📂 List of active FOSS Obsidian Clones

Tier 1 (fully Obsidian-compatible)

To be listed here, the FOSS Obsidian clone must work with the Obsidian vault format without requiring a custom importer. This means same Markdown¹ and JSON Canvas², same bidirectional link handling with short path suffixes³, and same arbitrary folder structure for notes and their attachments. Other features⁴ are optional.

• Lokus → cross-platform, canvas supported⁵, graph and base views supported
• Otterly → cross-platform, canvas planned
• Cherit → cross-platform, canvas planned
• Mdit → macOS-optimized, canvas and base planned
• Foam → VS Code plugin, not cross-platform

Tier 2 (opinionated)

Implementations listed here require an importer step for Obsidian vaults due to having a hard-coded attachment folder or forcing full vault paths for wikilinks⁶. While canvas support is not mandatory for listing here, an arbitrary folder structure for markdown notes is still essential.

• HelixNotes → cross-platform, UpNote-like UI

🚀 Tech Stack for Building Obsidian Clones

Essential tools for developers that want to make Obsidian clones a true commodity for the future, with their own clone.

Framework/Filesystem

• Tauri
• Notify

UI

• React
• Svelte

Markdown

• Obsidian-Flavored Markdown spec
• reMark
• markdown-it
• CodeMirror
• ProseMirror

Canvas

• JSON Canvas spec
• Open Canvas Interchange Format tools (see this issue)
• Excalidraw
• TLDraw
• React Flow | Svelte Flow
• Throwdown JSON Canvas editor (experimental)

🌎 Community

This ecosystem is built for anyone interested in FOSS alternatives compatible with the Obsidian vault format. There are three channels to get involved:

• Discord → Chat with developers and other users about the future of the ecosystem on our server.
• r/ObsidianAlternative → Follow the latest updates and ask questions about the mentioned projects on our subreddit.
• Github → Know of a project we missed or want to improve this list? You can open an issue.

We encourage FOSS enthusiasts, PKM users, and developers to join and help grow this ecosystem!

Footnotes

1. Obsidian-flavored Markdown with a WYSIWYG table editing helper. ↩

2. Implementing JSON Canvas as storage format must at least appear on the roadmap. The editors are free to use whatever frontend and internal representation format they want during editing. ↩

3. The link handler indexes all vault paths alphanumerically and resolves links using path suffixes. Backlinks are automatically updated when paths are renamed. When two suffix homonyms are introduced in the index—by adding or renaming a path—existing links to the lowest-ranking homonym are prefixed to maintain uniqueness. Aliases in sync with the base file name are added to hide these inconvenient prefixes from the reading view. ↩

4. Optional features may include cross-platform support, P2P sync/collab, secondary YAML metadata, metadata views (graph/base/orphans/homonyms), and icon-enhanced links/file explorer. ↩

5. Only Excalidraw format for now, but using JSON Canvas as storage format is on the roadmap. ↩

6. This prevents changing the scope of the vault, such as combining two separate vaults in a single parent vault. ↩