature of the experience as well as the pros and cons to see if it's right for you hello there my name is Franchesco and welcome to tool finder if you're new

here do subscribe and join tool finder you can go over to Tool finder.com to get insights and reviews on tools and apps for work and life you'll find the best ones for you whether it's obsidian and Beyond you'll follow them all there if you're interested so obsidian is a really interesting application and one I think one of the first places to start is the free nature of it and the pricing that it comes with so here's a little bit more about that so one of the best things about obsidian is the pricing a lot of

people find that the access to the free experience is one of the killer features because you don't have to pay you get no need to account or sign up with an email and you get access to pretty much everything like themes plugins and API and that's great news for people who want to get started now for the individual user there's actually something called Early Access and think of this as a way to get access to Beta nice and early as well as the support forums too and all you have to do is pay a one-time

payment of over $25 it can be more than that if you're feeling generous but that's how to get early access to stuff with obsidian now how do they make their money because it's important to know obviously when it comes to updates and things like that how are obsidian generated income well they have a commercial license which is $50 per user per year for those who want uh the access when it comes to uh using it for work and there's something called obsidian sync and publish these are priced monthly at $5 and $10 for publish and

sync gives you access to syncing across devices so obviously if you're using obsidian on one device it'll sync only to that device using it local first but if you access sync it will sync across those devices for you and give you endtoend encryption as well as version history if you want the publish option this is great for digital Gardens it allows you to publish your notes to the web and gives you the ability to see graph View and outline as part of that and that's $10 per user per month build monthly there is option for

yearly which is a little bit cheaper so that's how obsidian makes money and the great thing is that keeps them regularly upda in the application so let's tuck into some of the features and why they're important obsidian has something called local first and markdown now for those who don't know what they are basically markdown is a type of file that you can use for your notes what's beneficial about that well basically markdown is supported quite widely for many people it's a great way a great Raw way of taking a note and it means that if

obsidian were to shut down tomorrow you can move to another note taking app that supports markdown and this is brilliant because many people are in the mindset of this concept of owning their own data and owning their own notes it also means that if you were to use it for Mac only or Windows only you get a local first experience which means that you will be able to store it on your device you own that device you own the notes happy days which means it is easy to read offline and also to manage on the

go but if you did want to upgrade to the syncing abilities say you have an iPhone and a Mac then naturally you'll get the ability to use the sync function which is $4 per user per month build yearly which will give you access to not just sync between the notes but also the ability to have endtoend encryption so notes and privacy are a key focus of asidian now inside of asidian you can create a note and it's marked down so everything you take in a note is naturally going to be really raw and uh allow

you to do all of the regular stuff you'd expect like mark down uh headers and things like that now the great thing about obsidian is there's something called bidirectional links which means you can link or search for anything across your account creating a relationship between one note and another this is perfect for those who want to be able to visualize that later on and I'll show you a few of the ways that that can be done but primarily people do this because it helps to establish and bring together notes that are across your account allowing

more free form thinking and ideas to build creating this network of knowledge and personal Wiki in an application now there is a way to visualize this in a better way and it's called graph view graph view is built into obsidian it allows you to even filter things down to orphans display uh different options like how the note appears as well as even uh just having attachments as part of files but the concept is very simple it wants you to visualize the relationships between the notes that you've created a little bit like how your brain works

and the synapses between them now another ability that you get inside of obsidian is something called Community plugins now there is two types of plugins call plugins and Community plugins this makes it highly customizable for doing really cool things for example the core plugins allow you to switch on and off features that you do and don't like for example you can even switch on something called an audio recorder which allows you to record audio notes and save them as attachments but if you don't want that you can switch it off and the same concept goes

around for example if you really don't like graph view switch it off which is a really nice function that you can do inside of the cor plugins now Community plugins need to be turned on but Community plugins have a wide range of options and we're talking a lot of options there are over 1,800 plugins that the community have created and if you did want a tutorial on plugins because this video whilst being useful it won't actually cover plugins I will link it above if you're interested but a wide range of plugins means that you can

install them and see which one's suitable for example there's the ability to create Advanced tables that obsidian doesn't do inside of the app but it can be used in markdown which means you can create Excel like tables really easily there's also things like task management which allows you to turn your obsidian into a much more focused task management structure now some of these are really hacky but at the same time they're a great way to use an experience to its full advantage even turn it into a can band board if you did want to but

there's this great Community around obsidium that will help you to better manage and organize your work now moving on there's not just a one way to V visualize your notes there's a way called canvas where you can turn any of your notes into this visual canvas board and this is perfect for researchers visual thinkers and those who want to bring their ideas together and is a fan favorite for those who use whiteboards every single day now canvas is a really nice to use because you can add files or existing notes or any attachments to bring

everything into one location so this is perfect for even using as a replacement to things like Miller note and you can even connect up cards or notes from your Vault and other vaults you might have now the great thing about the Vault concept is you can create a vault and naturally extend it if you did want to meaning you own the notes but there is also customizations in themes if you go to appearances there is over 160 themes created by the community that you can install and Implement right away now it's really nice because that

gives you uh a little bit more play around with uh how it looks and how it feels now there are some small features like daily notes which allow you to create a daily note every time you have an idea there's even templates where it sources your templates and it's great for maybe even having a meeting with yourself or a meeting agenda and using it in place now obsidian has so much within it there are so many great things like exporting replacing and even split views reading views and so much more there's also a way to

scan your back links and really break them down with a range of filtering sortings tags and so much more that I probably won't be able to come into this video on but in terms of the pros and cons this is why a lot of people like obsidian is highly customizable and it's really tailored towards your need obviously most importantly the second feature is that it's free you can optionally upgrade and it does have a local first approach which for protecting your data is something that a lot of people are moving towards the plug-in system makes

it incredibly flexible but obviously take note to that because it can sometimes times uh be a little bit hacky in how it looks but that's up to you and how you customize it now some of the cons of this application is that there's a huge learning curb I'd recommend checking out Justin D Rose's course on this I'll link it below if you did want to learn it and go into those Advanced notetaking techniques you can also Implement a lot of the systems like zetoc cassen and many more inside of this application now whilst the core

experience is free there are more powerful experiences like sync that are limit liting you to sync between devices for example if you use two or more devices for your notes then you're probably going to have to look at sync because that's probably one of the only ways that you can access obsidian across devices um both of the mobile applications work very well although the rich experience is mainly focused on the desktop so that's something to very much know so who cidian best for pretty much those who are note taking want more control of their data

and have a very Advanced way of setting that up if you're not using backlinks if you're not using graph view if you're not using a uh PKM style concept then I don't know whether the obsidian is right for you I would say it's probably more suited for those ones who are researching those ones who are visualizing notes and those ones who want to be able to save a lot of money and have data privacy is an important thing an obsidian can feel quite overwhelming if you're not in that criteria so I would look at some

of the PKM options that we've got if you're not interested in obsidian but want to explore more or you can check out more tools over on tool finder in the note taking space which I'll link below thank you very much and if you did enjoy this video please do thumbs it up because many people find it will find it as a good resource and it will work out um the algorithm will put it to more people basically so do do that uh because we'd really love to help more people find out whether obsidian is right

for them thank you very much everyone and I will talk to you all very soon cheerio