Obsidian is a feature-packed note-taking tool, but does it justify the time spent getting familiar with it and customizing it, or do the benefits fall short?

On the surface, Obsidian looked generic to me, like any other app out there, but only using it over a couple of months revealed its underlying benefits. Fast-forward to today, Obsidian has become my central hub, a map of what I have learned and what I am learning, finally making my search for a note-taking app come to an end. When I think of Obsidian, I consider it a tool that glues your notes together and makes notes as a whole greater than the sum of its parts.

Previously, in my note-taking process, I used to jot down notes, and that was it. They were merely words and numbers, placed on one line after another, ready to be forgotten. Only after using Obsidian did I realize that my notes lacked a critical component — connections. How one note related to another. Instead of my notes being independent fragmented entities, Obsidian allowed me to turn notes into a chain of thoughts.

For example, at the start of a course during my Computer Science degree, for the first few classes, I took notes diligently, primarily due to my high motivation when a course started. However, as I approached the midpoint of my semester, my notes made no sense to me. They felt scattered and segmented to the extent that I stopped taking down notes.