What Obsidian is genuinely great at
Ownership. Your notes are plain markdown files on your own disk, readable in twenty years by anything that reads text. No company can revoke them, price-hike them, or shut down and take them with it. The linking model builds a genuine second brain over time, and the plugin ecosystem is enormous.
The app is free. Sync is $4 a user per month billed annually ($5 monthly), and Publish is $8 a site per month annually ($10 monthly) — both optional.
Where it falls down as a planner
It doesn't have a clock. People build daily-note workflows and task plugins on top, and some of those setups are genuinely impressive — but they're a project you maintain, and the maintenance is exactly the kind of productivity-about-productivity work that quietly replaces the actual work.
The learning curve is also real. Obsidian rewards investment; it does not reward showing up for four minutes on a Tuesday.
How Fuidzy is different
We're local-first too — your tasks live in a database on your own machine, sync is a switch that's off by default, and you can export everything whenever you like. So we share Obsidian's instinct about ownership while doing a completely different job with it.
Use Obsidian if your requirement is specifically a linked archive in loose markdown files, and you enjoy maintaining the setup. It's a fine piece of software.
Use Fuidzy if you want the same ownership without the project: local database on your disk, works offline, Markdown and JSON export, one-archive backup including attachments — and a clock, which no amount of plugins gives a vault. Ours also doesn't charge $4 a month to sync it or $8 a month to publish it.