Alternatives and competitors

Sites like Obsidian

The 20 closest note-taking software alternatives to Obsidian, ranked by what they actually offer, and the 5 technologies behind it.

Looking for an alternative to Obsidian? The closest matches are Evernote, Bitwarden and pastebin.com. We match sites by what they actually offer, from their homepages, Wikidata and a summary by Claude, in any language. Vote on each alternative and leave a short note to help the next person choose.

Neighbours
k = 20
Sites searched
4,032
Vector
384-d
Query
16 ms

01 · Entity

About Obsidian

Obsidian obsidian.md

Obsidian - Sharpen your thinking

The free and flexible app for your private thoughts.

Wikidata: knowledge base and note-taking software

Top 10K · #4,978 English 5 technologies Crawled Nov 6, 2026
Visit Obsidian

Summary by Claude

A free note-taking and personal knowledge base app that stores Markdown notes locally, with linking between notes, graph view, canvas, plugins and themes, plus paid end-to-end encrypted sync and web publishing services.

Who it’s for
Individuals, researchers, writers and teams managing notes
Business model
Freemium with paid sync, publish subscriptions and commercial licenses

02 · Embedding space

Competitor map

Each alternative by how close its vector is to Obsidian’s (x) and how much traffic it gets, how much of the stack it shares, or where it sits in the embedding space itself (y). Lines split each axis at the median. Hover for the numbers, click to jump to it in the list.

similarity × popularity

GoodnotesDesmosNotionCanvaProtonZoteroWikidotAcademia.eduBitwardenEvernote

03 · Nearest neighbours

Alternatives to Obsidian

Thumbs up if it’s a real alternative to Obsidian, thumbs down if it isn’t.

Only in English
  1. 01
    Evernote evernote.com Top 10K

    Best Note Taking App - Organize Your Notes with Evernote

    Our note taking app helps you capture and prioritize ideas, projects and to-do lists, so nothing falls through the cracks. Start your free trial today!

  2. 02
    Bitwarden bitwarden.com Top 10K English

    Best Password Manager for Business, Enterprise & Personal | Bitwarden | Bitwarden

    Bitwarden is the trusted, open source password manager for individuals, teams, and enterprises. Securely store, share, and manage passwords, passkeys, and secrets. Free to start.

  3. 03
    pastebin.com Top 10K English

    Pastebin.com - #1 paste tool since 2002!

    Pastebin.com is the number one paste tool since 2002. Pastebin is a website where you can store text online for a set period of time.

  4. 04
    Academia.edu academia.edu Top 1K

    open repository of academic articles

  5. 05
    Wikidot wikidot.com Top 10K English

    Wikidot - Free and Pro Wiki Hosting

    Polish wiki hosting corporation

  6. 06
    Zotero zotero.org Top 10K English

    Zotero | Your personal research assistant

    Zotero is a free, easy-to-use tool to help you collect, organize, cite, and share research.

  7. 07
    Proton proton.me Top 10K English

    Proton: Privacy by default

    Over 100 million people use Proton to stay private and secure online. Get a free Proton account and take back your privacy.

  8. 08
    Canva canva.com Top 1K English

    Canva

    online graphic design platform

  9. 09
    Notion notion.com Top 10K English

    The AI workspace that works for you. | Notion

    Build Custom Agents, search across all your apps, and automate busywork. The AI workspace where teams get more done, faster.

  10. 10
    Desmos desmos.com Top 10K English

    Desmos | Beautiful free math.

    Desmos Studio builds free Graphing, Scientific, Geometry, and 3D Calculators along with Notebook. Explore our tools, partner with us, or explore examples for inspiration.

  11. 11
    Goodnotes goodnotes.com Top 10K English

    Goodnotes | Notes Reimagined | Note-Taking App

    Bring your thinking to life, collaborate in real time, and turn brainstorming into action with shared notes, whiteboards and text documents.

  12. 12
    Wikidata wikidata.org Top 10K English

    Wikidata

    free multilingual online knowledge graph

  13. 13
    Strava strava.com Top 10K English

    Strava | Running, Cycling & Hiking App - Train, Track & Share

    Strava connects millions of runners, cyclists, hikers, walkers and other active people through the sports they love – all on our mobile app and website.

  14. 14
    SurveyMonkey surveymonkey.com Top 1K English

    SurveyMonkey: The World’s Most Popular Survey Platform

    Easily create surveys and forms with AI and templates for employee and customer feedback, market research, event registrations and more. Get started free.

  15. 15
    Syncthing syncthing.net Top 10K English

    Syncthing

    open source continuous file synchronization software

  16. 16
    Overleaf overleaf.com Top 10K English

    Overleaf, Online LaTeX Editor

    An online LaTeX editor that’s easy to use. No installation, real-time collaboration, version control, hundreds of LaTeX templates, and more.

  17. 17
    Flaticon flaticon.com Top 10K English

    That request didn't go through. Our security filter flagged something. You don't have permission to access this page.

    database of icons

  18. 18
    Grafana grafana.com Top 10K English

    Full-stack observability for the agentic era | Grafana Labs

    Avoid lock-in and ensure reliability with Grafana Cloud, the AI-powered platform built on open standards unifies metrics, logs, traces, profiles, and business data.

  19. 19
    Khan Academy khanacademy.org Top 10K English

    Client Challenge

    non-profit educational organization

  20. 20
    Drupal drupal.org Top 10K English

    Client Challenge

    free and open-source web content management system

Ranked by score: the cosine similarity of each site’s vector to obsidian.md’s, less a small penalty for generic sites that are close to everything. Highlighted technologies are ones Obsidian uses too. Votes and comments come from visitors and don’t change the ranking.

04 · Fingerprints

Technology

What Obsidian is built with, and what its closest competitors use, from its homepage’s code and its DNS records.

Built with

CDN
  • Cloudflare header cf-ray: a5631fbbdc1a131b-HAM
  • Fastly header x-fastly-request-id: 0c0d838271eb3e2a6d8e7494ce03902c16ec4110
Email delivery
  • Mailgun TXT v=spf1 include:mailgun.org -all
DNS hosting
SaaS tools (verified in DNS)

Stack changes

No changes yet. Each new crawl is compared with the last one, and what Obsidian adds or drops shows up here.

SimilarSiteSearch

Competitors by meaning, stacks from the source. Data from public homepages and DNS.

About our crawler