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Obsidian was not built from a verified list of six “classic apps.” It began in 2020 as co-founders Erica Xu and Shida Li’s attempt to make a personal knowledge-base tool that worked for them. Xu had tried a private MediaWiki setup and TiddlyWiki; other apps, including Roam Research and Evernote, help explain the wider note-taking landscape, but the available accounts do not establish them as direct blueprints for Obsidian.
Obsidian’s starting point was a personal knowledge-base problem
Obsidian’s official About page identifies Xu as co-founder and COO and Li as co-founder and CTO, and says Xu started Obsidian in 2020. In a Ness Labs interview, Xu said she had been thinking about a personal knowledge-base app for roughly two years. During quarantine in 2020, she and Li began building one as an experiment to meet a personal need. They had also worked together on Dynalist, a separate piece of team background rather than evidence of a direct Obsidian feature lineage.
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Which earlier apps did the founders say they tried?
MediaWiki: a personal wiki workflow
Xu said she had set up a private MediaWiki instance for herself. That is evidence she had tried a personal wiki workflow; the interview does not say Obsidian directly inherited particular MediaWiki features.
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Xu also said she tried TiddlyWiki and that it did not work out for her. Her account supports treating it as part of her personal exploration, not as one item in a confirmed list of six influences.
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How Obsidian’s approach differs from conventional note capture
Obsidian stores notes as local Markdown files, according to CEO Steph Ango in The Verge’s Decoder interview. He described links between notes as the product’s core unit: “What makes Obsidian unique is that it sort of works like Wikipedia, in that the core unit is a link between your notes.” A link can point to a note that does not exist yet, so a user can capture a connection first and create the destination note later as their interests develop.
That linking model makes Obsidian useful for connecting ideas, rather than only collecting individual notes. Ango contrasted Obsidian’s local-file approach with Notion’s cloud-service architecture. He also named Apple Notes and Notion as apps whose basic note-taking interaction resembles opening Obsidian; that comparison describes the user experience, not direct influence.
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What other familiar apps contribute to the comparison
| Tool | Role supported by the cited account | What that does—and does not—show |
|---|---|---|
| Roam Research | Ango said he had used Roam and credited it with inventing much of the then-current note-taking paradigm. | This is Ango’s retrospective assessment of a broader paradigm, not proof that Roam directly supplied specific Obsidian features. |
| Evernote | Ango used it as a familiar comparison for basic note-taking and said it had done a good job with web clipping. | The interview does not identify Evernote as a direct design ancestor of Obsidian. |
| Apple Notes and Notion | Ango compared their basic note-taking interaction with opening Obsidian; he also contrasted Notion’s cloud-centered architecture with Obsidian’s local files. | These comparisons clarify product differences, but do not establish a lineage. |
Why customization and plugins matter
Xu described Obsidian as highly customizable because she had repeatedly found details of existing note apps unsatisfactory. Ango explained that plugins expanded what Obsidian could do and let users adapt it to workflows such as calendars, task lists, themes, and integrations. That is a story of Obsidian growing its own toolset—not evidence that it simply copied another app.
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So did six classic apps shape Obsidian?
The sources do not establish a definitive set of six apps that shaped Obsidian, or a ranked “ultimate” note-taking tool. They establish a narrower, more useful account: Xu explored personal wiki tools before Obsidian; she and Li built the app to meet a personal knowledge-management need; and Ango situated it alongside products and ideas that shaped the broader note-taking conversation. Obsidian’s local Markdown files, links, and extensibility explain its own design without turning every comparison into a claim of influence.
For readers asking whether Obsidian is based on a particular note-taking method, a community discussion on the Obsidian Forum is relevant, but a forum reply is not an official founder account.
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