Marbles vs Obsidian
Marbles vs Obsidian: linking by hand, or links that appear on their own
Obsidian is the strongest ownership story in note taking and it asks you to do the connecting. Marbles connects notes for you and asks you to trust it.
Obsidian’s bargain
Obsidian hands you a folder of Markdown files and gets out of the way. That is a serious thing to offer and nothing here is going to argue against it. If the company disappeared tomorrow your notes would be exactly as readable as they are today, in any text editor ever written. Very little software can say that.
The bargain is that the structure is your job. Links are something you type. Tags are something you maintain. The graph looks impressive because you built it, one wiki link at a time.
For a certain kind of person this is the entire appeal, and that person should use Obsidian and stop reading here. The connecting is the thinking.
Why most people’s vault goes quiet
The rest of us start a vault, spend a good weekend on it, write forty notes with careful links, and then have a busy month. When we come back, the new notes are not linked to anything, and linking them retroactively is a chore with no deadline. So it does not happen. The vault becomes an archive of one enthusiastic period.
That is not a failure of discipline so much as a design assumption that does not survive contact with a phone. Typing double brackets and picking the right note from a list is fine at a desk. It is not fine standing on a platform with one hand.
What Marbles does instead
Marbles reads each note a few seconds after you write it and works out its connections from the content: who it mentions, which project it belongs to, which existing notes are about the same thing. Nothing is typed, and nothing is maintained.
The connections come from two signals rather than one. Notes that read alike are easy to find and are not enough: a note about a company’s funding and a note about one of its products can share almost no vocabulary while being obviously related. So Marbles also walks the graph of people and projects it has built, which reaches notes that a text similarity score never will.
Where Obsidian is honestly ahead
The privacy comparison goes to Obsidian and it is not close. An Obsidian vault with no plugins involves no server, no provider and no network. Marbles keeps credentials off the network entirely and stores everything on your own device, but the organizing step sends note text to an AI provider, and pretending otherwise would be the kind of claim this site is built to avoid.
If that is the deciding factor, it decides it.
The honest summary
Obsidian is better software for someone who wants to do the work. Marbles is for someone who has proved to themselves, twice, that they are not going to.
What Obsidian is better at
- Ownership, and by a wide margin. Your notes are plain Markdown files in a folder on your disk. No database, no export step, no company required.
- It works with no network and no third party involved in any part of it, which Marbles cannot claim: organizing sends note text to an AI provider.
- Plugins. Hundreds of them, and they can change almost anything about how it behaves.
- Desktop. Long writing sessions, multiple panes, and a real keyboard are where Obsidian is at its best.
- It runs on Mac, Windows, Linux, iPad and Android. Marbles is an iPhone app.
Side by side
| Dimension | Obsidian | Marbles |
|---|---|---|
| Storage | Plain Markdown files on your disk | A local database, exportable to Markdown any time |
| Linking notes | You write the links | Worked out from what the notes say |
| Structure | Whatever you build | Collections that form on their own |
| Capture speed | Fast on desktop, fair on mobile | Instant, and built for the phone |
| Nothing leaves the device | True, unless you add a plugin | False. Organizing sends note text to an AI provider |
| Plugins | Hundreds | None |
| Devices | Mac, Windows, Linux, iPhone, iPad, Android | iPhone only, for now |
| Price | Free for personal use | Free to capture and search, subscription to organize |
Which one you want
Stay with Obsidian if
You like building the connections yourself, you want files you can read without any app at all, or you want nothing about your notes touching a server.
Try Marbles if
You liked the idea of a linked set of notes, started one, and stopped maintaining it within a month. That is the common outcome and it is not a character flaw.