An Obsidian alternative for the Mac

People go looking for an Obsidian alternative for about four reasons, and the right answer is different for each. It is worth working out which one you are before downloading anything.

1. It is an Electron app and you can feel it.
2. The plugin ecosystem became a hobby and you wanted a notes app.
3. You want it on your phone and you do not want to pay for sync.
4. You want out of plain files entirely and into something prettier.

If you are number four, nothing below is for you and you want Bear or Craft, both of which are excellent and neither of which keeps your notes as files. Numbers one and two are what this post is about. Number three is the awkward one and I will come to it.

The thing to check first, in 2026

Ask any candidate one question: where are my notes?

A surprising number of apps described as “Markdown apps” write Markdown syntax while storing your notes in a database. Bear does, and says so clearly in its documentation. Craft keeps documents on its own servers by default. And in April 2026 Logseq split in two: the version carrying the name now uses SQLite, and the Markdown one continues as Logseq OG under a stated maintenance-only policy.

That is a real narrowing. If “my notes are ordinary files in a folder I picked” is the reason you liked Obsidian in the first place, the field of apps that still agree with you is smaller than it was two years ago.

What is actually available

Stay with Obsidian if you use plugins seriously. This is the honest first answer and most alternatives posts will not give it to you. Nothing else has Dataview, or four thousand community plugins, or a vetted directory with automated security scanning, which Obsidian introduced in May 2026. If your setup depends on three plugins, leaving costs you those three plugins and you will not get them back.

Logseq or Logseq OG if you think in outlines. Open source, block references, and a genuinely different shape of tool. Read the April announcement first so you know which of the two products you are installing. The longer version is here.

Bear if the phone matters more than the file. Beautiful, cheap, syncs over iCloud, tags done better than anyone. Your notes live in a SQLite container. Longer version.

Craft if your notes turn into documents other people read. Every platform, real collaboration, genuinely handsome output. Longer version.

Skein, which I make, if you are on a Mac, you want the files, and you would rather not configure anything. It is native rather than Electron, 11.1 MB rather than 218, free, and it has no plugin system at all: wikilinks, backlinks, a local graph, an infinite canvas, live queries, templates, quick capture and full-text search are simply present. The comparison, with numbers.

The phone problem

If you capture notes on a phone, your options among file-based Mac apps get thin fast, and I am not going to pretend Skein solves it: Skein is Mac only and will stay Mac only.

The arrangement that works is a folder in iCloud Drive with a Mac app at one end and any iOS Markdown editor at the other, since they are all just reading the same .md files. It is less tidy than Obsidian Sync, which costs $4 a month and is worth it if tidiness is what you want.

How to try one without risking anything

This is the part that makes plain files worth the argument. If your vault is Markdown, every app here that reads folders can open the same folder, and none of them needs to import it.

1. Copy your vault folder. Work on the copy. There is no reason not to.
2. Point the new app at the copy. If it asks you to import rather than to open, that tells you something important about where your notes are about to live.
3. Use it for a week on real work, not on a test note. Every app is pleasant for ten minutes.
4. Open the folder in Obsidian again afterwards and check nothing was rewritten behind your back.

Point four is the one people skip. An app that quietly reformats your files, renumbers your lists or rewrites your frontmatter is an app that has made a decision about your notes without asking. Skein has a test suite whose entire job is proving that a file it opened and saved comes back byte for byte identical, and I mention it here because it is the check you should be running on everything, not because it is a marketing point.

The short version

Obsidian is a good app. The two honest reasons to leave it are that you want a Mac app rather than a browser, or that you want the app to have made the decisions instead of handing you a workshop. If either is you, Skein is free and reads the vault you already have. If neither is, stay: the plugins are worth more than the 200 MB costs you.

Figures checked 14 August 2026, from each app’s own site, documentation and release listings. I make one of the apps named here, so read accordingly, and tell me if anything above is unfair or out of date.