For years, I was begging note-taking apps to start using a wiki-like hypertext system. At that point I wanted it more to plan out my fiction writing, but as time grew I realized a personal wiki could be used for just about anything.

[Full disclosure: I do not use Obsidian at this time. But that isn’t because it’s bad! For more details as to why I switched away and what I do now, read on.]

Why we got the wiki system of note-taking so late is something I’m still upset about. In 2014, when I was still a blossoming fiction writer, I wanted to use a software for my world-building that essentially operated the same as Wikia, but private and for personal use. As far as I know, back then the only real choice you got was TiddlyWiki. TiddlyWiki is good now, but I remember for my stupid high schooler brain it was too bulky to handle. I needed something that worked right out of the box.

I wouldn’t get anything like that until RoamResearch dropped five years later!

At that point I was in college, and going through my “too cool for fiction writing” phase. But I was maintaining this blog, and I had a different need for wiki note-taking: compiling all my knowledge and ideas in a place where I could easily make an article out of it.

This is now seen as the standard reason to use wiki note-taking, and is the main use-case that RoamResearch marketed for. Fortunately I was able to get into their free beta for academics, and use the tool that way.

The following year, everything exploded.

Presumably due to the financial success of RoamResearch, now everyone had to have a wiki note-taking service. Notion, TiddlyWiki 2.0 [1], Logseq — the zettelkasten was suddenly the thing to do!

Yet, ultimately, all these tools were overshadowed by one competitor. A tool that combined user-friendliness, advanced capabilities, and a beautiful design all in one package. That tool, of course, was Obsidian.

The reason I give this whole preamble is that I don’t think you can really appreciate just how fantastic a tool Obsidian is unless you know the history that predates it. Knowing note-taking before Obsidian is like knowing how commerce worked before Amazon — it is something that is so ubiquitous in its category that it makes the things it did do feel obvious and simple. But it’s not.

The best way to understand Obsidian for someone who has never seen it before is just to see it in action. Unfortunately, that’s not something I can do in this blog post format. While I do plan on making a video about Obsidian some day in the future, for now I’ll recommend you the excellent video by Tiago Forte in which he gets an Obsidian expert to explain the app at a fundamental level. From here on, I’ll assume you have watched the video, or already have some hands-on experience with Obsidian.

The first most obvious thing that separates Obsidian from other wiki note-taking apps is the graph view. Functionally, it is almost useless. Aesthetically, it is beautiful. As it turns out, you can build a moat over aesthetics, too!

From a user on /r/ObsidianMD named ‘jannesjy’. As a warning, most graphs don’t actually look this impressive.

However, if you know my particular fixation on using randomness in productivity, you know there’s a different feature in Obsidian that I love. It has built in random recall for notes! When I last used Obsidian this feature was not enabled by default, but it is a core plugin that can be quickly enabled with the flick of a settings switch.

…I suppose I should talk about plugins, huh?

It is said that the quality of a software is directly proportional to the size of its modding community. Skyrim has thousands of hours of user-made gameplay, Canva has thousands of user-made templates, Excel has thousands of user-made analysis models, and — yes — Obsidian has thousands of user-made note-taking tools.

There is something for pretty much any need. Want to sync your Vault on Google Drive? Done. Want to use AI prompting? There’s a tool for it. Want to draw stuff natively in the app — something that Notion still can’t do? It can (sort of) be done in Obsidian. The only thing that Obsidian, as of 1/7/2025, doesn’t have is a working bidirectional sync with Notion. About that…

As my disclaimer at the beginning of this article references, I did not stop using Obsidian because I didn’t like it. Hell, I didn’t even stop using Obsidian because I found a better option! Obsidian is unbelievably good, a master of its class — it is one of my favorite pieces of software up with Canva and Notion. However, there is one problem.

As with many things in life, there is little that Obsidian can do which Notion cannot do. In other words, since 99% of my workflow is already on Notion, I’d rather just implement my note-taking in Notion’s inferior yet more comprehensive system. Damn monopolies!

Still, there are moments which I yearn for Obsidian’s embrace. Some days I find myself spending an entire day writing notes in a brand new Obsidian save, looking at my beautiful graph, then wondering what the hell I am doing when I have 30k+ notes already in Notion. I swear, when the Notion-Obsidian sync one day becomes real, and I can use Obsidian while automatically updating my notes in Notion, I will finally achieve true happiness…

[1] – Not literally TiddlyWiki 2.0, but an update that made TiddlyWiki more user-friendly. I’m not an expert on the app but I think it was something more like its 5.0 release.