I was using Obsidian for a while, but actually switched when I found an awesome open source alternative, SilverBullet. The best comparison would be "Obsidian but for tinkerers/hackers".

Data is stored plaintext the same as obsidian - I actually just copy pasted my vault and it worked with exception of wikilinks being absolute paths only - and haven't looked back

The only downside is that its in early stages of development, but definitely usable

Excellent news for myself. I've wanted to use this at work but it's hard enough to convince people to use it without asking for money.

Excellent news ! Excellent note taking applications with its ecosystem of extensions.

I wanted to go all in on Obsidian, but in the end I went with "Upnote" which has an easy UI and a lifetime price. (No monthly fees). It's like a mix of Evernote and OneNote. The Slash commands are so cool too.

Dynalist is where it's at.

I just don't see the point of obsidian et al.

Just use a directory structure and save markdown files in it.

There are many apps that are great editors for this structure on every platform. IDK exactly what obsidian does but many editors have zettelkasten (fancy cross links) functionality, just no fancy graph.

Ghostty + helix is the sexxy RN.

It is a really good app. But was a pain in the ass to keep the archive in sync using multiple different platforms without paying for their sync addon in my experience. You can roll your own sync with stuff like Syncthing, cloud storage, etc. But the archive had a bad habit of seemingly finding ways to get out of sync.