Let's start with something almost no product comparison says: Obsidian is well made. It's fast, your files stay on your own disk in readable Markdown, and if the company behind it disappeared tomorrow your notes would still be there, openable with any text editor. In an industry where everyone builds walled gardens, that's a stance that deserves respect — and one that has influenced me too.
So no, you won't find the usual list here where the author's product wins across the board. You'll find something more useful: what Obsidian asks of you in return, and why, for a certain kind of person, that price is too high.
What Obsidian does better than Itomori
Let's say it right away, so the rest can be read honestly. The files are yours and local: they work offline, with no subscription, with no one in between. There's a huge ecosystem of plugins that lets you bend the app to almost any workflow. And the link graph, when a vault is well tended, is a beautiful thing to look at and to move through.
If you're someone who already writes — who sits down at the keyboard and thinks by writing — Obsidian is probably the right tool, and this article can end here with no hard feelings.
The hidden price: you do the work
Obsidian is an extraordinary tool for cultivating an archive. But everything that makes it powerful is also something you have to do yourself.
You have to write. Thoughts arrive while you're driving, while you're walking, while you're leaving a meeting with your head full — that is, almost always far from a keyboard. To get into the vault, that thought first has to pass through your fingers. Many never make it.
You have to link. The famous graph doesn't build itself: it comes from the [[wikilinks]] you add by hand. Which means remembering, while you write a new note, that six months ago you wrote a related one — and remembering what you called it. If you forget, the connection simply doesn't exist. The graph shows what you remembered, not what's actually there.
You have to maintain. Folders, structure, plugins that need updating, sync to configure. It's a system, and systems need looking after. I wrote about this in the context of methods for organizing ideas: the most valuable part is almost always the most demanding too, and the effort is what makes people give up.
Where I started: from the voice
Itomori grew out of a simple observation: most ideas die in the twenty seconds when you have no way to write them down. They don't die because they were weak; they die because capturing them cost too much.
That's why the central gesture isn't opening a file, it's press and talk. Your voice is transcribed and the raw text stays there, untouched, as the source of truth — it's never written over. From that material the app then helps you draw out something publishable, but the original is never touched.
Connections: found, not woven
This is the real difference. In Obsidian, you stretch the thread between two notes yourself. In Itomori the app finds it, by comparing what the notes mean rather than their words: it's semantic search applied to links. A reflection from today connects to a voice note from six months ago that you'd forgotten, even if they don't share a single word.
I deliberately didn't add manual note-to-note links. It's not a missing feature, it's a choice: the moment you introduce them, you're back to asking the user to remember the whole archive while writing. What we do respect is explicit intent: if you give two notes the same tag, you're declaring a kinship, and that kinship becomes a real connection in the graph — drawn with a different line from the ones the AI finds, so you always see who decided what.
What Itomori doesn't do (and won't)
For balance, the flip side. There's no plugin ecosystem, and none is planned: we prefer a few things that work with no configuration. Notes live in the cloud, in Europe, not as files on your disk — with everything that implies in terms of trust to be earned. And manual wikilinks, as I said, are left out by choice.
If those three things are the reason you use Obsidian, stay where you are: you'd be worse off, and there'd be no point.
How to bring your vault into Itomori
If you do want to give it a try, the move is painless — and it doesn't require giving up Obsidian, since your files stay where they are.
In the Library you'll find the import command. You can select individual files or an entire folder: point it straight at your vault and every file becomes a note. It accepts .md, .markdown, .txt and also .docx, so the same route works if you're coming from Word or from another app that exports Markdown.
Three things to know before you hit the button:
- Frontmatter is read, not thrown away: if you have
titleandtags, they become the note's title and tags. And since tags create connections in Itomori, the organization you'd built for yourself isn't lost — it just changes shape. [[Wikilinks]]become plain text. Consistent with the above: their job is taken over by the embeddings, which also connect the notes you never linked by hand.- Files over 500 KB are skipped. A file that size isn't a note, it's a book: we flag it at the end of the import instead of silently truncating it.
The import runs one file at a time with a progress bar, and each note is indexed as it comes in. When it's done, the first thing to do is open Connections: that's where you see whether your archive had threads you didn't know about.
Two tools, two jobs
The most honest summary I can give is this. Obsidian is for people who want to build their archive and find satisfaction in doing it: the control is total, and so is the work. Itomori is for people who have the ideas but not the time — for people who want to talk and find things again, and are fine with the app weaving the threads.
Neither is the other's future. If you're not sure which one you are, there's a quick way to find out: look at how many days have passed since you last opened your vault.