Snippets compared to Obsidian

To be fair ...

In just a few years, Obsidian has grown into a highly popular tool, widely discussed on platforms like YouTube and Reddit. It is supported by an enthusiastic community of knowledgeable users from diverse fields. Today, it is used by academics, students, journalists, software engineers — you name it.

Its success can be attributed to several factors. First, the app can be used free of charge. Second, its powerful plugin ecosystem allows the community to extend its functionality, meaning it can potentially meet almost any user need. Finally, it is built on Markdown, a widely adopted format that avoids vendor lock-in and helps ensure your notes remain accessible and future-proof.

To avoid some disappointment, here's a list of features which Snippets does not (yet) have, compared to Obsidian:

• Obsidian's look and feel is highly customizable through CSS - You can't do that in Snipptes. Making the app more customizable is on our roadmap, although it most likely will not be through custom CSS but other means.
• Obsidian has a canvas feature - Snippets does not have that yet, but it is on our roadmap.
• Obsidian stores your notes in markdown format and represents folder structures exactly as is on disk. Snippets does not support markdown and never will. We do offer export to markdown.
• Obsidian has a web clipper, Snippets doesn't. It is on our roadmap.
• Obsidian has a graph view, Snippets doesn't. We will add it if there's demand for it.
• Obsidian allows to open files in tabs, Snippets doesn't. We will most likely never have this exact feature and believe that the classic note taking experience warrants a different way of working.
• Obsidian has support for keyboard-heavy use, such as the command pallette and keyboard shortcuts - Snippets is not there yet, but we are going to add similar features. Let us know what you need - we are happy to take feature requests.
• Obsidian has a plugin system which allows the community to implement and share additional functionality - Snipptes does not have that, and most likely never will. We believe that a perfect user experience can only materialize if all the features are perfectly streamlined.
• For Obsidian, there's a plugin called Omnisearch, which, among other features, provides OCR. Snippets does not have that, but it is on our roadmap.
• For Obsidian, there's a lot of other plugins, and a lot of it is not covered by Snippets. Let us know what you need - we are happy to take feature requests.

How Snippets is different

Markdown-centric design

Obsidian is built around Markdown. This is often presented as a “future-proof” and “non-proprietary” approach: if your notes are stored in a standardized format, they should remain usable even if the app itself disappears.

So far, so good.

However, this promise starts to break down on closer inspection. From the very beginning, Obsidian has extended Markdown with its own conventions—most notably note links ([[...]]) and tags (#tag). These are not part of the official Markdown specification.

Admittedly, this may seem like a minor or even pedantic concern. After all, the syntax is intuitive, fits Markdown's philosophy, and still results in readable plain text files.

The plugin system

The real issue emerges with the plugin ecosystem.

When plugins need to store additional data inside your notes, they often introduce their own custom syntax. For example, a highlighting plugin might represent colored text using HTML like <span color={rgb(255,0,0)}>. This approach is not only foreign to Markdown, but it also undermines the very idea of a standardized, portable format.

At that point, your notes are no longer just Markdown—they are Markdown plus a growing set of app- and plugin-specific extensions.

This creates a subtle but real form of lock-in. Your notes may technically remain plain text, but their full meaning depends on specific plugins being installed and maintained. If a plugin is abandoned or becomes incompatible with future versions of Obsidian, parts of your notes may degrade or become difficult to interpret.

In other words, the “future-proof” promise holds only as long as the surrounding ecosystem — core app and plugins alike — continues to function. Once that assumption breaks, the portability of your notes becomes much less certain.

And this is where one begins to question the original premise: why use Markdown at all?

Users usually don't want to edit raw markdown

A common argument in its favor is that Markdown is easy to edit. That's a fair point. Because formatting is expressed through simple, visible syntax, you can immediately understand and modify the structure of a document without relying on a graphical interface.

However, Obsidian itself has gradually moved away from pure Markdown editing. Instead of exposing raw syntax, it offers a more WYSIWYG-like experience. This suggests that, in practice, many users prefer interacting with formatted text directly rather than editing markup.

Why markdown?

Obsidian promises freedom — plain text, no lock-in.

If all you really need is plain text notes, Obsidian is perfectly fine. But once you start extending the experience with plugins, your notes stop being truly portable and start depending on a specific ecosystem.

If you don't mind the jumpy, hacky feel of Obsidian's semi-WYSIWYG editor, then go for it. Just be aware that a properly engineered rich text editor can offer something different: a calmer, more consistent writing experience — without turning your notes into a mix of content and syntax.

In practice, Markdown in Obsidian lands in an uneasy middle ground — promised as portable yet subtly entangled in a web of disconnected plugins, framed as simple yet increasingly concealed behind a rich text-like interface.

Snippets takes a different approach

Snippets fundamentally disagrees with this design choice: the focus should not be on the format in which your data is written and stored.

If long-term access truly matters, the practical solution is simple: ensure that your data can be exported. Crucially, export acts as a reset: vendor-specific data is stripped away, leaving only clean, standardized Markdown. This is what you'd ultimately want if you're leaving for another tool. Today, exporting to Markdown is widely supported in the note taking realm, and Snippets provides this capability as well.

More importantly, the focus should not be on quantity, but on quality.

Opening a platform like Obsidian through a plugin system allows anyone to extend it. But this raises critical questions: who ensures the quality of these extensions? Who guarantees that multiple plugins work reliably together? And who ensures that the plugins you depend on will continue to be maintained?

In practice, no one can make these guarantees.

A consistently high-quality experience can only be achieved when the entire system is designed and maintained by a single, cohesive entity that retains full control over the ecosystem.

As outlined in the introduction, Snippets has been architected to support a wide range of note-taking use cases within a unified system. As a result, Snippets provides an experience that remains consistent while achieving a high degree of speed, smoothness, and overall usability.

To conclude, here's a list of things Snippets has which Obsidian does not:

• Getting started is really easy: you get a simple note taking app out of the box and can gradually start using the more advanced features as needed. Using Obsidian, you are confronted with a relatively complex UI and need to dig deep into the plugin ecosystem to get basic functionality.
• The app's architecture is built around well-defined internal JSON structures, enabling precise data representation. In contrast, Obsidian relies on loosely structured plain text, which is difficult to standardize or extend.
• At its core, the app introduces the concept of a Snippet — a structured piece of data paired with a dedicated UI. Obsidian, by comparison, is centered around plain text documents and lacks a cohesive model or guidelines for building alternative types of notes.
• Snippets has attributes, a flexible system that supports complex and structured data. Obsidian is limited to plain-text tags and plain-text properties.
• Snippets provides a dashboard feature for organizing and visualizing information. Obsidian does not offer this natively, and there are no equivalent plugins.
• Snippets supports auto-syncing to a GitHub repository over HTTP out of the box, both on desktop and mobile. Obsidian's Git integration relies on plugins, is typically schedule-based, and has limited or unreliable mobile support.
• Task management is a native feature in Snippets. In Obsidian, there are plugins, although some of them don't work on mobile while others come with a price tag.
• Snippets includes a navigation view with built-in icon support out of the box. In Obsidian, you need a plugin.
• Snippets features a powerful WYSIWYG rich text editor, while Obsidian uses a hybrid editing approach that mixes raw markdown with preview modes.
• Rich text color highlighting is supported natively in Snippets. In Obsidian, you need a plugin.
• Snippets includes a built-in flashcard system, enabling spaced repetition learning. In Obsidian, you need a plugin.