Old habits die hard.
One year ago, I wrote about how I’d chosen Obsidian over a host of other note-taking apps that I thought might have competed but now viewed as shiny objects…
Now this year, almost like a ritual, I’ve tried almost all the apps again and once more settled with Obsidian.
So I thought it would be worth writing a piece that went over all the reasons I still love the markdown-based offline note-taking app.
A couple of things have changed since last year, and this article performed well the last time I covered it, so here we go again…
Over the last year, I’ve tried Apple Notes, Tana (again), Capacities and Logseq, but none of them are the same as Obsidian. It’s going to take something exceptional to stop me from using this app.
The main reason is because of the increasing time that I’ve spent becoming familiar with it, building patterns and workflows that just wouldn’t be possible in other apps.
As I pour more hours into an ecosystem and even a brand inside Obsidian, the less likely I am to switch away because I may never become as proficient in a new app as I already am in Obsidian.
Second, the features of Obsdian are unparalleled. Smooth as anything because it’s working with simple markdown files, with a search so fast that it feels instant. That’s not even beginning to touch on community plugins.
How can any other app compete when Obsidian can be extended to have similar features to Notion, Tana and even Scrivener, all in one? There’s just no competition. If you juggle studying, running an online business and writing on the internet, Obsidian can keep up with you easily.
How do I know? I do all of these things in the app myself.
I even used to run a website on Obsidian. How many other offline note-taking apps do you know that can do that? If you want to hear more about my experience with Obsidian Publish then you can read this article I made about it.
The files that you use in Obsidian are also offline and private. This means that people can’t get to the uploaded, stored versions in some cloud server that you don’t own, and they can’t just disappear into thin air if something goes wrong. You have 100% accountability for them.
Now this might be bad if you’re someone who doesn’t trust themselves, but just make sure that you back up your vault now and again, and it’s likely nothing will go wrong. There are fewer moving parts with offline files. One thing this also provided was absolutely rapid speeds in comparison to platforms like Notion and Capacities.
The final selling point, and perhaps the largest of all of them — the community is superb. One of the best communities surrounding a piece of software that I’ve come across. And I’ve experienced this community from the perspective of someone providing information and seeking it too.
When I was learning to use Obsidian deeply, I was consuming videos about Zettelkasten, plugins and more. Now I’m on the delivering end of all this content and everyone has been just as engaged and engaging no matter which angle I approach the community from. They were willing to help at the start, and now they’re grateful receivers of what I try to provide.
I was never, ever at a loss for learning anything about Obsidian when I was new, and I’m honoured to make sure that this is the same for other people who are new to the software now.
So as you can tell, little has changed from the original article that I wrote about loving Obsidian.
From time to time I still think that I might be better off inside of another app but this always ends up being procrastination and shiny object syndrome. I’m slowly getting better at reminding myself that Obsidian is the place to be when it comes to note-taking apps.
If you want to read the original article that I posted about Obsidian being the number one app that I found for taking notes, you can go here. It was one of the first pieces that reached a wider audience here on Medium.
Thanks for reading!