Obsidian is a popular notes software. It used to be only free for non-commercial use. I think this change is welcome and noteworthy because it opens its (legal) use to employees who want to use it...
Obsidian is a popular notes software. It used to be only free for non-commercial use.
I think this change is welcome and noteworthy because it opens its (legal) use to employees who want to use it at their work. Well, as long as their employer lets them run it…
I really hope this means they’re doing well financially. I would have to change a lot of things in my life to get by without it. I in fact still keep some things on paper because I worry it’ll get...
I really hope this means they’re doing well financially. I would have to change a lot of things in my life to get by without it. I in fact still keep some things on paper because I worry it’ll get sold and either enshittified or shut down and buried like Pivotal Tracker was.
On the Enterprise page, they display the companies that have 25 licenses or above, divided into tiers according to number of licenses purchased. Assuming that each company is right on the lower...
Exemplary
I really hope this means they’re doing well financially.
On the Enterprise page, they display the companies that have 25 licenses or above, divided into tiers according to number of licenses purchased. Assuming that each company is right on the lower limit of their tier, Obsidian is making $945 000 annually from these. Obviously, the real number of licenses is greater as companies with less than 25 licenses aren't displayed.
The costs incurred from sync are covered by the sync subscription fees. I don't know what other costs besides salaries are involved, but given how small their core team is, I'd wager a guess that they're alright (as long as most of the current license holders keep renewing them or new ones keep coming on board).
I would have to change a lot of things in my life to get by without it.
Me too! I've had the courage to go all-in due to the local nature of the system (it helps that I don't need to use sync). Even if they somehow went out of business or drastically changed the model, I'd still have my current local system in place and no one can take it away from me.
I still have the Adobe CS6 suite on an old laptop as well. I just never updated to the cloud based version and then never upgraded the OS on that laptop. When it got too outdated, I got a new laptop to do other things on. Sure, I don't have access to some of the new fancy features but they're not anything I can't live without, and the funds I've saved over the years on subscription fees more than cover the price of my new laptop. Now that there's the Affinity Suite, Adobe is quickly becoming a thing of the past for me anyway but this system got me through the transition period.
I intend to do the same with Obsidian, should things ever change, but I'd be surprised if they did. The team seems absolutely awesome in how they approach things.
When I was using Obsidian at my work, I just said I used it for personal use. I still ended up paying for their cloud storage, but I didn’t want to have to get my boss to pay for an Obsidian...
When I was using Obsidian at my work, I just said I used it for personal use. I still ended up paying for their cloud storage, but I didn’t want to have to get my boss to pay for an Obsidian license when I didn’t know whether I would like it.
I imagine many people are claiming personal use and using it for commercial purposes anyways. Making a commercial license free allows them to collect better usage data and push relevant add-on subscriptions more effectively.
Yeah, this tracks with what I've seen. There's a lot of cross over between the desire for obsidian portable and using it at work when work cant/won't pay for it. Usually these are the people...
Yeah, this tracks with what I've seen. There's a lot of cross over between the desire for obsidian portable and using it at work when work cant/won't pay for it. Usually these are the people already paying for a personal license/sync, and love it so much they want to use it at work, but work won't spring for a license.
I suspect corporate licensing was a tough sell because it's plugin model is a security nightmare. So really, I think this is just Obsidian staying in touch with reality and their user base. If anything, I'm happy this change is taking place, because if they continued to persue b2b licensing, I'd expect them to enshittify the product with corporate features in order to make themselves more attractive.
Is it weird that I find this very concerning? I found comfort in how clearly aligned user and company interests appeared with the previous licensing model (happier users = users buy commercial...
Is it weird that I find this very concerning?
I found comfort in how clearly aligned user and company interests appeared with the previous licensing model (happier users = users buy commercial licenses = more money). Making the commericial license optional obscures that alignment, and makes me worried that Obsidian may start drifting towards wanting to make software procurement departments happy instead of users (a la Microsoft Teams). Especially since this change seemingly continues the pattern of Obsidian services becoming cheaper for users (e.g. introducing a cheaper "Sync" plan).
I haven't seen anything to suggest this, nothing to be worried about yet. Everything I've seen of the Obsidian team's efforts has shown prioritizing user experience above all else, and their...
...makes me worried that Obsidian may start drifting towards wanting to make software procurement departments happy instead of users
I haven't seen anything to suggest this, nothing to be worried about yet. Everything I've seen of the Obsidian team's efforts has shown prioritizing user experience above all else, and their subscriptions - where other companies would have been far more aggressive or locking core functionality behind paywalls - have been entirely optional offerings of convenience for those who don't want to configure their own cross-device sync/web hosting etc.
Still since obsidian works with markdown (data is portable), in case of heavy enshitification you're free to migrate elsewhere, and note taking app / knowledge management software are not in short...
Still since obsidian works with markdown (data is portable), in case of heavy enshitification you're free to migrate elsewhere, and note taking app / knowledge management software are not in short supply.
They're not in short supply, but Obsidian and Notion are basically the only two high-quality options if you're talking about PKM and not just basic note taking. For example, I've used Logseq for a...
They're not in short supply, but Obsidian and Notion are basically the only two high-quality options if you're talking about PKM and not just basic note taking. For example, I've used Logseq for a while, and although the concept and features are pretty cool, the app really lacks polish, especially the mobile one, which is often nearly unusable.
The team has been working on a version that uses a database instead of just markdown files to make it faster and more resilient for the last year and a half or so, and as a result of that there's...
For example, I've used Logseq for a while, and although the concept and features are pretty cool, the app really lacks polish, especially the mobile one, which is often nearly unusable.
The team has been working on a version that uses a database instead of just markdown files to make it faster and more resilient for the last year and a half or so, and as a result of that there's been no development on the main app and the mobile app for about that time (possibly longer on the mobile app).
I really hope they succeed and using markdown for backups, sync etc. is still easily viable because I like it more than Obsidian, with the basic block being a paragraph/bullet point instead of a page and it being more full featured instead of relying on plugins, but as you say it's not exactly perfect now.
Omg... I just... fuck. This is the spot I'm at with using teams. I'm the defacto tech guy for my local union and we license teams/office commercially for that reason. We don't even use or need...
software procurement departments happy instead of users (a la Microsoft Teams)
Omg... I just... fuck.
This is the spot I'm at with using teams. I'm the defacto tech guy for my local union and we license teams/office commercially for that reason. We don't even use or need most of what it all does but they bundle it together so it's the easiest and cheapest way to do things.
I don't have the bandwidth to play tech support for these people even if I did, it's extremely difficult to wrangle things like that because we're all working full time random shift-work and we all do our union work from home.
I absolutely hate microsoft and all the anti-competative BS that they do currently and have done over its history and it disgusts me that we pay them thousands of dollars a year for this crap.
They're a private company yeah? It'll eventually turn to shit, it's pretty much inevitable. But until then enjoy it. I would say only jump ship if they make moves away form storing notes as...
They're a private company yeah? It'll eventually turn to shit, it's pretty much inevitable. But until then enjoy it. I would say only jump ship if they make moves away form storing notes as markdown. Otherwise its fairly simple to switch to another platform when the time comes.
I'd recommend people read the CEO's comments on the Hacker News and reddit thread (username is kepano) - I'm a bit more assured by their comments that Obsidian is sustainable without corporate...
I'd recommend people read the CEO's comments on the Hacker News and reddit thread (username is kepano) - I'm a bit more assured by their comments that Obsidian is sustainable without corporate licenses.
Ahh this is great news. I decided to use Notion instead of Obsidian because of their licensing. Just taking personal work-related notes (my own personal work wiki) would have violated their free...
Ahh this is great news. I decided to use Notion instead of Obsidian because of their licensing. Just taking personal work-related notes (my own personal work wiki) would have violated their free license, so I didn't end up using it.
I've been looking for a more advanced not taking app and find myself mostly just overwhelmed by choice. Does Obsidian stand out as particularly good? And do I see this right, it's $4/month if you...
I've been looking for a more advanced not taking app and find myself mostly just overwhelmed by choice. Does Obsidian stand out as particularly good? And do I see this right, it's $4/month if you want to sync between your laptop and your phone?
There's pros and cons. It's fairly powerful out of the box, and can do much more with plugins (in particular, dataview allows it to have pseudo-database capabilities, like Notion can do). But...
There's pros and cons. It's fairly powerful out of the box, and can do much more with plugins (in particular, dataview allows it to have pseudo-database capabilities, like Notion can do). But unlike Notion, it's much more bare-bones UI-wise. It's for the already technical, or at least those willing to wade through some initial frustration.
As for sync, technically Obsidian isn't all that opinionated on it. It operates on a folder of markdown and metadata files. As long as there is some way to move that between devices, whether that be iCloud or a USB drive, it will work. For iOS, though, the per-app sandboxing proves difficult. The only officially supported ways are iCloud (which means that that vault is inaccessible on windows and android and linux) and Obsidian sync (which cost $4/month).
I hacked together a syncthings approach which will work on macOS, linux, and iOS, the main devices I use, but it's not exactly pretty.
I hate that dataview is still so required. I 99% use it for tracking media I want to consume or reviewing it if I have. I love tags for properties, but I'd LIKE to have a way of just throwing...
I hate that dataview is still so required.
I 99% use it for tracking media I want to consume or reviewing it if I have. I love tags for properties, but I'd LIKE to have a way of just throwing views that show "here's all the movies you want to see" and "here's all the shows you want to see" and "here's everything you just saw" and so on.
All these states are tracked in the properties under tags, but there's no easy default way to pull these.
Data view DOES do it, but it is not intuitive and does not always play nice, ESPECIALLY with tags. For example doing "has X tag but not Y" is not simple (and last I tried despite finding like 5 different supposed ways it should work, including regex, I never got working).
It's just so frustrating that they've got this nice tag system but no clean way to query it and save those for a glance. Updating a note in two places is annoying as hell, and I suppose I could type it all inline but it's all just so inelegant when what I want is apple smart lists.
According to their roadmap, the Obsidian team is working on an integrated Dataview equivalent. It probably won't be as powerful as Dataview, but that might be enough for most users who just need...
I hate that dataview is still so required.
According to their roadmap, the Obsidian team is working on an integrated Dataview equivalent. It probably won't be as powerful as Dataview, but that might be enough for most users who just need simple generated tables.
It's excellent. Powerful, extensible, simple to use, fair, fully local to your system. One thing I love about it is that it does not force you into any specific organization model or anything, but...
It's excellent. Powerful, extensible, simple to use, fair, fully local to your system. One thing I love about it is that it does not force you into any specific organization model or anything, but still gives you the tools to achieve any sort of organization you want.
Its main flaws in my eyes are being closed source and Electron-based.
As of syncing, as stu2b50 said below, Obsidian just works with folders of .md files and doesn't care about what you do with them outside of the app. The Syncthing approach works, but a lot of people, me included, use Git, and it works just as well with the Obsidian Git community plugin.
Obsidian is a popular notes software. It used to be only free for non-commercial use.
I think this change is welcome and noteworthy because it opens its (legal) use to employees who want to use it at their work. Well, as long as their employer lets them run it…
I really hope this means they’re doing well financially. I would have to change a lot of things in my life to get by without it. I in fact still keep some things on paper because I worry it’ll get sold and either enshittified or shut down and buried like Pivotal Tracker was.
On the Enterprise page, they display the companies that have 25 licenses or above, divided into tiers according to number of licenses purchased. Assuming that each company is right on the lower limit of their tier, Obsidian is making $945 000 annually from these. Obviously, the real number of licenses is greater as companies with less than 25 licenses aren't displayed.
The costs incurred from sync are covered by the sync subscription fees. I don't know what other costs besides salaries are involved, but given how small their core team is, I'd wager a guess that they're alright (as long as most of the current license holders keep renewing them or new ones keep coming on board).
Me too! I've had the courage to go all-in due to the local nature of the system (it helps that I don't need to use sync). Even if they somehow went out of business or drastically changed the model, I'd still have my current local system in place and no one can take it away from me.
I still have the Adobe CS6 suite on an old laptop as well. I just never updated to the cloud based version and then never upgraded the OS on that laptop. When it got too outdated, I got a new laptop to do other things on. Sure, I don't have access to some of the new fancy features but they're not anything I can't live without, and the funds I've saved over the years on subscription fees more than cover the price of my new laptop. Now that there's the Affinity Suite, Adobe is quickly becoming a thing of the past for me anyway but this system got me through the transition period.
I intend to do the same with Obsidian, should things ever change, but I'd be surprised if they did. The team seems absolutely awesome in how they approach things.
I would kill for a web client since I can't install it on my work machine 😔
When I was using Obsidian at my work, I just said I used it for personal use. I still ended up paying for their cloud storage, but I didn’t want to have to get my boss to pay for an Obsidian license when I didn’t know whether I would like it.
I imagine many people are claiming personal use and using it for commercial purposes anyways. Making a commercial license free allows them to collect better usage data and push relevant add-on subscriptions more effectively.
Yeah, this tracks with what I've seen. There's a lot of cross over between the desire for obsidian portable and using it at work when work cant/won't pay for it. Usually these are the people already paying for a personal license/sync, and love it so much they want to use it at work, but work won't spring for a license.
I suspect corporate licensing was a tough sell because it's plugin model is a security nightmare. So really, I think this is just Obsidian staying in touch with reality and their user base. If anything, I'm happy this change is taking place, because if they continued to persue b2b licensing, I'd expect them to enshittify the product with corporate features in order to make themselves more attractive.
Is it weird that I find this very concerning?
I found comfort in how clearly aligned user and company interests appeared with the previous licensing model (happier users = users buy commercial licenses = more money). Making the commericial license optional obscures that alignment, and makes me worried that Obsidian may start drifting towards wanting to make software procurement departments happy instead of users (a la Microsoft Teams). Especially since this change seemingly continues the pattern of Obsidian services becoming cheaper for users (e.g. introducing a cheaper "Sync" plan).
I haven't seen anything to suggest this, nothing to be worried about yet. Everything I've seen of the Obsidian team's efforts has shown prioritizing user experience above all else, and their subscriptions - where other companies would have been far more aggressive or locking core functionality behind paywalls - have been entirely optional offerings of convenience for those who don't want to configure their own cross-device sync/web hosting etc.
Still since obsidian works with markdown (data is portable), in case of heavy enshitification you're free to migrate elsewhere, and note taking app / knowledge management software are not in short supply.
They're not in short supply, but Obsidian and Notion are basically the only two high-quality options if you're talking about PKM and not just basic note taking. For example, I've used Logseq for a while, and although the concept and features are pretty cool, the app really lacks polish, especially the mobile one, which is often nearly unusable.
The team has been working on a version that uses a database instead of just markdown files to make it faster and more resilient for the last year and a half or so, and as a result of that there's been no development on the main app and the mobile app for about that time (possibly longer on the mobile app).
I really hope they succeed and using markdown for backups, sync etc. is still easily viable because I like it more than Obsidian, with the basic block being a paragraph/bullet point instead of a page and it being more full featured instead of relying on plugins, but as you say it's not exactly perfect now.
Anytype, AppFlowy, Notesnook, take your pick. They're all FOSS.
Omg... I just... fuck.
This is the spot I'm at with using teams. I'm the defacto tech guy for my local union and we license teams/office commercially for that reason. We don't even use or need most of what it all does but they bundle it together so it's the easiest and cheapest way to do things.
I don't have the bandwidth to play tech support for these people even if I did, it's extremely difficult to wrangle things like that because we're all working full time random shift-work and we all do our union work from home.
I absolutely hate microsoft and all the anti-competative BS that they do currently and have done over its history and it disgusts me that we pay them thousands of dollars a year for this crap.
/rant
They're a private company yeah? It'll eventually turn to shit, it's pretty much inevitable. But until then enjoy it. I would say only jump ship if they make moves away form storing notes as markdown. Otherwise its fairly simple to switch to another platform when the time comes.
I'd recommend people read the CEO's comments on the Hacker News and reddit thread (username is kepano) - I'm a bit more assured by their comments that Obsidian is sustainable without corporate licenses.
Ahh this is great news. I decided to use Notion instead of Obsidian because of their licensing. Just taking personal work-related notes (my own personal work wiki) would have violated their free license, so I didn't end up using it.
I've been looking for a more advanced not taking app and find myself mostly just overwhelmed by choice. Does Obsidian stand out as particularly good? And do I see this right, it's $4/month if you want to sync between your laptop and your phone?
There's pros and cons. It's fairly powerful out of the box, and can do much more with plugins (in particular, dataview allows it to have pseudo-database capabilities, like Notion can do). But unlike Notion, it's much more bare-bones UI-wise. It's for the already technical, or at least those willing to wade through some initial frustration.
As for sync, technically Obsidian isn't all that opinionated on it. It operates on a folder of markdown and metadata files. As long as there is some way to move that between devices, whether that be iCloud or a USB drive, it will work. For iOS, though, the per-app sandboxing proves difficult. The only officially supported ways are iCloud (which means that that vault is inaccessible on windows and android and linux) and Obsidian sync (which cost $4/month).
I hacked together a syncthings approach which will work on macOS, linux, and iOS, the main devices I use, but it's not exactly pretty.
Oh, it‘s iCloud compatible? That would work for me.
I hate that dataview is still so required.
I 99% use it for tracking media I want to consume or reviewing it if I have. I love tags for properties, but I'd LIKE to have a way of just throwing views that show "here's all the movies you want to see" and "here's all the shows you want to see" and "here's everything you just saw" and so on.
All these states are tracked in the properties under tags, but there's no easy default way to pull these.
Data view DOES do it, but it is not intuitive and does not always play nice, ESPECIALLY with tags. For example doing "has X tag but not Y" is not simple (and last I tried despite finding like 5 different supposed ways it should work, including regex, I never got working).
It's just so frustrating that they've got this nice tag system but no clean way to query it and save those for a glance. Updating a note in two places is annoying as hell, and I suppose I could type it all inline but it's all just so inelegant when what I want is apple smart lists.
According to their roadmap, the Obsidian team is working on an integrated Dataview equivalent. It probably won't be as powerful as Dataview, but that might be enough for most users who just need simple generated tables.
It's excellent. Powerful, extensible, simple to use, fair, fully local to your system. One thing I love about it is that it does not force you into any specific organization model or anything, but still gives you the tools to achieve any sort of organization you want.
Its main flaws in my eyes are being closed source and Electron-based.
As of syncing, as stu2b50 said below, Obsidian just works with folders of .md files and doesn't care about what you do with them outside of the app. The Syncthing approach works, but a lot of people, me included, use Git, and it works just as well with the Obsidian Git community plugin.