Everything is stored in your device. You can back them up, encrypt and process however you want to. Works completely offline. Read your notes anytime, anywhere.

Variety of settings, and community themes & plugins, available from built-in marketplace. Every community plugin is open-source which means you can learn from it and develop your own.

It's becoming more powerful everyday, it seems like they add many functions within several days.

This allows you to link notes back and forth really easily.

Linking notes is a game changing feature. Very easy to use and link notes. Their implementation of markdown doesn't deviate from the standard form of markdown and so the same files can be used by other markdown programs without any consequence.
While renaming note link still works.

Ability to tag-as-you-write and find each occurrence of a tag in the entire vault makes it very easy to organize and retrieve notes. Supports nested tags.

A Vault in Obsidian is like a database. Internal links and files are not shared across Vaults. Each Vault is opened with a separate instance of Obsidian. Each Vault can have its unique app settings and plug-ins. Useful if you have distinct/unrelated projects or "data spaces" requiring different workflows and data relations.

Also open for anyone to develop their own extensions/plugins.

Daily Notes plug-in, when clicked, generates a new note with the current date. Great for journaling and reduces friction in your writing habit.

You can create a custom template for your Daily Note.

In Obsidian, pane = window = note = page

Obsidian allows you to open as many notes as you can fit concurrently in your screen. You can split a pane horizontally/vertically. You can lock/link panes so they scroll in sync, useful for and edit & preview modes.

The Graph view is more than an aesthetic gizmo. It allows you to grasp and recognise clusters of information, follow branches and easily filter out what you don't want to see. The "animate" option shows how your notes and links have grown organically. With a bit of tweaking to the visuals and the proper theme, your graph might even start to look like a disturbingly "alive", eerie thing.

This is a big difference, as having to read through long-form texts laden with [[links]] gives friction.

The onboarding consists of well-written help documentation (saved as a vault) served in small chunks and organized systematically so that you become familiar with all its features as well as get hands-on experience in real time.

When you hover on an internal [[link]], you get to preview the note without opening it on a new pane.

Page preview plugin must be enabled.

A plugin that, when clicked, surfaces a random note from your vault.

The app doesn't frustrate the user - the built-in help is excellent.

Hotkeys can be customized in settings.
Can switch on or off Vim key bindings in the editor settings.

Variety of file formats are directly embedded in the markdown preview, e.g. markdown, image, audio, video and PDF files.

Easily turn your notes into simple yet sleek powerpoint-style presentations by enabling the Slides plugin and adding the --- separator.

Due to the tool being very developer-friendly, there are tons of cool developments being made to it by 3rd party devs.

A pretty, alternative way to represent links between your notes.

A feature unseen in other tools.
From the help doc, "This can be useful when modifying a lot of lines in the same way, for example putting - at the beginning of multiple lines to turn them into a list, or appending [[ to a series of links you’ve copied from elsewhere."

No lock-in to a certain company - just markdown files on disk.

Supports extended searching by default. Community plugin called "Vantage" allows to make more advanced queries.

Allows to refer to a note with multiple names.

Available as a plugin.

Version Control for your vault with Obsidian Git plugin.

There's a Discord server and a forum. Join the community!

Allows exporting your markdown files as PDFs rendered with all of your plugins.

Uses MathJax.

Allows to create templates with built-in plugin. There's also powerful community plugin called "Templater".

Daily and Weekly notes with Calendar Plugin.

You can link to a block - e.g.: paragraph, blockquote, heading.

Advanced queries for the data-obsessed with Dataview Plugin.

Add a custom metadata to a note with YAML front matter.

Saving and loading workspaces.

With Excalidraw.

Uses Mermaid.

Supports Citations and provides inserting from Zotero.

Variety of planning and organization plugins, such as Kanban boards or Day Planner.

Use HTML in a note.

Supports importing from tools such as Notion, Evernote, OneNote, Apple Notes, Bear, Zkn3, TiddlyWiki 5, and Roam Research. Refer to Obsidian Help for more info.

Update your Discord status to show your friends what are you working on with Discord Rich Presence plugin.

With other options like notion, we can not see how the data is actually stored.

Translations are made by the community at GitHub repository.

When taking notes, you can just grab a print screen from your clipboard and paste into the notes without having to do any file management