Obsidian stores notes privately on your device, so you can access them quickly, even offline. No one else can read them, not even us.

With thousands of plugins and themes, you can shape Obsidian to fit your way of thinking. Obsidian uses open file formats, so you're never locked in. You own your data for the long term.

Can I use Obsidian offline?

Yes, Obsidian is fully offline-first. All notes are stored locally on your device, and you can access and edit them without an internet connection. This makes it ideal for privacy-conscious users or those working in areas with poor connectivity.

What's the difference between Obsidian and Notion?

Obsidian is markdown-based, local-first, and better for linking ideas and personal knowledge management. Notion is cloud-based, more visual, and collaborative, with databases and team features. Obsidian is preferred for fast, distraction-free note-taking and privacy, while Notion excels at structured content and teamwork.

How do I sync my notes across devices for free?

You can manually sync your Obsidian vault across devices using services like Dropbox, Google Drive, iCloud, or Git. These work because Obsidian stores notes as plain markdown files. However, you'll need to ensure correct setup and resolve occasional sync conflicts manually.

Is Obsidian free?

Yes, Obsidian is free for personal use, including access to all core features and community plugins. If you're using it for commercial purposes, you'll need a commercial license, which costs around $50/year per user.

Features

  • Markdown-based: All notes are saved as plain .md files on your device, ensuring portability and control.
  • Linking and Backlinks: Easily link between notes using and view all backlinks, facilitating a "second brain" or Zettelkasten system.
  • Graph View: Visualize the connections between your notes as a dynamic graph.
  • Plugins and Customization: Obsidian supports community and core plugins for features like to-do management, spaced repetition, daily notes, kanban boards, etc.
  • Local-first: All your data stays on your device by default, with optional sync via Obsidian Sync or third-party services (Dropbox, Git, etc.).
  • Cross-platform: Available on Windows, macOS, Linux, iOS, and Android.

What's New

  • New Appearance settings (enabled by default):
    • Full screen: Automatically hide interface elements while reading.
    • Floating navigation: Navigation buttons float over the content instead of being anchored.
    • Sliding sidebars: Option to have the sidebars slide to the side of the content instead of floating above.
  • When full screen mode is enabled, the phone's status bar is now hidden when you scroll in a note.
  • New App actions (the menu when you press and hold on the app icon):
    • "Manage vaults..." Closes the current vault and takes you to the vault selection screen.
    • "Today" – Opens today's daily note. Only available when the daily notes plugin is enabled.
    • "New Note" – Creates a new note in the active vault.
  • Vault switcher has a new option to "Open Vault in Restricted Mode." This option opens the vault without activating any plugins. If your vault is failing to open due to a plugin issue, use this option to debug.
  • Improved layout of Keychain settings.
  • Keychain: Disabled auto-capitalization on the "secret ID" input field.

No longer broken

  • Android: Fixed app being unable to open on devices without Google Play services.
  • Fixed tab switcher not updating to reflect the currently active tab.
  • Fixed position of header buttons and toolbar on some older devices.
  • Fixed bug where the file name in the right sidebar would show the wrong text after renaming a file in the vault.
  • Fixed bug where the right-most navigation bar icon flashed briefly when the app was first loading.
  • iOS: Fixed bug where the first tap or long-press in the File Explorer and Outline did not work.
  • iOS: Fixed scroll getting interrupted if touch overlaps with a link.
  • iOS: Fixed text on Debug screen ("Show debug info") appearing very faint.
  • iOS: Fixed error when selecting vault from New Note widget.
  • iPad: Fixed Command + , not opening in-app settings.
  • iPad: Fixed mobile toolbar not appearing when using "Floating keyboard" option.
  • iPad: Fixed File Explorer context menu appearing too high and overlapping with the status bar.

Bases

  • Fixed list property values getting prematurely truncated.
  • Fixed extra space at the bottom of the base view when editing.
  • Fixed extra space appearing when editing items within the Bases toolbar.

Previous release notes

Introducing Bases, a new core plugin that lets you turn any set of notes into a powerful database. With Bases you can organize everything from projects to travel plans, reading lists, and more.

Bases lets you create custom views to visualize and interact with data in your vault. You can filter your notes by properties and create formulas to derive your own dynamic properties.

All the data in a base is backed by your local Markdown files and properties stored in YAML. To support Bases, we're introducing the .base file format and syntax.

Shiny new things

  • New Footnotes view core plugin adds a new sidebar tab that helps you manage footnotes for the current file without losing your place in the note.

Breaking changes

  • We have officially removed support for the properties tag, alias, cssclass in favor of tags, aliases and cssclasses. In addition, the values of these properties must be a list. If the current value is a text property, it will no longer be recognized by Obsidian. In the "Format converter" core plugin, there is a new option to fix any incorrectly formatted aliases, tags, and cssclasses in your vault. It will also migrate your old alias, tag, and cssclass properties to the new format.

Improvements

  • Property editor is now available inside page preview and Canvas.
  • Added button to open current page preview in a tab.
  • In the "Export PDF" flow, the export button now receives initial keyboard focus.
  • Settings that show file or folder suggestions now use fuzzy search for better matching.
  • Whitespace is now correctly shown in Sync history and file recovery diffs.
  • Text selection contrast has been increased in dark mode.
  • Sync history view now includes a button to open affected files in File Recovery.
  • The Sync history view now shows the file name before and after it was renamed.
  • File Recovery now displays file extensions in titles and suggestions for non-Markdown files.
  • If the current tab is pinned, the "Close current tab" command will unpin the tab instead of closing it. Repeat the command to close the tab.
  • The "Move file to..." option remains available even when the Files plugin is disabled.
  • The "Save file" command now only appears in the Command Palette when a file is active.
  • Improvements to the display of an "unknown" tab. Added option to close all unknown tabs.
  • The Unique Note Prefix plugin now includes an "Add unique internal link" command for linking selected text.
  • When there is not enough room to display the whole path in the titlebar, the folders will be truncated before the file name.
  • Improved how the Markdown parser handles large tables and large callouts. These notes will take slightly longer to load, but then the tables and callouts will be rendered instantly.
  • Global search stops scanning your vault after it finds 100,000 results.
  • File Explorer: When the view is active, holding Command/Ctrl while navigating through files using the arrow keys will now open the file under the cursor.
  • File Explorer: Right-clicking in the empty space within file explorer will now include options to create a new base or a new canvas.
  • Added "Copy path" and "Copy relative path" to the link context menu.
  • Added "Toggle readable line length" command.
  • macOS: Apple Writing Tools now appear in the editor context menu. This requires installing the latest installer and enabling "Native menus" in settings.

No longer broken

  • Page preview no longer hides or switches to edit mode when the fold icon is clicked.
  • Fixed display of titles in page preview for RTL languages.
  • Improved how results in the command palette are sorted. By default, results are now sorted alphabetically. And more recently used commands will rank higher in the search results.
  • Editing a file no longer resets folded sections in the Outline view.
  • Pressing Shift-Enter inside a text property no longer creates an empty input.
  • Cursor placement is now accurate when navigating table cells after searching.
  • When using the "Obsidian frame" window frame style, the Window title will now properly update to show the currently open file in pop-out windows.
  • List numbering remains consistent when editing inside callouts.
  • PDF view no longer steals focus when opened in the background.
  • Strict line breaks now render properly in the first paragraph of a callout.
  • Outline view now highlights the correct line when the note includes footnotes.
  • Graph view: If you have saved filters, you'll no longer see an initial flash of nodes when you open the graph view. The filters will be applied immediately.
  • Markdown tables containing partially complete HTML now render correctly.
  • Tab history buttons, Web viewer history entries, bookmarked URLs, and ribbon items that open notes now respect modifier keys and honor the "Focus new tab" preference.
  • The Tags view now updates correctly when clearing the search filter.
  • Autocompleting a codeblock now properly accounts for indentation and if the cursor is inside a list item.
  • Improved the rendering of codeblocks inside quoteblocks.
  • Canvas cards now support callouts without generating internal errors.
  • Canvas: Fixed bug where Canvas nodes would hide when trying to move 2 groups that are the same size and at the same exact position in the viewport.
  • Canvas now consistently copies selected notes when pressing Ctrl-C.
  • Canvas: Fixed "New group" not selecting the label text by default.
  • The "Export to PDF..." command no longer causes the screen to flash white while in dark mode. It also works on Linux when the app is set to adapt to system theme.

Developers

  • The installer has been updated to Electron 37.3.0.
  • idb has been updated to version 8.0.2.
  • yaml has been updated to version 2.7.0.
  • CSS properties added to document.body are now mirrored across all pop-out windows.
  • ButtonComponent now automatically shows a loading spinner if the onClick event is async.
  • You can now bypass the Web viewer and specify that a URL is opened in the user's default browser using window.open(url, 'external').
  • YAML aliasing has been disabled to prevent unintended references when assigning the same object to multiple keys.
  • Assigning the same object to multiple keys via processFrontmatter will no longer create a YAML alias.