Keep Obsidian. Add Markbase.

Obsidian is local-first, low-code, and built around a personal editing experience. Backlinks, graph view, canvas, plugins, daily notes. It's one of the best tools ever made for a human thinking on a single machine.

Markbase is none of those things. It has no UI, no plugins, no graph view. It's a hosted MCP endpoint that exposes your markdown to agents over HTTPS, with concurrency control so several agents can write to it at once without trampling each other.

They solve different problems. You can — and probably should — use both.

Where Obsidian stops being enough

Obsidian was never built to be an API. The moment you want this:

• A second agent on a remote machine reading the same notes
• Claude Code on your laptop and Claude.ai on your phone seeing the same memory
• Two parallel agents updating notes without clobbering each other
• A secure, network-reachable endpoint with OAuth, not a sync hack

…you're outside what Obsidian was designed for. There are community plugins that gesture at this, but exposing a local app as a secure, multi-tenant, public MCP server is not a small project. It's a different product.

Conventions that travel with the memory

An Obsidian vault is a personal space. The conventions for how it's organized live in your head — folder names you settled on, templates you reuse, the daily-note layout you like. When the only reader is you, that's the right amount of structure.

Once a fleet of agents are reading and writing the same memory, "conventions in your head" doesn't scale. Markbase ships _markbase.md as a per-folder governance file. Drop one at any folder root and you've defined the contract for that subtree: what it's for, how docs in it are organized, what frontmatter they need. Agents working on a path read the chain root-to-leaf before acting. You write the rules once, in the store; every agent that touches the subtree applies them.

Typed records, not just notes

Obsidian power users reach for Dataview-style plugins when notes start having shape — frontmatter properties, queries that pretend the vault is a database. It works, but the contract is whatever you remember to type, interpreted by a local plugin that any agent in another harness doesn't see.

Markbase ships the same idea natively. Drop a _schema.md in a folder and that folder is a typed collection: every record conforms to a shape you authored, and agents query the collection by field. The structure lives with the data, not with one app.

Knowledge that isn't stuck in one vault

An Obsidian vault is, by design, a single place you open. The notes you wrote in last year's vault aren't on hand when you're thinking inside this year's. The lessons stay with the vault that holds them.

Markbase keeps each project's memory in its own workspace, but knowledge doesn't have to stay there. An agent working in one project can read design notes, decisions, and postmortems from another in the same conversation, and apply them to what it's building now. Past work is a resource, not a silo.

Can I use both?

Yes — they're different jobs on the same kind of data. The notes are plain markdown either way, so the clean split is: keep Obsidian for the personal thinking you edit by hand, and let your agents read and write the shared memory in Markbase. Same shape, no format conversion.