NOT ON THE LIST IN 2026

A second brain, for you, forever. Obsidian is a powerful knowledge base on top of a local folder of plain text Markdown files

Website: obsidian.md

Ranking in the surveys

Obsidian’s only appearance on the list was in 2021 when it was ranked 265

Comments on Obsidian

“In this past year, I have switched to a new note-taking system. A long time ago, I used to use Evernote, but they started charging the most ridiculous prices, which eventually pushed me to move off of it. The application was also incredibly bloated. I then moved to a few others and finally made the move to Obsidian. There’s so much that I could say about it, but this is supposed to just be a top ten short look at them, but it is incredible what is possible through Obsidian. What I like about it is it’s relatively easy to get started just to take notes, but it is incredibly expansive as you continue to learn more about it. I have all of my notes for things like this very blog post that I’m writing to you now, along with my notes for classes that I teach or am preparing to teach, to notes for conferences that I attend, or workshops or keynotes that I offer. It’s an amazing note-taking tool, and the most beautiful part about it is if I ever change my mind about that, every single note that I’ve taken in Obsidian doesn’t live exclusively in Obsidian. It is simply a plain text note sitting on my computer. So I never have to worry about being locked in to anything. By the way, if you’re wondering how images show up in my notes if it’s plain text, well, I have a single folder for all of the images that can easily then be embedded or otherwise pointed to from within a given note. I also like the ways that it links to other notes in some pretty incredible ways. I have notes for people who have come on the podcast, and then I can link to the episode notes for the time they came on the show, or over to the notes that I took on their book, or over to a quote that they shared that is now on my quotes list.” Bonni Stachowiak, Teaching in Higher Ed Podcast Host, USA, 2026