Both read the same folder of Markdown, so you don’t have to choose, and most people who try both won’t. Obsidian is an excellent and beloved home for knowledge that’s been worked out and written down. Filamental is for the half that’s still moving: arranging it, saying how the parts relate, and handing it to somebody who wasn’t there.
Obsidian keeps your notes as plain Markdown in a folder you own, lets you link one to another while you’re still mid-sentence, and has a community that has built a plugin for very nearly everything. For a personal library of what you know, it’s the tool a great many people chose, and we’re among them.
Nothing on this page is an argument against any of that. It’s about a different job, the one that comes before the writing settles down.
A vault is notes that point at each other, and a link between two of them says they’re related. Filamental works one level up, on the structure the notes describe. A connection carries a type you name yourself, a direction and a strength, so supersedes, blocks and evidenced by are different relationships rather than one plain line, and every node has a classification with its own colour.
You arrange that structure by hand, or let Dark Energy, our auto-arrange, spread it out, and the layout you settle on is kept. Then the same project opens in the Publisher as pages you can format, share as a link or present on a screen, for the people who’ll never open a vault.
The model is the one a photographer uses when one picture moves between two applications. A vault opens in Filamental when there’s something to work out, and when the work has settled the project drops back into the vault as notes, with its structure still written in their front matter.
Bringing a vault across is one step. Import from Obsidian turns your links into connections, keeps the fields your notes already have, such as tags and aliases, and lists any links that point at notes that don’t exist. The connections arrive untyped on purpose, since only you know whether one note supersedes another. Filamental’s own layout and settings live in a hidden .filamental folder, so the vault stays a vault.
If you’d rather start inside Obsidian, our free plugin, 3D Filamental Graph, draws your vault as a 3D graph in a tab, and one button opens the folder in Filamental when you want the rest.
The plugin costs nothing, and so does the desktop app’s Personal plan, permanently, with no account and no card. 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.
Not in the sense of replacing it. Both read the same folder of Markdown files, so they work side by side on one vault. Obsidian is a notes app for writing and keeping knowledge, and Filamental is a 3D and 2D workspace for arranging a structure, saying how things relate with typed connections, and turning it into a document you can share or present. Many people use Obsidian for the settled half of their work and Filamental for the half that's still being worked out.
Yes. A vault and a Filamental space are both folders of Markdown files, so one folder can be both, and neither application locks it against the other. Filamental keeps its layout and settings in a hidden .filamental folder inside, and the details it adds to a note go in that note's front matter alongside the fields that were already there.
It adds its own details, such as an identifier, a name, a classification and any connections, to a note's front matter when it first takes that note in, and keeps every field that was already there, such as tags and aliases. The text of the note isn't touched and nothing is moved or renamed. Take a copy of the vault first if it's irreplaceable, as you would before trying any new tool on it.
A link says two notes are related, while a Filamental connection says how, carrying a type you name yourself, a direction and a strength, so supersedes, blocks and evidenced by become different relationships rather than one plain line. When you import a vault its links become connections that start untyped, and typing the ones that matter is the work.
The Obsidian plugin is free, and so is the desktop app's Personal plan, permanently, with no account and no card. 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.
Import a copy, since Filamental writes its details into the notes it takes in. When it’s done, it goes back into the vault with its structure still attached.