Develop your thinking and explore connections over time with offline note-taking app Obsidian. Create your first vault, start typing, and change how your thoughts are organized.

What we love: Obsidian helps you create links between notes, which are stored in collected folders called vaults and displayed in a living, visual graph. A central idea can shoot off to random thoughts or topics you want to explore later. Our thoughts aren’t linear, but eventually they come together, and the same concept applies here. The open file format, with notes stored locally on the device, ensures they can be opened in any other app, and the format-as-you-type Markdown file type makes our heart sing too.

Quick tip: Powerful core and community plug-ins make Obsidian endlessly adaptable. One of our favourites is Dataview, which helps you to spawn Maps of Content—intuitive, searchable directories—from your notes.

Meet the creator: Co-founder Erica Xu began working on Obsidian in 2020 after becoming frustrated with how her digital notes lived disorganized and in isolation. Joined by Shida Li, who Xu met at Canada’s University of Waterloo, the pair founded the app on five enduring principles: The basic tools should be free; they should be able to adapt to the user’s thought process through customization; the file always comes first, so all data should be user-owned through open formats; all files should be stored securely; and, finally, Obsidian should only be supported by real-world users.