obsidian

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title: vs Obsidian type: comparison

vs Obsidian

Obsidian and mind-map look superficially similar — both store concepts/pages, both have concepts/wikilinks and concepts/backlinks and a design/wikilinks-as-graph. Where they diverge:

Architecture

	Obsidian	mind-map
Storage	Files on disk	Files on disk
App	Electron desktop	Web UI served from a Go binary
Index	Internal, opaque	SQLite, visible, queryable
Agent access	Community plugins, no first-party	First-class architecture/mcp-server
Size	~150 MB	~38 MB (design/lightweight)

What Obsidian does better

• Plugin ecosystem. Massive community library; Canvas, Dataview, Excalidraw, etc.
• Rich editor. Inline rendering, hotkey-rich.
• Mobile. Native iOS/Android apps.
• Sync. First-party (paid) and Git plugin (free) options.

What mind-map does better

• Agent access. architecture/mcp-server is in the binary; no plugins to install. Any MCP-speaking agent gets agents/mcp-tools tools immediately.
• Visible index. .mind-map.db is just SQLite. Open it in DB Browser. Run queries.
• Smaller footprint. design/lightweight.
• No Electron. Web UI runs in your existing browser.
• REST API. Anything that can curl can use it; not just Obsidian plugins.

Migrating

Your Obsidian vault is a directory of markdown files — point mind-map serve --dir /path/to/vault at it and you're done. Wikilinks render the same. Backlinks compute the same. Frontmatter parses the same.

The other direction works too: a mind-map wiki is just markdown files, openable in Obsidian.

See also

• design/rationale
• comparisons/logseq
• comparisons/notion