I really wanted to like this, but unfortunately couldn't see how it improves my experience over Obsidian or VS Code.
The fact that I have to juggle between OpenKnowledge and Codex to engage the AI, while also accepting a barebones Obsidian, is a real bummer. From what I can tell, you are saving me a few key strokes with moving prompts around. What I really want is the AI to live IN the app, like VS Code, and then move around the documents like it is Obsidian. I'll accept a plain terminal, but a pretty UI would feel like a better fit. My sense is that the new value add here is a set of skills and mcp servers, which probably already exist for Obsidian, or could more productively be spun up. I looked at the plugins again in Obsidian and found Claudian, which lets me bring my local models and Codex in the right pane. This is perfect, so sorry your app is not for me (yet), but thanks for getting me to look again at my tooling.
I want to throw my vote in for local models. Gemma4-31b is working well for me on these types of tasks, and not having an easy way to plug that in is a deal breaker. Embeddings should certainly have a local option, as they are cheap to compute. For what it is worth, I use LMStudio which supports OpenAI and Anthropic compatible api endpoints, so it should be easy to wire in.
A big caveat, I'm not trying to share my vault with other people, and I can see making that pain go away being worth switching. That said, I feel like you're targeting a weird market, where you want people technical enough to use LLMs and GitHub, but not so technical they can't customize a shared environment.
I would switch if the whole experience was self contained and "clean." Right now, it feels like a well dressed wrapper for pretty basic functionality.
Thank you for this project - I am excited to check it out!
My current agentic workflow is having a github repo that is a workspace and essentially a single obsidian vault over it called agents. I modify with Claude code (or other harness), check diffs in...VSCode and read it in...Obsidian.
It's separate from my actual personal Obsidian vault (that I don't send to any AI providers), and is only for agents. It's been really nice on all sorts of varied projects and for performing web research. I also have a bun monorepo setup in the root with varied tools for search, fetching individual websites, setting up folder structures - etc.
But essentially, in my experience, the moment you tell the model that it's in an Obsidian Vault - magic happens.
I am so curious how this will play in with it all and am hoping this will improve my workflow!
To add one more thing: Codex/Claude/Cursor can open the OpenKnowledge web viewer within their own embedded web viewer. So you don't need the two apps open.
And we embedded the Claude terminal within the OpenKnowledge app itself if you prefer that. We are working on embedding the AI (including local models) more deeply within the app itself as well, expect updates in next week.
I have been trying to replace Obsidian with something for over 4 years now ever since I started using it. But I am just too comfortable now and I have it set up exactly the way I like and extended it with plugins etc.
I tried other stuff but nothing imo can beat its utility to me. I also personally wouldn't want an AI or anyone else looking through my vault or want AI in it.
Fully local, but can't integrate with any local LLM?
I do think a fully OSS Obsidian-like that syncs natively is an impressive accomplishment, though the usefulness of this is limited with OSX being the only supported platform. If an Android app is in the works I'll definitely follow the project!
Personally I just want to see more support for local LLMs. I haven't been doing much coding lately but am interested in setting up Qwen 3.6 if I can obtain the hardware
Amazing, thanks. I've decided to try daily driving this instead of Obsidian, but I'm a bit curious how the syncing works. I copied an Obsidian vault to a new folder, and when I start the import process in OpenKnowledge it asks me if I want it "shared" or "local only". If I select "Shared", where does the git repo live that other instances of OK sync from?
edit: This seems to be "team-oriented" rather than geared towards individuals who might want to edit their notes from multiple devices?
And only seems to be able to sync with github... In addition to my privacy concerns, I'm curious if there could be issues with lots of images and other attachments since git can choke on repos that contain lots of larger files without github's git-lfs extension.
Last question I have is if any plugin system comparable to Obsidian's is planned (or already supported)? I realize this is probably a massive ask for an open-source project, and something Obsidian gets a lot of flack for as well, so I'm certainly not expecting it, but I am curious if it's on the roadmap already
To clarify, OpenKnowledge will never publish your project to GitHub automatically. When you init a new project, selecting "Shared" means that OK config files will not be gitignored. Selecting "Local" will add them to your gitignore. Other open knowledge instances can only sync if you have explicitly published your project to GitHub (which you can do from the app) and enabled auto-sync in OpenKnowledge. Some docs related to this can be found here https://openknowledge.ai/docs/features/github-sync and https://openknowledge.ai/docs/features/share.
It would make a repo in your own GitHub account. You can choose whether that repo is in your personal GitHub or your GitHub org. We'll make that clearer in the UX.
Feel free to ping me any additional feedback any time (here or @nickgomez on X).
On a side note, I find it interesting that a few recent projects are going for the Open Knowledge name. The Open Knowledge Foundation (https://okfn.org) is one of the first/largest proponents of the open data movement (think of it as a Free Software Foundation but for data, not software). They started in 2004 and developed many of the open data licenses and widely used infrastructure tools like CKAN (an open data portal platform).
OKFN and OKF are the same thing: "Open Knowledge Foundation (OKF) is a global, non-profit network that promotes and shares information at no charge, including both content and data [--] founded by Rufus Pollock on 20 May 2004 [--] Between May 2016 and May 2019 the organisation was named Open Knowledge International"
You should just integrate with pi.dev, like I did for https://github.com/rcarmo/piclaw (which has replaced Obsidian for me). I too integrated a terminal and a WYSIWYG Markdown editor (as well as plugins for a mindmap, kanban, etc.)
Ye built in AI is the only way this makes sense to me. Or otherwise could just add a terminal where you can run any TUI mapped to that notes/vaults dir or something.
For ages I've been looking for a way to easily share & sync a simple knowledgebase (HTML/MD and other files in folders) with my team (= including non-technical people), using Git as the sync/versioning layer, without it being too technical, and without getting vendor lock-in with expensive & unnecessarily complex cloud-based platforms.
Having built-in AI integration without relying on sketchy plugins would be the cherry on top (although, seriously missing the option to connect with any openai-compatible LLM provider like someone else mentioned here).
Seems like this might almost offer exactly that? I'll have to try it out...
1. Name collison happenstance. We'd locked in the npm package and domains prior to their announcement.
2. Our templates are Open Knowledge Format compliant and we have an explicit quickstart around making an OKF knowledge base. You can think of OKF as a format/standard for the content, and OpenKnowledge (our app) as an IDE/editor for any type of markdown based content.
Sweet, let me know the experience, we're actively thinking about how to make OKF KBs editing a good experience. E.g. a linter or other conformant mode.
Did you look at the OKF repo from Google? Open Knowledge seems to be a common term these days for similar solutions. I think OKF is more of the protocol for wiki-for-llm while you have more of the bells and whistles
This is interesting and a promising start. I gave this a shot.
I'd love to see support for Bases and obsidian plugins that are typescript/open source anyway - I use a few such as excalidraw/mermaid etc.
I also want to use my local model.
When collaborating on Notion, we had to pop into Google docs for comments, suggestions and history. I see this as important even when working with AI on something.
I'm working on a PKM myself, and while wysiwyg won't be my first priority and I'm aiming for a more hackable surface, this is very interesting and I'll most likely take inspiration from it for integrating AI workflows into my notes
I recently moved from Obsidian to a self-hosted Outline. Primarily because I needed an easy to use solution for sharing a knowledgebase with the team. Obsidian doesn't do team. Notion appears to, but Outline fit the bill so well, and was free. It has an MCP server, just like Notion.
I do wish that there was a way to provide filesystem level access to the markdown files to an AI agent. I think that might be faster.
Let me know if you see any gap with OpenKnowledge an this scenario. It's exactly what we aimed to solve (files are markdown and local, sync and team sharing happens via git/GitHub but is abstracted away from user).
Electron apps tend to fall down in the minutiae of the little things that native apps get right (around things like selection, scrolling, various small affordances across various levels). Would love to see something like this be more native app upfront, than starting out with something that will always leave that top 10% of what makes a nice feeling app unobtainable.
You win hard on this if you have the best possible UX that feels natural to drive. You just also ran if not because obsidian/notion etc. are already there (and have the people to put into those random edge cases that make electron apps bad).
Personally I’ve been trying very hard to migrate away from git+Obsidian project setup according to the OpenAI Harness Engineering. It works wonderfully in Codex Desktop.
The only gotcha - I want to share knowledge bases with the team in a way that is:
(1) versioned (a la git, not Notion)
(2) usable from any chat (a la MCP)
(3) basic access controls for team setup.
(4) works through the interface that optimizes accuracy and token use across agentic architectures and LLMs.
Funnily enough, 4 is the easiest one (I have a platform for agent training and verification where I publish fun challenges for agents in simulated worlds around agentic commerce and personal OSes. With 98M agentic interactions recorded, that is already enough information for tuning)
Gotcha. We're optimizing for the same scenarios, may be worth a look at our implementation in case transferable to yours. See:
#1 - the "autosync" and GitHub integrations do exactly this.
#2 - The app auto-instals skills/MCP server configs for a few harnesses
#4 - We embedded agentic-search capabilities via the MCP server (e.g. we virtualize 'ls' and 'cat' so we can enrich it for the agent for better hierchical navigation).
#1 - the tricky part there is in scenarios from a few AI Native teams. There often are a multiple agents rolling out linked changesets to a bunch of documents on behalf of controlling humans. Eg updating compliance policy, and references and change log and current procedures at the same time.
So changesets have to be atomic across multiple documents and semantic (so that agents can resolve the changes). Weak per-document versioning isn’t enough here.
#4. Nice! Same story, but also virtualizing ripgrep, find and tree (plus MD-aware outline mode). With that setup even agents with weaker local models (eg runnable on DGX Spark) can solve complex tasks in the Agentic Commerce domain.
I don't understand how Obsidian, a collection of markdown files, isn't already AI friendly. It's hard for me to imagine a more AI-friendly but still usable way to organize your notes.
What we did to go "beyond" is build in skills and an MCP server into the app, and auto-install those into e.g. Claude, Codex, and Cursor formats. Also added a web viewer so that e.g. Claude Desktop can open up the editor directly within it's embedded web viewer.
There is at least one MCP server in Obsidian's community plugins, plus the REST API access capability which is already addressed in several open source MCP plugins.
I use Obsidian as a persistent context store and knowledge graph (..loosely defined, i.e. link/back-link) for both Claude Code and Hermes, while also using it to generate live Wiki pages for working documentation. The native replication and the Git integrations work well keeping it all synchronized across multiple harnesses, as well. I use the native MCP server mentioned above, plus just letting the agent work with the markdown files directly.
That said, having built out all of this manually I'm excited to try out something that addresses much of this out of the box. I'd also be curious about the integration with Hermes/OpenClaw/etc.
Why not build skills and an MCP for markdown or obsidian? I'm using both at present and it's fine, bit would like to understand the differentiating factor here.
Example of the functionality that's OK specific: we made it so that e.g. Claude Desktop (or Codex, Cursor) can open the OpenKnowledge web viewer within their own embedded web viewers, to make for better side-by-side editing. Since Obsidian is closed source, we wouldn't be able to make that work.
Making the skills/MCP specific to OpenKnowledge allows us to optimize experiences like that.
We wanted to make our own editor experience, allows us to do things like proper WYSWIG editing (Notion-like editor). MCP/AI integrations were one piece.
This. I just open the Obsidian folder (aka "vault") in VS Code and BOOM, it is AI friendly. I just hack on the .md files like I would code with Copilot.
Same flow I had. We did a few things to make the flow easier, like making it easy for Claude Desktop to open the OpenKnowledge web viewer within its own web view. Also exposing things like vector search, etc.
Our goal was you wouldn't need a separate IDE and to work well with the coding agent desktop apps.
But alas -- markdown files on your local machine is indeed the way for being AI friendly.
Our bar was "Notion-grade", i.e. drag and drop blocks, slash commands, select to highlight/bold, etc.
I don't think I'd seen an extension that does that. It was a technically very hard problem, rich text editors usually use a lossy intermediary format (e.g. prosemirror).
The feature I am waiting for in all of these editors is integrating 'red lining' as a channel for LLM input. This is the best interface for working on a text. https://www.roughdraft.md/ does the core idea pretty well - but is not well integrated with the rest (browsing, etc).
I wish (in general, not a criticism of this project) there was some way for claude.ai to write to a version controlled KB, ie from chats in the mobile app
This is mostly a Claude problem
So far the closest thing to what I want is using Claude Code in the mobile app to work in some repo and tell it not to write code, just have a discussion, and then eventually ask it to write the md doc or whatever.
I can then add that GitHub repo to a claude.ai 'Project' files and chats within the project can see the contents, but can't write back to it unfortunately.
It's rather easy to ask claude code to make you plugins, although you need to instruct it to break the sandbox in which Obsidian run and I think I'm currently hardcoding some paths.
e.g. I have a plugin that when triggered reads a text and asks the LLM whether there are unclear points and unwarranted leaps of reasoning.
I wonder how it compares to https://github.com/refactoringhq/tolaria They look similarly scoped. I haven't used it yet and it's great that there is more choice now
Good point. But doesn’t Obsidian also support a CLI? In theory, wouldn’t that also work well with agents? I’m still curious what pain points this project solves compared with Obsidian or Notion.
Two key pieces:
1. True WYSIWYG UI
2. MCPs and skills support showing the OpenKnowledge web UI within the Desktop apps, as well as things like agentic search with embeddings and other goodies. We also add AI affordances into the UI, including an embedded Claude/Codex terminal.
PSA: If your comment includes a variant of "I like releasing directly AI in my vault..." or "My vault as context is required..."
I ignore your comment :D
I see no knowledge graph kinda of things which any replacement of obsidian needs.
Currently its probably just a less good obsidian copilot (but at least its open source)
There is a knowledge graph -- we'll update the readme to make clearer. We support wikilinks and forward/backward links are presented to the agent through the MCP server for "agentic search". There's semantic search support as well, etc.
Warning for those who use Codex: when I started this, it trashed my Codex config.toml file. I'm sure that it'll be fixed upstream soon, not a deal breaker, just a warning for anyone installing it right this second. Thankfully I had backups.
It nuked a substantial portion of the file, unfortunately, not just the comments. It basically gave me a reset config.toml with your MCP and not too much else.
I have a nontrivial config. Will share on your Issues page when I can.
I've been using my opencode go subscription for Obsidian, saving my Claude sub for actual coding. Any reason why it's limited to Codex, Claude, and Cursor?
100% second for OpenCode. for a lot of people it's becoming a very important second choice. I use it for cheaper models when my $20 claude code runs out for the day and I get a lot out of it.
Consider making the first image in the readme either static, or move slowly enough that there's reasonable dwell time to understand the UI when it's done with rendering. Right now there's nowhere on the gif that you can focus on to understand that part of the app in any detail, so it's basically a flashy box of randomness.
Rant warning (sorry OP but I have to vent somehow) : AI-first is the proof that things didn't change that much. It's a bit like "Roomba-compatible" flat. If somehow you have to changes your ways for a tool to work then clearly that tool isn't that flexible. It's perfectly fine but to me it's quite tiring when it's about the most hyped industry ever funded.
How does this integrate with Git? is the CRDT stack mainly for syncronizing locally? and then "snapshotted" into git? Or how would the team collaboration part of this work?
Git is used for the "auto-sync" and sharing functionality. Uses GitHub as the source of truth for the content.
Currently the CRDT is local and is used so that agents can edit the markdown concurrently with the user, and the user can edit it via the WYSWIG editor or the raw markdown editor. CRDT powers the live indicators, etc.
CRDT and git are reconciled so that git stays as the canotical version history.
Looking into Slite now to check. With OpenKnowledge, the content is just markdown files on-disk, so there shouldn't be anything exclusionary about it. Not sure how/if Slite handles markdown files. Will take a look.
I recommend taking a look at appimages or flatpak within Linux if you wish to do so and if you do appimage, try to take an older system within a VM from my understanding as then you wouldn't have issues of glibc which I have sometimes heard. I'd be interested to help if that is of your interest.
The signature figure on the repo shows file contents alongside a chat window. Is this actually supported by the app? I can't figure out how to open a chat window in the app without handing off to an external AI app.
The external agents can open the open knowledge web viewer within their own embedded web UIs.
Within the OpenKnowledge app itself, right now we do support the Claude terminal embedded inside - try that out. We're looking at adding more within-app capabilities soon.
You'll note that's the claude app if you actually look at the preview, which while confusing advertising what isn't even your app, does show how it works with the hand off.
how does the collab work locally. do you add provision for connecting to a yjs sync server? or do you have plan to add this option as premium only in future?
collab between agent <> human happens locally via yjs
collab between human <> human happens using git/GitHub. so collab right now is auto-sync (~few min latency) + sharing functionality. Richer realtime collab is indeed something we're looking at.
Hi, I'm also currently chipping away at a PKM. I was wondering what would be things you would want to consider switching? I'm trying very hard to be performance focused + easy onboarding for obsidian heavy users.
Neat, trying it out now. Are the Open Knowledge skills actually needed, if this is just markdown and folders? The skills are large, I'd prefer not filling up context.
Skills / MCPs are not hard requirement, they're tailored for the desktop agents to be able to leverage built in tools we make available for e.g. agentic search over the content and manipulating the open knowledge web viewer and editor.
Sounds cool. How do agents know what else is going on in the doc? They have an embedded browser and they do like mutation observer type stuff? Or does the integration do polling?
Since Obsidian is just markdown, you can just open an Obsidian vault with OpenKnowledge. We made it so that most Obsidian syntax is supported, like wikilinks.
For Notion, we don't have a migration tool, but you can try the export to markdown approach.
Recommend trying it to get a feel, and if are looking to migrate and facing friction let me know details.
Obsidian is a lot more than "just markdown" though.
For example, with the appropriate plugins like dataview and charts, it's possible to create dashboards, lists, and tables that update automatically based on data elements present in documents or documents themselves. I use it to have views over my to-do lists (daily routine items, tasks that are overdue, upcoming tasks, etc), make dashboards, and show lists of documents edited on a particular date.
I'd love to migrate away from Obsidian towards something that's not proprietary, but I haven't seen anything that allows querying other documents.
That doesn't mean it's a design direction that open knowledge should go in, but just a data point that reducing Obsidian vaults to "just markdown" misses what some users use it for.
Yes makes sense, the database site of it is the primary point we don't support yet. We want to do it in the way we think is best and will keep in mind how to make the experience good for existing Obsidian users.
Nothing personal, but there genuinely ought to be consequences for using "open source" in the context of something like this tied to proprietary AI services.
Local models should be the first choice in that framing.
I don't believe I've seen a KM app with true WYSWIG that's markdown underneath. Rest is indeed mainly packaging up all the second-brain, MCP, skills, and AI integrations to be out-of-the-box. More to come.
Interesting using tiptap with codemirror, i guess to get around that tiptap doesn’t really support html very well but a shame that we need to use two editors to get the complete experience. Still, nicely done!
Just my personal pref with your roadmap, don't waste time on the electron app, I would never use it. A webapp definitely with OpenCode support big on the list as well.
Nice. the frontmatter question is the one i'd want answered before trusting it: when an agent edits a file does it round-trip YAML frontmatter and nested code fences cleanly, or does that stuff get mangled? every "wysiwyg markdown" tool i've tried falls apart there. Also is the CLI cross-platform or mac-only like the app?
CLI is cross-platform, works on Linux/Windows. We've tested it but the environments can vary, so definitely let me know if see any issues.
Re:front-matter, we do optimistic parsing of it, haven't seen any issues with it. If we detect invalid markdown we return warnings to the agent in the MCP response so it knows it needs to fix it.
I really wanted to like this, but unfortunately couldn't see how it improves my experience over Obsidian or VS Code.
The fact that I have to juggle between OpenKnowledge and Codex to engage the AI, while also accepting a barebones Obsidian, is a real bummer. From what I can tell, you are saving me a few key strokes with moving prompts around. What I really want is the AI to live IN the app, like VS Code, and then move around the documents like it is Obsidian. I'll accept a plain terminal, but a pretty UI would feel like a better fit. My sense is that the new value add here is a set of skills and mcp servers, which probably already exist for Obsidian, or could more productively be spun up. I looked at the plugins again in Obsidian and found Claudian, which lets me bring my local models and Codex in the right pane. This is perfect, so sorry your app is not for me (yet), but thanks for getting me to look again at my tooling.
I want to throw my vote in for local models. Gemma4-31b is working well for me on these types of tasks, and not having an easy way to plug that in is a deal breaker. Embeddings should certainly have a local option, as they are cheap to compute. For what it is worth, I use LMStudio which supports OpenAI and Anthropic compatible api endpoints, so it should be easy to wire in.
A big caveat, I'm not trying to share my vault with other people, and I can see making that pain go away being worth switching. That said, I feel like you're targeting a weird market, where you want people technical enough to use LLMs and GitHub, but not so technical they can't customize a shared environment.
I would switch if the whole experience was self contained and "clean." Right now, it feels like a well dressed wrapper for pretty basic functionality.
Ack, thanks for feedback ! We're definitely looking at a more integrated experience.
Thank you for this project - I am excited to check it out!
My current agentic workflow is having a github repo that is a workspace and essentially a single obsidian vault over it called agents. I modify with Claude code (or other harness), check diffs in...VSCode and read it in...Obsidian.
It's separate from my actual personal Obsidian vault (that I don't send to any AI providers), and is only for agents. It's been really nice on all sorts of varied projects and for performing web research. I also have a bun monorepo setup in the root with varied tools for search, fetching individual websites, setting up folder structures - etc.
But essentially, in my experience, the moment you tell the model that it's in an Obsidian Vault - magic happens.
I am so curious how this will play in with it all and am hoping this will improve my workflow!
Got it yup, sounds like similar to the setups our team runs. Give it a shot and feel free to share any feedback.
To add one more thing: Codex/Claude/Cursor can open the OpenKnowledge web viewer within their own embedded web viewer. So you don't need the two apps open.
And we embedded the Claude terminal within the OpenKnowledge app itself if you prefer that. We are working on embedding the AI (including local models) more deeply within the app itself as well, expect updates in next week.
I have been trying to replace Obsidian with something for over 4 years now ever since I started using it. But I am just too comfortable now and I have it set up exactly the way I like and extended it with plugins etc.
I tried other stuff but nothing imo can beat its utility to me. I also personally wouldn't want an AI or anyone else looking through my vault or want AI in it.
Fully local, but can't integrate with any local LLM?
I do think a fully OSS Obsidian-like that syncs natively is an impressive accomplishment, though the usefulness of this is limited with OSX being the only supported platform. If an Android app is in the works I'll definitely follow the project!
Got it. MCP Server and CLI is agent-agnostic, so should work with local models/harnesses, but we'll look into more explicit docs around this.
What IDE or harness do you use? We'll take a look.
Personally I just want to see more support for local LLMs. I haven't been doing much coding lately but am interested in setting up Qwen 3.6 if I can obtain the hardware
Agree same. We'll look into explicit guides and integrations with Zed // OpenCode as a starting point, they let you choose your model.
Amazing, thanks. I've decided to try daily driving this instead of Obsidian, but I'm a bit curious how the syncing works. I copied an Obsidian vault to a new folder, and when I start the import process in OpenKnowledge it asks me if I want it "shared" or "local only". If I select "Shared", where does the git repo live that other instances of OK sync from?
edit: This seems to be "team-oriented" rather than geared towards individuals who might want to edit their notes from multiple devices?
And only seems to be able to sync with github... In addition to my privacy concerns, I'm curious if there could be issues with lots of images and other attachments since git can choke on repos that contain lots of larger files without github's git-lfs extension.
Last question I have is if any plugin system comparable to Obsidian's is planned (or already supported)? I realize this is probably a massive ask for an open-source project, and something Obsidian gets a lot of flack for as well, so I'm certainly not expecting it, but I am curious if it's on the roadmap already
To clarify, OpenKnowledge will never publish your project to GitHub automatically. When you init a new project, selecting "Shared" means that OK config files will not be gitignored. Selecting "Local" will add them to your gitignore. Other open knowledge instances can only sync if you have explicitly published your project to GitHub (which you can do from the app) and enabled auto-sync in OpenKnowledge. Some docs related to this can be found here https://openknowledge.ai/docs/features/github-sync and https://openknowledge.ai/docs/features/share.
It would make a repo in your own GitHub account. You can choose whether that repo is in your personal GitHub or your GitHub org. We'll make that clearer in the UX.
Feel free to ping me any additional feedback any time (here or @nickgomez on X).
Pi Coding Agent would be great also.
Yup, taking a look at it. Expect it integrated within next week.
Congratulations on the launch. It looks neat!
On a side note, I find it interesting that a few recent projects are going for the Open Knowledge name. The Open Knowledge Foundation (https://okfn.org) is one of the first/largest proponents of the open data movement (think of it as a Free Software Foundation but for data, not software). They started in 2004 and developed many of the open data licenses and widely used infrastructure tools like CKAN (an open data portal platform).
Nothing to add, just found it interesting.
Disclaimer: I worked there for a few years.
Biased but great name of course haha.
OKF timing was coincidence, we'd started I take it around the same time they'd started internally.
What's good is that everything is pretty open formats/source and complimentary.
The Open Knowledge Foundation is an organisation that has been going since 2004. <https://okfn.org/en/>
This is different to the Open Knowledge Format announced by Google in June 2026.
You had started your AI project before 2004?
Talking about a few different things, OKFN and OKF.
OKFN and OKF are the same thing: "Open Knowledge Foundation (OKF) is a global, non-profit network that promotes and shares information at no charge, including both content and data [--] founded by Rufus Pollock on 20 May 2004 [--] Between May 2016 and May 2019 the organisation was named Open Knowledge International"
Ah, I was referering to https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/data-analytics/how-th... for "OKF"
https://pi.dev/
You should just integrate with pi.dev, like I did for https://github.com/rcarmo/piclaw (which has replaced Obsidian for me). I too integrated a terminal and a WYSIWYG Markdown editor (as well as plugins for a mindmap, kanban, etc.)
Looks very relevant, will take a look. Definitely looking at built-in-chat-ui, thinking about how to integrate with the harnesses.
Ye built in AI is the only way this makes sense to me. Or otherwise could just add a terminal where you can run any TUI mapped to that notes/vaults dir or something.
Great thought - we indeed added Claude/Codex terminal in there already. Was our quick win as we investigated this deeply.
For ages I've been looking for a way to easily share & sync a simple knowledgebase (HTML/MD and other files in folders) with my team (= including non-technical people), using Git as the sync/versioning layer, without it being too technical, and without getting vendor lock-in with expensive & unnecessarily complex cloud-based platforms.
Having built-in AI integration without relying on sketchy plugins would be the cherry on top (although, seriously missing the option to connect with any openai-compatible LLM provider like someone else mentioned here).
Seems like this might almost offer exactly that? I'll have to try it out...
That was our exact stated goal -- felt a lot of the same pain. Feel free to drop me any feedback here or @nickgomez on X.
Is this following the Open Knowledge Format proposed by Google earlier this month or just a name collision?
https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/data-analytics/how-th...
Two bits:
1. Name collison happenstance. We'd locked in the npm package and domains prior to their announcement.
2. Our templates are Open Knowledge Format compliant and we have an explicit quickstart around making an OKF knowledge base. You can think of OKF as a format/standard for the content, and OpenKnowledge (our app) as an IDE/editor for any type of markdown based content.
Neat, I’ve created a couple OKF based knowledge bases, this looks like a nice way to work with them.
https://github.com/jacquescorbytuech/crm-open-knowledge-wiki
https://github.com/jacquescorbytuech/running-knowledge-base
Sweet, let me know the experience, we're actively thinking about how to make OKF KBs editing a good experience. E.g. a linter or other conformant mode.
I'm getting tired of the "second brain" concept, it is mostly a hallucination of the human brain
I opt to refer to it as a digital repository of information
https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/data-analytics/how-th...
Did you look at the OKF repo from Google? Open Knowledge seems to be a common term these days for similar solutions. I think OKF is more of the protocol for wiki-for-llm while you have more of the bells and whistles
It looks like a revision to OKF format could include: support for RDF URIs as labels, schema.org RDFS alignment (:name @en, :about, :description,)
Yup, OKF is more of a specification for a format, similar to e.g. Skills or MCP.
Our templates follow it and we have a starter pack for it.
You can think of our app as a general purpose IDE for any knowledge base/wiki/markdown.
Docs: https://openknowledge.ai/docs/workflows/supporting-open-know...
This is interesting and a promising start. I gave this a shot.
I'd love to see support for Bases and obsidian plugins that are typescript/open source anyway - I use a few such as excalidraw/mermaid etc.
I also want to use my local model.
When collaborating on Notion, we had to pop into Google docs for comments, suggestions and history. I see this as important even when working with AI on something.
Thanks nitin, these are all top of queue. We'll follow on quickly.
I'm working on a PKM myself, and while wysiwyg won't be my first priority and I'm aiming for a more hackable surface, this is very interesting and I'll most likely take inspiration from it for integrating AI workflows into my notes
I recently moved from Obsidian to a self-hosted Outline. Primarily because I needed an easy to use solution for sharing a knowledgebase with the team. Obsidian doesn't do team. Notion appears to, but Outline fit the bill so well, and was free. It has an MCP server, just like Notion.
I do wish that there was a way to provide filesystem level access to the markdown files to an AI agent. I think that might be faster.
Let me know if you see any gap with OpenKnowledge an this scenario. It's exactly what we aimed to solve (files are markdown and local, sync and team sharing happens via git/GitHub but is abstracted away from user).
Electron apps tend to fall down in the minutiae of the little things that native apps get right (around things like selection, scrolling, various small affordances across various levels). Would love to see something like this be more native app upfront, than starting out with something that will always leave that top 10% of what makes a nice feeling app unobtainable.
You win hard on this if you have the best possible UX that feels natural to drive. You just also ran if not because obsidian/notion etc. are already there (and have the people to put into those random edge cases that make electron apps bad).
This is a very mac-centric view. It makes business sense to plan for multiplatform.
Yes, we're working on Linux/Windows beyond the CLI/WebUI, Electron enables us to do that.
Nice approach.
Personally I’ve been trying very hard to migrate away from git+Obsidian project setup according to the OpenAI Harness Engineering. It works wonderfully in Codex Desktop.
The only gotcha - I want to share knowledge bases with the team in a way that is:
(1) versioned (a la git, not Notion) (2) usable from any chat (a la MCP) (3) basic access controls for team setup. (4) works through the interface that optimizes accuracy and token use across agentic architectures and LLMs.
Funnily enough, 4 is the easiest one (I have a platform for agent training and verification where I publish fun challenges for agents in simulated worlds around agentic commerce and personal OSes. With 98M agentic interactions recorded, that is already enough information for tuning)
Still figuring 1 and 3, though.
Gotcha. We're optimizing for the same scenarios, may be worth a look at our implementation in case transferable to yours. See:
#1 - the "autosync" and GitHub integrations do exactly this.
#2 - The app auto-instals skills/MCP server configs for a few harnesses
#4 - We embedded agentic-search capabilities via the MCP server (e.g. we virtualize 'ls' and 'cat' so we can enrich it for the agent for better hierchical navigation).
#1 - the tricky part there is in scenarios from a few AI Native teams. There often are a multiple agents rolling out linked changesets to a bunch of documents on behalf of controlling humans. Eg updating compliance policy, and references and change log and current procedures at the same time.
So changesets have to be atomic across multiple documents and semantic (so that agents can resolve the changes). Weak per-document versioning isn’t enough here.
#4. Nice! Same story, but also virtualizing ripgrep, find and tree (plus MD-aware outline mode). With that setup even agents with weaker local models (eg runnable on DGX Spark) can solve complex tasks in the Agentic Commerce domain.
Got it, makes sense. And neat ideas for the virtualization, will take a look.
I don't understand how Obsidian, a collection of markdown files, isn't already AI friendly. It's hard for me to imagine a more AI-friendly but still usable way to organize your notes.
What we did to go "beyond" is build in skills and an MCP server into the app, and auto-install those into e.g. Claude, Codex, and Cursor formats. Also added a web viewer so that e.g. Claude Desktop can open up the editor directly within it's embedded web viewer.
There is at least one MCP server in Obsidian's community plugins, plus the REST API access capability which is already addressed in several open source MCP plugins.
I use Obsidian as a persistent context store and knowledge graph (..loosely defined, i.e. link/back-link) for both Claude Code and Hermes, while also using it to generate live Wiki pages for working documentation. The native replication and the Git integrations work well keeping it all synchronized across multiple harnesses, as well. I use the native MCP server mentioned above, plus just letting the agent work with the markdown files directly.
That said, having built out all of this manually I'm excited to try out something that addresses much of this out of the box. I'd also be curious about the integration with Hermes/OpenClaw/etc.
Right on. We did a lot of the same and then had to deal with coaching everyone on the team how to do also set it up.
Large inspiration for OpenKnowledge was providing these flows out of the box.
We'll prioritize Hermes/OpenClaw guides next.
Feel free to drop me any feedback as you try it out - @nickgomez on X.
What was complicated about the setup? Its a plug-ins folder... add it in and boom you are ready to go
Keeping the MCPs/skills cross-compatible across the different harnesses, and also getting non-eng folks familiar with git.
Why not build skills and an MCP for markdown or obsidian? I'm using both at present and it's fine, bit would like to understand the differentiating factor here.
Example of the functionality that's OK specific: we made it so that e.g. Claude Desktop (or Codex, Cursor) can open the OpenKnowledge web viewer within their own embedded web viewers, to make for better side-by-side editing. Since Obsidian is closed source, we wouldn't be able to make that work.
Making the skills/MCP specific to OpenKnowledge allows us to optimize experiences like that.
Don't take this the wrong way, but couldn't this have been a plugin?
We wanted to make our own editor experience, allows us to do things like proper WYSWIG editing (Notion-like editor). MCP/AI integrations were one piece.
they can't make money out of that. don't be silly lmao.
This. I just open the Obsidian folder (aka "vault") in VS Code and BOOM, it is AI friendly. I just hack on the .md files like I would code with Copilot.
Same flow I had. We did a few things to make the flow easier, like making it easy for Claude Desktop to open the OpenKnowledge web viewer within its own web view. Also exposing things like vector search, etc.
Our goal was you wouldn't need a separate IDE and to work well with the coding agent desktop apps.
But alas -- markdown files on your local machine is indeed the way for being AI friendly.
But there’s no good WYSIWIG markdown editor extension for VS code.
Well there's quite a few options. The most popular I think is also open source (Markdown for Humans). Not sure what disqualifies it as "good" to you
Our bar was "Notion-grade", i.e. drag and drop blocks, slash commands, select to highlight/bold, etc.
I don't think I'd seen an extension that does that. It was a technically very hard problem, rich text editors usually use a lossy intermediary format (e.g. prosemirror).
The feature I am waiting for in all of these editors is integrating 'red lining' as a channel for LLM input. This is the best interface for working on a text. https://www.roughdraft.md/ does the core idea pretty well - but is not well integrated with the rest (browsing, etc).
Curious: do you mean being able to select text and "add it" to clipboard/attachment for the LLM, or something else?
select text and comment on it - then let the llm read all comments
got it. we'll ship this within the next week.
I wish (in general, not a criticism of this project) there was some way for claude.ai to write to a version controlled KB, ie from chats in the mobile app
This is mostly a Claude problem
So far the closest thing to what I want is using Claude Code in the mobile app to work in some repo and tell it not to write code, just have a discussion, and then eventually ask it to write the md doc or whatever.
I can then add that GitHub repo to a claude.ai 'Project' files and chats within the project can see the contents, but can't write back to it unfortunately.
It's rather easy to ask claude code to make you plugins, although you need to instruct it to break the sandbox in which Obsidian run and I think I'm currently hardcoding some paths.
e.g. I have a plugin that when triggered reads a text and asks the LLM whether there are unclear points and unwarranted leaps of reasoning.
I wonder how it compares to https://github.com/refactoringhq/tolaria They look similarly scoped. I haven't used it yet and it's great that there is more choice now
How do you make money, and how will you pay for your salaries?
Don't ask our VCs. Kidding -- we're taking a look at what would make sense for a cloud solution. E.g. richer team collaboration, etc.
(We're same team behind Inkeep -- already have a healthy biz).
Good point. But doesn’t Obsidian also support a CLI? In theory, wouldn’t that also work well with agents? I’m still curious what pain points this project solves compared with Obsidian or Notion.
Two key pieces: 1. True WYSIWYG UI 2. MCPs and skills support showing the OpenKnowledge web UI within the Desktop apps, as well as things like agentic search with embeddings and other goodies. We also add AI affordances into the UI, including an embedded Claude/Codex terminal.
PSA: If your comment includes a variant of "I like releasing directly AI in my vault..." or "My vault as context is required..." I ignore your comment :D
I see no knowledge graph kinda of things which any replacement of obsidian needs. Currently its probably just a less good obsidian copilot (but at least its open source)
There is a knowledge graph -- we'll update the readme to make clearer. We support wikilinks and forward/backward links are presented to the agent through the MCP server for "agentic search". There's semantic search support as well, etc.
Got this toast/notification message from your desktop app.
> Added ok to your PATH — managed block in ~/.zshrc, ~/.config/fish/conf.d/open-knowledge.fish.
Took a while to see that 'ok' is the name of your product.
Ack ! We made the shorthand for e.g. the CLI and .ok/ configuration folders. Shouldn't show up in the UX strings, we'll clean that up.
Warning for those who use Codex: when I started this, it trashed my Codex config.toml file. I'm sure that it'll be fixed upstream soon, not a deal breaker, just a warning for anyone installing it right this second. Thankfully I had backups.
Checking this asap, apologies for any inconvenience.
Is the issue you're seeing that it stripped comments, or something else?
It nuked a substantial portion of the file, unfortunately, not just the comments. It basically gave me a reset config.toml with your MCP and not too much else.
I have a nontrivial config. Will share on your Issues page when I can.
Appreciate it. An anonymized repro file would help ensure we validate against your specific cases.
i think the gap that needs to be bridged between obsidian and notion is:
obsidian: great for LLMs (local markdown files), bad for collaboration (no multiplayer features like multi editor, comments)
notion: not great for LLMs (network round trips, block-based editing), great for collaboration
+1. We'll continue at it.
I've been using my opencode go subscription for Obsidian, saving my Claude sub for actual coding. Any reason why it's limited to Codex, Claude, and Cursor?
OpenCode is next on the queue. Each has it's quirks, just working through quality testing each.
What AI plugin do you use in Obsidian?
100% second for OpenCode. for a lot of people it's becoming a very important second choice. I use it for cheaper models when my $20 claude code runs out for the day and I get a lot out of it.
Yup, we're working on it, should have integration eod or tomorrow.
Consider making the first image in the readme either static, or move slowly enough that there's reasonable dwell time to understand the UI when it's done with rendering. Right now there's nowhere on the gif that you can focus on to understand that part of the app in any detail, so it's basically a flashy box of randomness.
Fixed!
Good to see CodeMirror and yjs in there.
Rant warning (sorry OP but I have to vent somehow) : AI-first is the proof that things didn't change that much. It's a bit like "Roomba-compatible" flat. If somehow you have to changes your ways for a tool to work then clearly that tool isn't that flexible. It's perfectly fine but to me it's quite tiring when it's about the most hyped industry ever funded.
As a founder of a company that revolves around AI, I get you. It can feel frothy // intangible // overwhelming.
How does this integrate with Git? is the CRDT stack mainly for syncronizing locally? and then "snapshotted" into git? Or how would the team collaboration part of this work?
Git is used for the "auto-sync" and sharing functionality. Uses GitHub as the source of truth for the content.
Currently the CRDT is local and is used so that agents can edit the markdown concurrently with the user, and the user can edit it via the WYSWIG editor or the raw markdown editor. CRDT powers the live indicators, etc.
CRDT and git are reconciled so that git stays as the canotical version history.
so if I understand you correctly crdt is not used to collaborate in realtime with other human beings? instead we need to sync via git?
Currently yes. We'll be exposing a centralized CRDT server option in near future.
The “not quite WYSIWYG” of Obsidian is its selling point. Typing ### for heading 3 is what I love about Obsidian.
I would love to try it, can I sign up for a Linux desktop app notify-list?
Give us a follow on X: @openknowledgeai, we'll post updates there. Or feel free to dm me at @nickgomez and I'll reach out when available.
I'm a sucker for pretty UIs. I already have a company-mandated knowledge base tool, Slite, can they be used together?
Looking into Slite now to check. With OpenKnowledge, the content is just markdown files on-disk, so there shouldn't be anything exclusionary about it. Not sure how/if Slite handles markdown files. Will take a look.
tl;dr: Slite supports import/export Markdown files, so not a native "interop".
Links: https://slite.slite.page/p/5XOO7_tII0D87T/Importing-Files, https://slite.slite.page/p/PxKfPvLrLHj07O/Exporting-Your-Doc...
Recommend trying it for some personal notes/specs/etc. -- can be used independently.
Looks solid. The Obsidian migration path is honestly the make-or-break.
We support most things except bases at the moment. Let us know if you see any gaps that are important for you.
macos only? shame.
CLI + Web viewer are available for Linux and Windows. We tested it and works pretty well.
yea pass..
are you linux or windows? if linux, which distro? Electron support for distros varies so input is appreciated.
I recommend taking a look at appimages or flatpak within Linux if you wish to do so and if you do appimage, try to take an older system within a VM from my understanding as then you wouldn't have issues of glibc which I have sometimes heard. I'd be interested to help if that is of your interest.
Will take a look, appreciate it.
The signature figure on the repo shows file contents alongside a chat window. Is this actually supported by the app? I can't figure out how to open a chat window in the app without handing off to an external AI app.
The external agents can open the open knowledge web viewer within their own embedded web UIs.
Within the OpenKnowledge app itself, right now we do support the Claude terminal embedded inside - try that out. We're looking at adding more within-app capabilities soon.
I was really dissapointed whem realized that they sell on the webpage what they don't have in the app
Deleted immediately
You'll note that's the claude app if you actually look at the preview, which while confusing advertising what isn't even your app, does show how it works with the hand off.
how does the collab work locally. do you add provision for connecting to a yjs sync server? or do you have plan to add this option as premium only in future?
collab between agent <> human happens locally via yjs
collab between human <> human happens using git/GitHub. so collab right now is auto-sync (~few min latency) + sharing functionality. Richer realtime collab is indeed something we're looking at.
So it's just a Electron editor + "open in %agent" button... I don't see any reasons to use it instead of. obsidian + my agents.
More
1. Webpage is lying and showing stuff what you don't have in the app
2. You made changes to my .zshrc without asking me.
3. Slow. Open and render tiny md file with 10 lines - 1s
Removed, will never install again
Hi, I'm also currently chipping away at a PKM. I was wondering what would be things you would want to consider switching? I'm trying very hard to be performance focused + easy onboarding for obsidian heavy users.
Neat, trying it out now. Are the Open Knowledge skills actually needed, if this is just markdown and folders? The skills are large, I'd prefer not filling up context.
Skills / MCPs are not hard requirement, they're tailored for the desktop agents to be able to leverage built in tools we make available for e.g. agentic search over the content and manipulating the open knowledge web viewer and editor.
The skills should be pretty progressive disclosure optimized but we'll do an audit.
Nice, thanks! On my first run on Codex desktop, it said the equivalent of “skill too large, reading it in chunks”. I have the pro subscription.
Got it, investigating.
Sounds cool. How do agents know what else is going on in the doc? They have an embedded browser and they do like mutation observer type stuff? Or does the integration do polling?
Right now you'd simply prompt it. Working on more direct integration. Turns out they don't make event based back and forth easy.
Looks like a really good alternative of obsidian
Appreciate it !
Is there a migration path from Obsidian or Notion? Switching costs are usually what keeps people locked in.
Since Obsidian is just markdown, you can just open an Obsidian vault with OpenKnowledge. We made it so that most Obsidian syntax is supported, like wikilinks.
For Notion, we don't have a migration tool, but you can try the export to markdown approach.
Recommend trying it to get a feel, and if are looking to migrate and facing friction let me know details.
Obsidian is a lot more than "just markdown" though.
For example, with the appropriate plugins like dataview and charts, it's possible to create dashboards, lists, and tables that update automatically based on data elements present in documents or documents themselves. I use it to have views over my to-do lists (daily routine items, tasks that are overdue, upcoming tasks, etc), make dashboards, and show lists of documents edited on a particular date.
I'd love to migrate away from Obsidian towards something that's not proprietary, but I haven't seen anything that allows querying other documents.
That doesn't mean it's a design direction that open knowledge should go in, but just a data point that reducing Obsidian vaults to "just markdown" misses what some users use it for.
Yes makes sense, the database site of it is the primary point we don't support yet. We want to do it in the way we think is best and will keep in mind how to make the experience good for existing Obsidian users.
Nothing personal, but there genuinely ought to be consequences for using "open source" in the context of something like this tied to proprietary AI services.
Local models should be the first choice in that framing.
Integration with local models/harnesses is top the queue. What IDE or Harness do you use?
We're looking at OpenCode/Zed next but open to input.
It's not tied at all, the AI integration is on top of. So OSS applies to the app itself.
It's crazy that AI is goo enough for me to just write my own custom version of stuff like this nowadays.
Would it possible to support Org Mode?
Could you share more on what's important for you there?
Org Mode is wiredly used in Emacs, taking notes etc, github also support org mode. As a knowledge editor, it is better to support.
Got it, we'll investigate.
Looks really neat. Though, it does feel like "yet another KM app" without significant innovations.
I don't believe I've seen a KM app with true WYSWIG that's markdown underneath. Rest is indeed mainly packaging up all the second-brain, MCP, skills, and AI integrations to be out-of-the-box. More to come.
I think it looks great!
Appreciate it !
mac only? dead on arrival.
steam machine means everyone is moving to linux.
Web UI available for Linux/Windows. Updates docs !
Looks neat.
how does this differ from Rowboat ?
Haven't tried it, will take a look.
High level general purpose "IDE" for document editing (think Google Docs, Notion), that also exposes MCP/Skills for LLM wiki/second-brain scenarios.
Seems Rowboat is more focused on the personal assistant angle, we defer to your own agent (Claude, Codex, etc.) to do the LLM work.
Interesting using tiptap with codemirror, i guess to get around that tiptap doesn’t really support html very well but a shame that we need to use two editors to get the complete experience. Still, nicely done!
Looks powerful. If you focus on notion-like elements you’ll go far. The product roadmap is there—their pricing is nuts.
Appreciate it. Editor should already be pretty "Notion-grade", more to do though.
What functionality is most important to you re:Notion?
Just my personal pref with your roadmap, don't waste time on the electron app, I would never use it. A webapp definitely with OpenCode support big on the list as well.
Ack !
re: Web app do you mean local web UI, or web hosted?
Look into Tauri, not electron
Nice. the frontmatter question is the one i'd want answered before trusting it: when an agent edits a file does it round-trip YAML frontmatter and nested code fences cleanly, or does that stuff get mangled? every "wysiwyg markdown" tool i've tried falls apart there. Also is the CLI cross-platform or mac-only like the app?
CLI is cross-platform, works on Linux/Windows. We've tested it but the environments can vary, so definitely let me know if see any issues.
Re:front-matter, we do optimistic parsing of it, haven't seen any issues with it. If we detect invalid markdown we return warnings to the agent in the MCP response so it knows it needs to fix it.