Obsidian convinced a lot of people that one note can call on another. The graph, the bidirectional links, the files that stay on your own machine: on that ground, the tool is hard to fault.
The limits show up elsewhere, almost always the day your notes have to turn into dated actions.
What Obsidian does really well
Worth saying up front, because it weighs on the decision.
Your notes are Markdown files in a folder, on your own disk. No proprietary format, no dependency on a service that could shut down. It is hard to get more portable than a folder of text files.
Links between notes are native and bidirectional. For anyone practicing the second brain approach or networked note-taking, this is the reference tool.
The plugin ecosystem covers just about anything you can imagine. The app itself is free for personal use; only the add-on services are paid, Sync to keep a vault in step across devices and Publish to turn one into a website, billed per user and per site respectively. Students, teachers and non-profit staff get a discount on both, according to the plan overview.
Where it falls short
Three gaps keep coming up, and none of them is really solved by a plugin.
Tasks are not objects. A checkbox inside a text file has no native due date, no status, no recurrence. Plugins add a layer on top, but that layer rests on writing conventions you have to keep up yourself.
There is no calendar. Your notes know what you are talking about, not when you are available. The question "what am I doing tomorrow" has no answer inside an Obsidian vault without extra assembly.
Collaboration was never the plan. The model is a local vault, for one person. Working with someone else means a shared repository and conflict handling that was not the point to begin with.
The hidden cost of plugins
Every plugin you install is one more dependency, maintained by someone else, usually as a volunteer. An Obsidian update can break it, and keeping it working means following how it evolves.
A vault running fifteen plugins turns into a small piece of personal infrastructure, with outages, migrations and upkeep. Some people love that, and that is entirely fair enough. Others discover they spend more time tuning their system than using it.
How many plugins does it take to handle your tasks?
If the answer is more than two, you are rebuilding a task manager by hand.
Obsidian or an all-in-one tool: the question to ask
| What you mainly need | What fits |
|---|---|
| Connecting ideas, building a knowledge base | Obsidian |
| Keeping your files local, whatever happens | Obsidian |
| Notes that lead to dated tasks | An all-in-one tool |
| Seeing your week and your deadlines | An all-in-one tool |
| Writing on the same note together | An all-in-one tool |
Neither column is better than the other. They answer different questions, and yours depends on what you do most often.
What Flots offers instead
Flots is not trying to compete on the knowledge graph. The approach is the opposite one: notes, tasks, calendar and documents are objects in a single space, not layers to assemble.
In practice, a meeting note can produce dated tasks without leaving the note. Those tasks show up in your schedule next to your events. The whole thing is shared inside a project, and written on together live.
Notes stay in Markdown and export to PDF or Word, which avoids trading one dependency for another. The details are in Markdown notes: PDF and Word export, and task extraction.
Migrating, if you decide to
The good thing about an Obsidian vault is that it locks nothing in. Your notes are .md files you can pick up as they are.
Two pieces of common sense. Don't migrate everything: half of an old vault will never be opened again, and copying it across only moves the mess. And start with the active notes, the ones tied to a project under way, where the benefit shows immediately.
For a wider comparison, see note-taking apps: the comparison and a tour of notes in Flots.
Your notes, and what they set in motion, in one place.
