Obsidian - The only Note Taking App You’ll ever need

The use of traditional paper notes has become obsolete in the 21st century. The top note-taking apps are now widely available online, enabling users to take notes digitally and save them in the cloud.
One such app is called Obsidian, which has lately attracted a lot of attention in the productivity world for its offline method, which stores the files locally with the goal of turning off distractions so you can concentrate on your work.
Obsidian's developers promote it as your "second brain" because of its innovative but clever data-storage strategies, which we will cover in more detail below.

All things — interlinked.

Being promoted as a “second brain” by the developers themselves and also backed by the community, Obsidian says that the second brain should work at the same time as your ideas since they are non-linear in nature.
What this means is, when you make a note in Obsidian and then another and then, later on, link those notes together, be it a reference of a word or two or a complete sentence, you form a map of some sort called “connection”. You can see the connections between the notes in your vault using the Graph view. The Graph View also has other various features like groups, filters, and display options so you can narrow down or get a bird’s eye view of your notes.
Obsidian also has other features, for example, Backlinks which allow you to interlink your documents like hyperlinks allowing you to jump from one note to another with ease and also visualize them whenever you want.

Local Files
To get started with Obsidian you need to create a database, This database is called “Vault” and in this vault, you will have all your files. These files are all local, meaning nothing is ever uploaded to the internet and therefore you are in control of your own data. That is unless you buy Obsidian Synn which helps you sync files across multiple devices for a subscription.

Subscription

Obsidian is completely free to use and you don't even need an account to run the app. But, Obsidian also offers two tiers of the subscription mode (called “Add On Services”)l: Sync and Publish.
The Tier-1 Sync is what most people would go after for their day-to-day needs. This model enables sync capabilities in the Obsidian app so you won't have to set up a separate sync server for your files.
The Publish is mainly for website owners looking to publish their notes taken on/wish Obsidian on the web. Both the tiers have monthly and yearly subscriptions, if you opt for the yearly one it gives some discount so you can save a few bucks.

Let’s Talk Markdown
Markdown is a lightweight markup language for producing prepared text in a plain-text editor. In order to build a markup language that is acceptable to human readers in its source code form, John Gruber and Aaron Swartz invented Markdown in 2004. Blog posts, instant messages, online forums, collaborative software, instructional sites, and readme files all often utilize markdown.
Obsidian uses Markdown for all its files. This makes it easy for other apps to read the file and also makes it future-proof. People who are unfamiliar with markdown may find it strange at first. Because Markdown is only text, it greatly eliminates the barriers to information gathered from being reused elsewhere because it is not in a proprietary format. Markdown is easy to learn and most people will start to love it when they get their hands on it.

Plugins

We all know plugins make our life easy. Obsidian comes with pre-installed plugins such as Backlinks, Command Palette, and other Core Plugins. And although Obsidian is not Open Source, its community driven. People who use Obsidian make plugins for the same and publish them on Open-Source Version Control websites like Github, Gitlab, etc.
These plugins are then showcased on the official Obsidian website and are also ranked by the number of downloads and their usability. Currently, there are over 690 Community Plugins on the Obsidian Website. These plugins are not only easy to install but also come with a set of instructions to follow so you can learn how to use them to their full potential.

The Mobile App

Launched in August of 2021, the most anticipated app of Obsidian, the mobile app was finally released. The app allows you to do basically everything the Desktop version can. You can read, write and edit Markdown files on the go so you are making the most of the “Second Brain”.

Just like the Obsidian Desktop App, the mobile app is also free and supports sync if you buy it.

Conclusion

Obsidian is a tool that is still in development with version 1.0 recently launched. For such a young tool, it does not give the impression of immaturity; this is clearly down to the quality of the development. All this taken into consideration makes Obsidian the best for taking notes, even if it does feel quite different from other apps in this market.
Obsidian comes at no cost for personal use; however, you can support its development by pledging $25 or more. With many supporters and a highly active community, Obsidian is a tool going from strength to strength.