Obsidian for Enterprise Knowledge Management

The appeal is obvious: local-first, version-controllable, Markdown-based knowledge that you actually own. The friction is also obvious — it's built for individuals, not teams.

Why it works for small groups

• No vendor lock-in; it's just files on disk
• Works with Git for history and collaboration
• Huge plugin ecosystem
• The graph view is genuinely useful for finding unexpected connections between notes

The multiplayer problem

Obsidian Sync is designed for one person across their own devices, not a team. Real-time collaboration doesn't exist natively. Community solutions:

• relay.md — syncs vaults across a team using its own relay server; adds presence and shared workspaces on top of the vault model
• Git-based workflows — commit and push manually or via a plugin; works but requires everyone to be comfortable with merge conflicts

What breaks at scale

• No permissions model — everyone sees everything
• No inline comments or suggestion mode
• Plugin fragmentation — the vault behaves differently on each machine depending on installed plugins
• Search is local only; there's no centralized index across all team members' vaults

My take

Good fit for a small technical team that already lives in the terminal and values data ownership over convenience. Probably not the right call if onboarding needs to be smooth or if non-technical people need to contribute regularly.

The genuinely unsolved problem is the "second brain" for a team — something with Obsidian's model (local, text, linked, owned) but with a proper collaboration surface on top. Nothing has cracked this yet.

References

https://www.reddit.com/r/ObsidianMD/comments/19c8ueb/obsidian_for_enterprise_knowledge_management/ https://relay.md/