Obsidian note-taking software

Obsidian is a proprietary personal knowledge base and note-taking application that operates on markdown files. Developed by Shida Li and Erica Xu, who met at the University of Waterloo, the software was first released in beta on March 30, 2020, and reached its 1.0.0 version on October 13, 2022. Obsidian is available on multiple platforms, including Windows, macOS, Linux, iOS, and Android, but does not offer a web application. The software is free for personal and commercial use, with paid options for cloud services, commercial licenses, and early access versions. Obsidian's development was motivated by the founders' desire to create an extensible app similar to code editors and IDEs, addressing shortcomings in other tools like MediaWiki and TiddlyWiki. The company behind Obsidian, Dynalist Inc., continues to develop and support the software, with Steph Ango joining as CEO on February 6, 2023.