A complete Obsidian overview (2025)

The whole idea of building a "second brain" or a Personal Knowledge Management (PKM) system has really taken off lately. If you’re trying to get a handle on your digital thoughts, notes, and projects, finding the right tool is everything. Obsidian has become a huge contender in this space, and for good reason. People love its powerful features, flexibility, and a "local-first" approach that puts you in the driver’s seat of your own data.

But is it the perfect note-taking app for everyone, or is it a complex beast best left to developers and academics? This guide offers a balanced Obsidian overview, digging into what it does best, how you can customize it, what it costs, and who it’s really for, so you can decide if it’s the right fit for you.

What is Obsidian?

Obsidian is way more than just a simple app for jotting down notes. Think of it as a knowledge base that runs on a folder of plain text Markdown files sitting right there on your own device. This simple foundation is guided by a few key ideas that really set it apart from the crowd.

• Your data is yours, period. Unlike cloud tools like Notion, all your files live on your computer. You have total ownership, you can work completely offline, and your notes will always be readable in a standard format, even if the Obsidian app itself vanished tomorrow.

• It’s all about connecting the dots. The app is designed from the ground up to help you link notes together. This helps you create a "digital garden" or a personal wiki where your ideas can grow and connect organically. It’s less about stuffing things into rigid folders and more about seeing the relationships between your thoughts.

• You can make it do almost anything. Out of the box, Obsidian is a solid Markdown editor. But its real magic comes from a huge library of official and community-made plugins that let you customize it for pretty much any workflow you can imagine.

Core features and functionality

Even before you dive into the wild world of plugins, Obsidian’s standard features give you a strong starting point for building out your personal knowledge base.

The editor: Markdown and linking

Obsidian is built around Markdown, a simple way to format text using symbols you already know. This makes writing feel quick and clean, and it means your notes are super portable and can be opened in any basic text editor.

The real heart of the Obsidian experience, though, is linking notes together by typing "[[double brackets]]" around a note’s title. This one simple action is how you build your web of knowledge. It transforms your separate notes into a connected network of ideas, making it easy to jump between related concepts and see the bigger picture.

Visualizing knowledge: Graph view and canvas

The Graph View is probably one of Obsidian’s most famous features. It creates a visual map of all your notes, showing them as little dots and the links between them as lines. It’s a pretty cool way to spot connections you might have missed. That said, its practical use can sometimes fade as your collection of notes gets bigger, turning into a tangled web that’s more fun to look at than to actually navigate.

Canvas offers a totally different way to play with your notes. It’s an infinite, spatial board where you can drag and drop notes, images, links, and text cards anywhere you like. This makes it an amazing tool for brainstorming, mind-mapping, drawing out complex systems, or even creating visual storyboards for your projects.

The Command Palette and Quick Switcher

Taking a cue from developer tools like VS Code, the Command Palette is a dream for anyone who loves keyboard shortcuts. With a quick key combination, you can search for and run almost any command in the app, from creating a new note to applying a template, all without taking your hands off the keyboard.

The Quick Switcher works in a similar way, letting you navigate at lightning speed. You can instantly search for any file in your vault and jump right to it, which is way more efficient than clicking through a tree of folders.

Customization: Making it your own

Obsidian’s biggest strength is just how much you can change it. With a bit of tinkering, you can transform it from a basic note-taker into a productivity hub that’s perfectly tailored to you.

Core and community plugins

Plugins are what take Obsidian from good to great. Core plugins are official add-ons you can just flip on in the settings, like Daily Notes, Templates, or an Outline view. But the community plugins, created by other users, are where things get really wild. There are plugins for Kanban boards, interactive calendars, advanced database-style queries with Dataview, and a whole lot more.

This is also where the learning curve can get a little steep. It’s easy to fall into a "tinkering trap," spending more time tweaking your setup than actually getting work done. Some of the most powerful plugins, like Dataview, have their own syntax that can feel like learning a new programming language, which can be a real hurdle if you’re not technically inclined.

Themes and appearance

If you’re not a fan of Obsidian’s default look, you can change it completely. The community has made hundreds of themes that can alter colors, fonts, and layouts with a single click. And if you want even more control, you can add your own custom CSS to adjust every single pixel of the interface.

While all this customization is great, some feel the default interface is a bit plain and less polished than competitors like Craft, which focus more on providing a beautiful experience right out of the box.

Who is it for (and who is it not for)?

Obsidian is a fantastic tool, but it’s definitely not for everyone. Its unique qualities make it perfect for some, while its limitations make it the wrong choice for others.

Ideal use cases

• Academics, researchers, and writers: It’s a perfect environment for anyone managing and connecting tons of research, especially if you’re into methods like Zettelkasten.

• Developers and technical folks: The plain text, Markdown-first design, and keyboard-driven navigation will feel instantly comfortable for anyone who lives in a code editor.

• Privacy-conscious people: If you want absolute control over your data without trusting a third-party cloud service, Obsidian’s local-first model is the gold standard.

Key limitations and alternatives

• A steep learning curve: Let’s be real: Obsidian isn’t an app you master in an afternoon. It takes a genuine time investment to wrap your head around its concepts and set it up in a way that works for you.

• Collaboration is limited: You can technically share a vault with a service like Dropbox or the paid Obsidian Sync, but it doesn’t have the kind of real-time, Google Docs-style collaboration that’s a must-have for most teams.

• Not built for team knowledge: Obsidian is a phenomenal personal knowledge base, but it wasn’t designed to be the single source of truth for a team, especially in a busy customer support or IT department. Team knowledge needs to be consistent, easy to find, and connected to workflows in help desks and chat tools.

For teams trying to pull together scattered information from places like Confluence, Google Docs, and old support tickets, a different kind of tool is a much better fit. An AI platform like eesel AI is built specifically to connect those different sources and provide instant, accurate answers right inside the tools your team uses all day.

Pricing explained

Obsidian’s pricing is refreshingly simple and fair, with the main application being completely free for personal use.

• Personal Use: The core app is free. There are no limits on features or how many notes you can have.

• Commercial Use: If you’re using Obsidian for work in a company with two or more people, you’ll need a commercial license. This runs $50 per user, per year.

• Optional Add-ons: The team also offers a couple of paid services to add more functionality.

Service	Price (Monthly Billing)	Price (Annual Billing)	Purpose
Obsidian Sync	$10 / month	$8 / month	Syncs your notes across all your devices with end-to-end encryption.
Obsidian Publish	$10 / site / month	$8 / site / month	Lets you publish your notes as a public website or digital garden.

There’s also a one-time Catalyst license (starting at $25) if you want to support the developers and get early access to new versions.

A powerful but demanding tool

So, what’s the final word in this Obsidian overview? At the end of the day, the app is an incredibly powerful, private, and flexible "tool for thought." It gives you all the pieces you need to build a deeply personal knowledge system that can grow with you over a lifetime.

The catch is that all that power comes with complexity. The same customizability that makes it so great also creates a major learning curve and the constant temptation to tinker with your setup instead of actually writing.

It’s a wonderful choice for dedicated individuals who enjoy customizing their tools and are committed to the process of building a "second brain." However, for teams that need to work together on a shared knowledge base, it’s just not the right tool for the job.

This ultimate Obsidian review gives a great walkthrough of whether it's the right note-taking app for you.

Beyond personal notes: Powering team knowledge with eesel AI

Managing your own notes is one thing, but getting a company’s collective knowledge in one place is a whole different ballgame. Support and IT teams can’t afford to dig through scattered documents for answers; they need the right information, right now, delivered directly in their help desk or chat app.

While Obsidian helps you build your personal web of knowledge, eesel AI builds an AI-powered knowledge engine for your entire team. It plugs into all your scattered knowledge sources, from wikis and documents to past support tickets, and uses that unified brain to automate frontline support, help agents draft replies, and answer internal questions in Slack or MS Teams.

eesel AI's copilot drafts replies for support agents directly within their help desk, using the team's unified knowledge base.

The best part is that you can be up and running in minutes, not months. eesel AI connects directly to the tools you already have, so there’s no need to migrate your help desk or spend weeks on a complicated setup. It just works.

eesel AI answers internal questions directly in Slack, providing instant and accurate information to team members.