Why Are People Leaving Obsidian?

People who quit Obsidian rarely quit because it's a bad app. Across two years of quit threads — r/ObsidianMD, the Mac Power Users forum, Hacker News, personal blogs — the same six reasons come up again and again: maintaining the vault became a job in itself, the setup spiral never ended, sync across devices cost money or patience, plain-text Markdown hit a ceiling, the Zettelkasten method never fit how they think, and the mobile app frustrated them. Almost everyone who leaves still respects the app. Many come back.

We build a notes app ourselves, so we wanted the honest version of this answer, not the marketing version. Here is what the threads actually say, with links, so you can check every claim.

1. Maintaining the vault became a second job

This is the dominant theme, by a wide margin. Obsidian's core is deliberately minimal; the power comes from community plugins — 5,957 of them, plus 644 themes, as of July 2026. That ecosystem is the app's superpower, and it is also the number-one reason people burn out.

From a widely shared r/ObsidianMD quit post:

Then plugins became my nightmare. The problem for me is that you get more and more maintenance to do as you keep growing your workflow. […] At some point it became so laborous that I was just spending so much time for the things I could simply do with a pen and papers.

The Mac Power Users thread "I Think I've Grown Tired of Obsidian" is full of the same arc. The opener: "everything I try to do doesn't have an obvious solution and when I hit the web for answers the solution is always a plug-in." Three pages later, another member compresses it to one line: "I'm Obsidian'd out because I'm Plugin'd out."

A developer writing on dev.to put the operational cost plainly: "One plugin update would break another… Every update felt like rolling the dice." And a 471-point Hacker News thread named the deeper problem — plugin-heavy vaults quietly stop being portable: "If you are a plug-in heavy user, and those plugins introduce new syntax and lots of JavaScript functionality, you are accumulating a bespoke custom syntax."

2. The setup spiral never ends

Distinct from maintenance: the anxiety loop. Watch a few YouTube setups, install a dozen plugins, restructure the vault, repeat. An r/ObsidianMD mega thread on using Obsidian without stress opens with the tension in one sentence: "(1) I love Obsidian, but (2) I am overwhelmed by this process."

The person who wrote the quit post above described the exit as relief, not loss: "using Obsidian for everything was just induced by my anxious mind's FOMO. Now I feel relieved." The MPU thread's opener said they had "overcomplicated things beyond my comfort zone" until the app "no longer 'sparks joy'." XDA's 2026 uninstall piece called the learning curve "a bit too steep" and the app "a major time-sink."

The pattern reads less like a software complaint and more like productivity burnout, with the vault as the trigger.

3. Sync is where the friction gets expensive

Obsidian stores notes as local files, so cross-device sync means paying for Obsidian Sync or wiring up iCloud, Syncthing, or git yourself. Both routes generate quit stories. A 203-upvote thread titled "iCloud Got Me Too :(": "Ever since that day I have had to sync all the files when opening Obsidian. It's gotten to the point that I've stopped using Obsidian on my phone." On the HN thread, one blogger's decision to leave was driven partly by not wanting to pay for phone sync at all.

Worth saying: commenters in the same threads solve sync happily for free. It's less a missing feature than a recurring tax on attention.

4. Plain text hits a ceiling

For a loud minority, the dealbreaker is the medium itself. The MPU thread again: working "inside a text file at all times" wore thin; images and tables were a "hassle"; "even though it can show images in text files, the experience is painful." An r/PKMS thread asks directly for a non-Markdown alternative because of formatting and copy-paste friction.

Obsidian heard this one — it shipped Bases, native database views, in 2025, and that pulled some Notion-leaners back. But if visible [[syntax]] breaks your focus, that's a fit problem no plugin fixes.

5. The method never fit

Some people don't leave the app; they leave the philosophy around it. From an Obsidian Forum thread: "I have been trying for YEARS to become a zettelkasten/linking-your-thinking guy, and finally threw my hands up." Years of maps-of-content and atomic-note guilt, for a brain that just wanted folders.

That same thread is also the best argument against quitting — the author came back, dropped the method, and kept the editor. More on that below.

6. Mobile

A steady background complaint rather than a headline one: the mobile app feels "worse on mobile … like a website trying to be an app" (MPU), and slow vault loads on phones push people to capture notes elsewhere — which quietly breaks the whole system. Several quit stories start with "I stopped using it on my phone" and end with leaving entirely.

Two smaller themes, for completeness. A late-2025 security discussion raised that Obsidian is closed-source and plugins run unsandboxed — "any plugin can do anything" — which unsettled some users with sensitive vaults. And a few stories involve a scare: "A plugin update + a sync conflict + a sleepy brain = one completely nuked thought process" (dev.to). Both are real but far less common than the six above.

Where do people go instead?

There is no single successor — the destination tracks the reason for leaving:

Sources for the table: the MPU thread (UpNote, Craft, Bear, Capacities, DEVONthink, NotePlan, Apple Notes), XDA (Notion), dev.to (Joplin), and the HN thread.

The counter-case: most people stay, and some boomerang back

Fairness requires the other half of the ledger, and it's substantial.

Leaving is easy, which makes leaving unnecessary. The most-repeated point in every thread: your notes are plain Markdown files. From HN: "If somehow all the copies of Obsidian magically disappeared off the earth tomorrow, I could easily switch over to Emacs org mode, VS Code, or literally anything else." The exit door being wide open is exactly why many never use it.

The complexity is opt-in. "Obsidian is what you make it," as one MPU member put it. A 145-upvote r/ObsidianMD post makes the case that core Obsidian is just folders, tags, and text files — the overwhelm comes from copying power users, not from the app.

People come back. The forum member who quit over Zettelkasten guilt returned: "I eventually realized I was trying to re-create Obsidian with other tools. So I decided dang it I'll just go back to Obsidian."

The product is moving. Since February 2025 Obsidian is free for commercial use — the company says people in over 10,000 organizations use it for work — and Bases addressed the loudest feature gap. Nothing in the threads suggests Obsidian is declining; the churn is individual, not aggregate.

So should you leave?

An honest sorting, based on everything above (we compare the main options feature-by-feature in Obsidian alternatives, tested):

• Your vault works and the overwhelm is self-inflicted → stay. Disable the plugins you added this year, keep the five you actually use. This is the advice Obsidian's own community gives, and the boomerang stories suggest it works.
• You need real databases, rich media, collaboration → Notion or Capacities will fit better than any amount of plugin duct tape.
• You want Markdown files with zero ceremony → Joplin, UpNote, or Bear.
• You loved the ideas — linked local notes — but the assembly required wore you out → that's the gap we're building Zyler for.

Where Zyler fits (and where it doesn't)

Full disclosure, since this is our blog: Zyler is a desktop notes app with a Notion-style block editor, backlinks and a graph built in, and an AI assistant that works with your own API key (or a local model via Ollama). The things Obsidian's quit threads describe assembling from plugins — WYSIWYG editing, backlinks, AI — are the defaults here. Your notes live in a folder on your machine, in the open.

And the honest part: Zyler does not store Markdown. Notes are ProseMirror JSON files — plain text you own and can read, with Markdown import and export, but not a drop-in home for a .md vault. If your five thousand interlinked Markdown files are the point, stay in the Markdown world; Obsidian, Logseq, or Joplin will serve you better. No mobile app and no built-in sync yet, either — if those ended your Obsidian run, they'll end a Zyler run too.

If what ended it was the maintenance — the plugin roulette, the sync rituals, the settings spelunking — that's the person we built for.

Every quote above links to its source thread. We deliberately excluded viral statistics we couldn't verify — if you spot a claim without a link, call us on it.