TL;DR
- Obsidian stores every note as a plain markdown file on your own disk, not in a vendor’s database.
- That format is the point: because the files are plain text, an AI assistant can read and write them alongside you.
- I keep the vault boring on purpose. Four plugins, not forty. The value is the files, not the dashboard.
- Reach for it as the memory you own. Do not reach for it when you need real-time collaboration or client-facing shared docs.
What it is
Obsidian is a notes app that stores everything as plain markdown files on your own disk. No proprietary format, no cloud account required, no vendor holding your writing hostage. A note is a text file. A folder of notes is a folder of text files. That is the whole model, and it turns out to be the whole point.
How I use it
My vault is the system of record for the entire business. Daily logs, a running strategy file, one folder per project, meeting notes, half-finished drafts. If it matters and it is not code, it lives there.
Nothing unusual so far. Plenty of people keep a vault. The part that changed how I work is that my AI assistant reads and writes the same files I do.
Because the notes are plain text on disk, Claude can open my strategy log, see every decision I have made and the reasoning behind it, and append the next one in the same format. It can read this week’s daily logs and tell me where the time actually went. When I finish a work session, the assistant writes the log entry itself, in the same place I would have put it, in the same shape as the entries above it.
That is the difference between a notes app and a notes app your team can use. My files are not trapped behind a login only I can reach. They sit in a folder, in a format a machine can read, which means the machine can pull its weight instead of asking me to copy and paste my own history into a chat window.
A concrete version. Last week I wanted to know what we had settled on for pricing over the past month. I did not go digging. I asked, the assistant read the strategy log, and it quoted the three relevant entries back to me with their dates. The notebook remembered so I did not have to.
None of that works if your notes live inside an app that only speaks its own language. Plain text is what makes the vault legible to anything, including the assistant doing half the work.
When to reach for it (and when not)
Reach for Obsidian if you want a knowledge base you own outright and can hand to any tool, human or otherwise. Markdown is the most portable format there is. It will outlive the app, it will outlive the company that makes the app, and every AI worth using can already read it. If you are running a one-person operation and you want your notes to compound instead of scatter across six services, this is the foundation I would start from.
Do not reach for it as a collaboration tool. Obsidian is single-player by default. If you need several people editing one document at once, or client-facing pages you share by link, use Notion or Google Docs and do not fight it. I keep both. Obsidian is my memory. Notion is where I work with other people.
And do not fall into the plugin hole. There are a thousand community plugins and you can lose a weekend building a system you never actually use. I run four. The value is the plain files underneath, not the dashboard you assemble on top of them. Keep it boring and it keeps working.
The slicker apps demo better. But the boring one, the one that just writes text files to a folder, is the one my assistant and I can both open. That turned out to be worth more than any feature on the comparison page.