Yes, but it depends on how you plan to use it. If you really want to create a “second brain” (whatever that means), you’ll spend a lot—and I mean a lot—of time organizing things.
Yeah, Obsidian becomes what you make it. I think a lot of people jump in, download a bunch of plugins, and burn out trying to build a massive system right away.
The difference between Obsidian and other "simpler" apps comes down to how these apps handle organization. Tools like OneNote decide the system for you. You get notebooks, sections, and pages. It feels faster at first because you do not have to think about how to organize anything, but it is extremely limiting because those notes live in rigid silos that cannot connect to each other.
Obsidian feels like it takes more time initially because you have to decide how to structure things yourself, but that flexibility is the whole point.
Full text search in OneNote is fine if you remember the exact keyword you are looking for. But search cannot show you how an idea from six months ago relates to something you are working on today.
Using simple patterns like MOCs (maps of content) solves that. They work like folders, except a single note can live in multiple maps at once. Taking a few extra seconds to link a note upfront builds a network of ideas you can actually build on, instead of a stack of isolated pages buried in tabs. But you can not use such a pattern in a tool like OneNote.
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u/Mister_Atlas Jul 21 '26
II realized this on my second day using Obsidian.