It’s not hard to find an app designed for journaling. In fact, it’s harder to choose one from the sea of options out there. Worse, most lock their features behind a subscription service and store your notes themselves, making it difficult to switch apps in the future. But you can actually journal for free and have complete control over every word you write, with Obsidian.

Obsidian is a minimalist, fast, and free note-taking app that's trying to carve out a space for itself in a world dominated by Notion, Evernote, and even Apple's own Notes app.

The hook? You own the data. Rather than uploading your notes to a service that can change subscriptions at will (I’m looking at you, Evernote), you choose where to store all your notes in simple text files. They can live on your computer, if that’s where you spend most of your note-taking time, or you can put them in a cloud-based storage solution like iCloud Drive or OneDrive. Better yet, if you manage your own storage, all of Obsidian’s myriad features are free. If you want Obsidian’s own syncing feature, that’ll cost you $8 a month.

Speaking of features, there are quite a few that stand out. The show-stealer is how notes can be effortlessly linked together, like hyperlinks to web pages. These notes can be stored in any folder, but can be connected using good old hypertext. Start religiously linking notes and the app will create a visual map of all your connected notes. There’s also support for a wide range of additional features using community plugins.