A local-first Markdown notebook: every note is a plain .md file on your own disk, linked with [[wikilinks]] and visualised in a graph view. Its extensibility comes from a huge community plugin ecosystem rather than built-in features, and Canvas adds an infinite-canvas layer over the same vault.
Local-first speed and offline reliability with zero server; plain-text longevity — files stay readable regardless of the app's fate; extreme plugin extensibility; and Canvas for spatial thinking. Free for personal use, with paid Sync/Publish add-ons. Widely cited as serving more schools of thought (Zettelkasten, LYT, Evergreen, LLM Wiki, MCP, AI OS, Active Curation, Smart Notes, Digital Gardening) than any other single tool surveyed.
Both reject filing into one rigid destination in favour of link-and-retrieve. Obsidian's graph view is a direct visual ancestor of Mimir's Constellation — both encode a network of connections rather than a folder tree, and the research traces the "personal knowledge graph" lineage straight through Roam/Obsidian/Logseq's bidirectional backlinks.
A compulsory governance layer has no local-plain-file equivalent — a standard can't be thrust upon a query if there's no serving daemon sitting between the request and the files. Mimir also enforces classification and facets at the row level (Postgres RLS), rather than relying on folder or vault discipline, and exposes an audited, agent-native API (six live endpoints, per-agent attribution) rather than the community's unofficial Local-REST-API-based MCP bridge, which the research flags with its own security caveat.
Nearly everything about day-one experience: free, instant, no Postgres, no serving daemon, and years of plugin maturity Mimir has none of. Obsidian works fully offline; Mimir's serving core is a required hop. Obsidian's graph view is a real, draggable visual today — and it's worth stating the asterisk plainly here: the product's Constellation view runs real force-directed physics, but this showcase's own copy of it is a static, non-interactive paint, disclosed on the issues page as static-field.
research/_tools-and-stacks.md · research/09-graphrag.md