replacing Obsidian
Local-first markdown notes with a plugin ecosystem — Obsidian pricing: Free for personal use; Sync $4-$8/user/month; Publish $8-$16/site/month. Below: 3 free, self-hostable open source projects that cover the same ground, ranked by real GitHub adoption.
There are 3 open source Obsidian alternatives tracked on this registry, against Obsidian pricing of Free for personal use; Sync $4-$8/user/month; Publish $8-$16/site/month. The most-adopted is AppFlowy with 76,854 GitHub stars under AGPL-3.0, written in Dart. Together the set has 178,280 stars across 3 languages and 1 licence. All 3 are free to self-host with no licence fee, and 3 of 3 received a commit in the last 90 days. 3 head-to-head Obsidian comparisons are available.
AppFlowy is an open-source collaborative workspace platform that combines note-taking, project management, wikis, and AI features into a single interface. It runs as a desktop and mobile application and supports self-hosting, built with Flutter for the frontend and Rust for the backend. AppFlowy lives in the productivity and knowledge management ecosystem, positioned explicitly as a Notion alternative.
AGPL-3.0 · Dart · Obsidian vs AppFlowy →
Joplin is a TypeScript and Node.js application, built on Electron, that stores Markdown notes inside notebooks and makes them searchable, taggable, copyable and editable either in the Joplin apps or in an external text editor. It runs on Windows, Linux, macOS, Android and iOS, and it is offline first, so the complete note collection lives on each phone or computer and stays accessible without an internet connection. Notes synchronise through Nextcloud, Dropbox, OneDrive or Joplin Cloud, with end-to-end encryption protecting them on the sync target. A plugin and theme system allows extensions and restyling, and a Web Clipper for Firefox and Chrome saves web pages and screenshots into notebooks.
NOASSERTION · TypeScript · Obsidian vs Joplin →
Logseq is an open-source, privacy-first knowledge management platform built for local-first workflows. It runs as a desktop application and web interface, storing data locally in Markdown or Org-mode files, with optional SQLite-backed DB graphs for advanced features. The project lives in the Clojure/ClojureScript ecosystem and is licensed under AGPL-3.0.
AGPL-3.0 · Clojure · Obsidian vs Logseq →
AI workspace for docs, projects, and wikis you control
Encrypted note-taking that syncs across all your devices
Privacy-first knowledge base that connects your notes
last updated nightly · ranking method: github stars, live-tracked
AppFlowy is the most-starred open source alternative to Obsidian in this registry, with 76,854 GitHub stars. 3 alternatives are compared here in total.
Yes. Every project listed on this page is open source and free to self-host — there is no licence fee. Some projects also sell a managed hosted version, but the self-hosted path costs nothing.
Compare licence terms, community size (stars), primary language and release activity. A fast-moving project with a compatible licence and an active maintainer base matters more than raw star count when you are committing to a migration.