Obsidian Canvas gives a vault an infinite board, with notes, images, PDFs and web pages laid out as cards and kept locally in the open JSON Canvas format. Filamental reads the same folder and works on the structure: every connection carries a type you name, the layout can arrange itself from those connections, and the whole of it becomes a document you can hand over.
On a canvas each line is drawn and labelled one at a time, with a colour if you want one. It’s quick for a sketch, and the label belongs to that one line.
In Filamental you define a connector type once, such as “supersedes”, “funds” or “evidenced by”, with its colour, direction and pull, and every connection of that kind shares it. Rename the type and every instance follows. Show one type at a time to read a single layer of the structure, or ask Pathfinder for the route between two nodes and read it back as a chain of named relationships.
Canvas gives you snapping, aligning and even spacing, so the board looks the way you place it. Filamental lets you place nodes by hand too, in three dimensions or flat in 2D, and adds Dark Energy, which spaces each part by how connected it is, so a cluster shows itself before you’d have drawn a group around it. When you want a hierarchy, Layers stacks the structure in bands by type.
A line on a canvas is stored in the .canvas file, alongside where each card sits, its size and its colour. Filamental writes each connection into the front matter of the note it belongs to, so the structure travels with the notes themselves: readable in Obsidian, in any editor, or by an AI pointed at the folder, with Filamental closed.
Connect Claude Desktop, Claude Code, Cursor or any other MCP client and it reads that structure directly, what each thing is and how it relates, on your own AI account, with nothing passing through us.
Publisher Studio turns the space into something you can hand to a person who’ll never open a vault: a link that opens in any browser, on a phone as readily as on a desktop, with nothing to install, or a single HTML file. Press Present and it fills a screen for a room.
Filamental’s Personal plan is free and permanent, with no account and no card, unlimited spaces and everything AI, and an imported vault arrives whole however many notes it has. The paid tier is $120 a year, or $12 a month, and covers handing work over beyond the one live link that’s free, including presenting.
For some jobs. Canvas is Obsidian’s infinite board for laying out notes, images, PDFs and web pages as cards, stored in the open JSON Canvas format. Filamental reads the same folder of Markdown and works on the structure: every connection carries a type you name, with a direction and a pull, the layout can arrange itself in 3D or 2D from those connections, and the result can be published as a document. A board you arrange by eye suits Canvas, and a structure where each relationship has a named type suits Filamental.
Not directly, since Filamental doesn’t read the JSON Canvas format. The notes a canvas points at are ordinary Markdown in your vault, so they come across when you open or import the vault. To bring the canvas’s lines across as well, attach the .canvas file to a message in Filamental’s built-in AI window and ask it to add them as typed connections.
A line on a canvas carries an optional label and colour, set one line at a time, and is stored in the .canvas file. A Filamental connection belongs to a connector type you define once, with a name, colour, direction and pull, so every connection of that kind matches and renaming the type updates them all. The connection is written into the note’s own front matter, so it travels with the note.
No. Filamental works in 3D or flat in 2D, and one button switches between them without losing anything you’ve arranged. In 2D the camera locks front-on, so the structure reads like a diagram.
The desktop app’s Personal plan is free and permanent, with no account and no card, and importing a vault brings the whole of it across on any plan. The paid tier, at $120 a year or $12 a month, covers handing work over beyond the one live link that’s free, such as more links, updating a link already sent, the HTML download and presenting.
Open the vault in Filamental, bring the canvas’s lines across through the AI, give each kind of line a name, then press Dark Energy.