Obsidian has really delivered in a crowded note-taking space by focusing on the fundamentals:<p>1. Privacy. You can roll your own syncing (or use iCloud, Dropbox, etc.), without the notes being stored on the note editors' servers, which is a huge win over Roam, Notion, Evernote, etc. After the Evernote fiasco from a few years ago (where they considered reading your notes for ML model training and got massive pushback), I value future-proof solutions that won't become a liability in 10 years if the company providing the note taking software gets desperate.<p>2. Markdown. Speaking of future-proofing, Markdown is as close as it gets to having interoperability with the notes. Obsidian is at its core just a Markdown file editor, which means your notes are stored as plaintext and easy to export. There is a bit of Obsidian-flavored syntax (e.g. bi-directional links [[...]]), but these are becoming standard in note-taking. Many note-taking apps claim export functionality, but at the end of the day they're not incentivized to give you your data in a format that will work with other editors.<p>3. Executing on features that have become indispensable for note-taking, and personal knowledge management specifically: bi-directional linking, block-embeds, query-embeds, unlinked mentions, graph view, custom CSS, note aliases, markdown diagrams (via mermaid), and a few others.<p>4. Offline support. If there's any kind of login or sync required to access your notes on your personal device, that's a dealbreaker for me. This seems to have been a regression lately in the latest batch of note-taking apps.<p>My entire personal knowledge base was in Evernote for a few years, and now happily migrated to Obsidian. The graph view is just a magical way to explore the knowledge that you've stumbled upon over the years.<p>The team gives away so much value in the core app for free. If you enjoy their product, consider supporting via the Catalyst plan: <a href="https://obsidian.md/pricing" rel="nofollow">https://obsidian.md/pricing</a>