50 Obsidian plugins worth your time

Obsidian has more than 9,500 community plugins today. Nine thousand five hundred. Nobody needs that many, and honestly most people don't need fifty either. But fifty is a good menu to pick from, so that's what I put together here.

I went through the official directory and kept only plugins that do something useful, still get updates and have a real crowd of people using them. Every name below links to the plugin's page in the directory, where you install it with one click and can see when it was last updated. The download numbers come from Obsidian's own public stats, October 2026.

One piece of advice before we start, and I mean it: install one or two at a time. Use them for a week. Then come back for more. A vault with 40 plugins you don't remember installing gets slow, breaks after updates, and good luck finding out which one is guilty.

First, how to install one #

If you've never done it, it's quick. Open Settings, go to Community plugins and click "Turn on community plugins." Then hit Browse, search for the name, click Install and, this is the part everybody forgets, click Enable.

A small warning that nobody likes to hear: plugins run inside Obsidian with access to your files, just like the app itself. That's why they can do so much, and it's also why it's worth preferring the popular, open source and maintained ones. The directory now shows a health score and the date of the last update for every plugin. Two seconds of looking, that's all.

For writing #

Let's start with the stuff that changes how writing feels.

Linter is the friend who tidies your room while you're out. Every time you save, it fixes spacing around headings, list markers, the YAML at the top, those trailing spaces you never see. You choose the rules, it does the nagging.

If you think in bullet points, install Outliner. Lists start behaving like they do in Workflowy: you move an item up or down with all its children, fold branches, indent with Tab. It's one of those plugins you forget is a plugin.

Various Complements brings autocomplete to your notes, like a code editor. It suggests words from the note you're in, from the whole vault or from your own word lists, which is a blessing for long technical terms and names you always get wrong.

Coming from Word, or writing a lot on your phone? Editing Toolbar gives you a real formatting bar with bold, headings, colors and lists, no Markdown memorizing required.

For grammar there's LanguageTool Integration, which checks spelling and grammar as you type in a bunch of languages. And if you're the self-hosting type (hello, friend), you can point it at your own LanguageTool server so your text never leaves your house.

Novel word count puts a word count next to every file and folder in the sidebar. It sounds silly, but it's strangely motivating.

Writing something big, like a novel, a screenplay or a thesis? Longform lets you write in scenes, drag them around until the order makes sense, and compile the whole thing into one manuscript at the end.

And then there's Natural Language Dates. You type @tomorrow or @next friday and it becomes a proper date link. Tiny thing. You'll use it every day.

For capturing and reading #

Templater is the templates plugin after it grew up. It fills in dates, asks you questions when you create a note, moves the new note to the right folder and, if you're into it, runs bits of JavaScript. About 6 million downloads, and there's a reason for every one of them.

Once you have Templater, QuickAdd is the obvious next step. You set up a command that creates a note from a template, or drops a line into your inbox note, and fire it with a shortcut from anywhere in the app. You have a thought, hit the shortcut, and you're back to what you were doing.

Moving in from somewhere else? Start with Importer, made by the Obsidian team itself. It converts your old notes from Evernote, Notion, Apple Notes, OneNote, Google Keep and others into plain Markdown.

If you read a lot and already pay for Readwise, Readwise Official pulls your Kindle and article highlights straight into the vault.

Image Converter is less glamorous and very necessary. It takes the images you paste, converts them to a lighter format, resizes and renames them. Your vault will thank you in two years, when it isn't 4 GB of phone screenshots.

And for PDFs, PDF++. You highlight a passage, copy a link to that exact spot, paste it in a note, and the link takes you right back to the highlight. Students, this one is for you.

For finding things again #

Writing notes is the easy part. Finding them six months later is where vaults live or die.

Omnisearch is the search Obsidian should have shipped with. It forgives typos, ranks results by how relevant they are and looks inside PDFs too (and, with its companion plugin, inside images).

Quick Switcher++ takes the Ctrl+O box and makes it smarter: jump straight to a heading, a block, an open tab or a command, all from the same place.

Recent Files just adds a list of the notes you opened lately to the sidebar. That's it. You'll miss it the day you uninstall it.

Homepage opens whatever you want when Obsidian starts: a dashboard, your inbox, today's daily note. No more landing on whatever note you closed last night.

If the default file tree never really clicked for you, try Notebook Navigator. It turns the sidebar into a two-pane browser, Apple Notes style, with folders on one side, notes with previews on the other, and a calendar on top of that.

Every few months, run Find orphaned files and broken links. It lists notes that nothing links to and links that point nowhere, and you'll find things you completely forgot you wrote. It happens to everybody.

And Tag Wrangler is for the day you notice you have #book and #books living side by side. Rename, merge, done, across the whole vault.

For tasks, data and planning #

Dataview is a legend. It runs queries over your notes ("every book I finished this year," "all meetings with this person") and has more than 5 million downloads and examples all over the internet. One honest note, though: since 2025, Obsidian's own Bases does a lot of this without code, and Dataview's updates have slowed down. Try Bases first, and come to Dataview when you need what Bases can't do.

For to-dos there are two very different philosophies. Tasks turns ordinary checkboxes into real tasks, with due dates, recurrence and priorities, and gathers them from every note into one list. TaskNotes goes the other way: every task is its own note, with properties for status, dates and project, plus calendar views, a pomodoro timer and time tracking. Checkboxes scattered everywhere? Tasks. A tidy vault built on properties? TaskNotes.

Day Planner shows your day as a timeline. You drag tasks into time blocks, see your calendar events beside them and, the slightly painful part, find out how long things actually took.

Meta Bind puts buttons, sliders and dropdowns right inside your notes. Click a star rating or pick a status from a menu, and the note's properties change with it.

And if you're studying anything, Spaced Repetition makes flashcards out of your notes and schedules the reviews for you, Anki style, without leaving Obsidian.

For drawing and thinking visually #

Excalidraw is the most downloaded community plugin of all time, with more than 8.7 million installs. It gives you a whiteboard with that charming hand-drawn look, where shapes can link to notes and drawings can be embedded anywhere. Diagrams, sketches, mind maps, even slides.

From the same author comes ExcaliBrain, which draws the neighborhood of the note you're on: parents, children, siblings, friends. Much easier to walk around than the giant graph, which, let's be honest, mostly looks pretty.

If you like the built-in Canvas, Advanced Canvas adds more shapes, flowchart arrows and a presentation mode.

On a tablet, Ink lets you write and draw by hand between paragraphs with a pen or an Apple Pencil. Great for math, quick sketches and doodles in the margin.

Sheet Plus brings real spreadsheets, formulas included, into the vault and lets you embed them in notes. For when a Markdown table just doesn't cut it.

Map View puts your notes on a map. Give a note a location, a trip, a restaurant, a client, and it shows up as a pin.

And speaking of tables: Advanced Tables. Tab jumps to the next cell, columns line up on their own and sorting is a shortcut away. It makes Markdown tables bearable, which is a big compliment.

For making it yours #

Style Settings unlocks the hidden options of themes and CSS snippets: colors, fonts, widths. It hasn't been updated since 2024, but so many themes depend on it that it's usually the first thing a theme asks you to install.

If your theme is Minimal, one of the most popular out there, add Minimal Theme Settings and you get its whole control panel. If it isn't, skip this one.

Iconic lets you put icons and colors on files, folders, tags, properties and tabs, right from the menus. A folder with an icon is much easier to find than you'd think.

Pretty Properties makes the properties block at the top of your notes look nicer, with banners, side images and colored values, and hides the fields you never need to see. Pixel Banner does the magazine-header thing, a big image at the top of the note, either yours or pulled from free photo sites.

And for the minimalists, Hider hides the parts of the interface you don't use. Status bar, tooltips, ribbon, scrollbars. Less noise, more page.

For sync, backup and peace of mind #

This is the boring section, and it's the most important one.

Git backs your vault up to a Git repository on a schedule, with the full history of every change. If you've ever deleted a paragraph you needed, you already get it. It works on mobile too, but it's fussier there.

Self-hosted LiveSync syncs your devices through a server you run yourself, or straight from one device to another. More setup than paying for Obsidian Sync, sure, but your notes never sit on anyone else's computer.

Remotely Save syncs with storage you already have: S3, Dropbox, OneDrive, WebDAV and more. Some services and features are in a paid tier, so check yours on the page.

Meld Encrypt encrypts part of a note, or the whole note, with a password. For the Wi-Fi password, the bank details, that kind of thing.

And BRAT installs beta plugins straight from GitHub. You won't need it at first, but it's how you try something that isn't in the directory yet.

For shortcuts and automation #

Commander puts any command anywhere: the ribbon, the title bar, the status bar, the right-click menu, the mobile toolbar. It also chains commands into little macros.

Note Toolbar adds a toolbar to the top of your notes with the buttons you pick, and different folders can get different toolbars. Your meeting notes get one, your journal gets another.

And for the terminal people, Local REST API with MCP opens a secure local API to your vault, so scripts, automations and AI assistants can read and write notes. Desktop only.

And AI, if you want it #

Copilot puts a chat assistant inside Obsidian that reads your notes and answers questions about them, using the AI provider you choose or a model running on your own machine.

Smart Connections shows notes related to the one you're writing, by meaning and not just matching words. It runs a small model locally, so no API key, no account.

What's missing, and why #

You probably noticed some famous names aren't here. The Calendar plugin hasn't been updated since 2021, and Notebook Navigator now does that job. Kanban is looking for new maintainers as I write this. Both still work for plenty of people, but I'd rather point you to plugins that someone is still taking care of.

If you only take three from this whole list, take Templater, Omnisearch and Git. One makes notes faster to create, one makes them easy to find, and one makes sure you never lose them.

Anyway, that's the list. Did I leave out your favorite? Tell me. There are only nine thousand and something more to choose from, hehe.