Obsidian hands you the graph and the pen. Stop being the librarian of your own brain.
You wanted a connected map of everything you know. What you got was a second job: picking the note, recalling the title, typing the [[brackets]], pruning the orphan. Dump your pile in plain language and Naumu draws the edges for you — then answers across all of it.
Why it holds up
It draws the lines so you don’t garden a vault.
It links, you don’t
Obsidian gives you a graph only as connected as the [[backlinks]] you typed by hand. Naumu reads plain text and draws the connections itself — a March repair note to two October symptoms — so the map stays whole without you tending it.
Every answer has a receipt
Ask in plain language and the answer comes back with the source and the date it was captured — not a keyword match across filenames. Nothing invented; nothing floats free of where you wrote it.
Bring the vault you already have
No live sync — but no starting over either. Drag your Markdown files in or paste them; Naumu reads the whole export and does a first pass you fix in a glance. You arrive full, not re-gardening a blank canvas.
The honest comparison
Where each tool actually wins.
A rigged table fools no one. Here’s the real split — including the rows Obsidian flat-out wins.
Linking
You write [[backlinks]] by hand; the map is only as connected as you make it.
It draws the connections for you — you write plain text, it links by meaning.
Capture
Decide the note, the title, the tags, the links before you’re allowed to keep the thought.
Dump it as it comes — type, paste, drag, talk. It proposes the links; you confirm before anything lands.
Maintenance
Prune orphans, fix aliases, garden the vault — the day you stop, it’s a folder of files again.
No vault to garden, no orphans to prune. It stays organized without upkeep.
Finding things later
Search filenames + manual queries (Dataview, plugins you configure).
Ask in plain language; answers come from real connections, not a word match.
The graph itself
A force diagram where a line means “these two files mention each other.”
A map of the actual things in your pile and how they relate, built to be asked.
Where a fact came from
You track provenance yourself, by hand.
Every answer carries the source and the timestamp it came from.
Your AI assistant
Via third-party plugins you wire up and maintain.
Your ChatGPT writes the same brain Claude reads — as you, reversible, over MCP, off until you turn it on.
Offline & local files
Best-in-class — plain Markdown on your own disk, no account, works on a plane.
Cloud-first; you ask from anywhere and your AI can reach it, but you need a connection.
Owning your data forever
Flat Markdown files you own outright — no lock-in, no service to outlive.
One-click export takes the whole map (nodes and edges), but it’s a portable graph, not files on your disk.
Plugins & customization
A huge community of plugins and themes that bend it into almost anything.
A focused product; no third-party plugin marketplace, and a younger, smaller ecosystem.
Trying it
Free to download, but you build and link the vault before it’s useful.
No signup to try; nothing saved until you keep, so the trial costs you nothing.
If offline-first, plain Markdown files you own forever, or a deep plugin ecosystem are your non-negotiables — stay on Obsidian. Those are real strengths, not consolation prizes, and if drawing your own links is the part you enjoy, that’s your hobby and it’s yours forever. Naumu is for the Obsidian user who loved the idea of the graph and got tired of being the librarian — who wanted the connected brain, not the second job of keeping it connected.
FAQ
Leaving the vault, honestly.
Compare Naumu with other tools
Stop drawing the lines yourself.
Drag your vault export, paste a scrap, or start with a sentence. Naumu reads it, draws the edges, and from then on you ask instead of garden.