What's the same
- Plain
.mdfiles as the source of truth — no proprietary format. - Wikilinks, backlinks, and a graph view of how your notes connect.
- A local-first option (Obsidian: default; Noesis: opt-in).
- Free for personal use.
What's different
strong· partial / depends· not built in
Where Obsidian still wins
Honest concessions: Obsidian has a deeper plugin ecosystem, more graph-view configurability, vim mode, local-first as the default, and a larger community templates library. Pick Obsidian if those matter more than AI chat, Claude Code, mobile UX, and sync-included.
Built around Claude Code via MCP
Noesis ships a first-party @noesis-brain/mcp-server on npm so Claude Code can read, write, search, and sync your markdown notes directly from the terminal. 19 tools cover semantic search, embeddings, conflict-aware 3-way merge for offline sync, AI metadata enhancement, and related-note discovery. Plug it into Claude Code in two lines of config and your notes become a first-class context source for every prompt.
The Obsidian community has several MCP integrations — notably MarkusPfundstein/mcp-obsidian (3k★, requires the Local REST API plugin) and iansinnott/obsidian-claude-code-mcp (auto-discovery, WebSocket). If you already love Obsidian, those work well. The difference with Noesis is that the notes app, the cloud sync, the mobile UI, and the MCP server are one product, not a stack of plugins.
$ npm install -g @noesis-brain/mcp-server
# Then from Claude Code
$ claude
# > What did I learn about auth?
search_semantic("auth flow")
Migration is free — both speak markdown
Your .md files import as-is. No proprietary format, no lock-in. Try Noesis on a copy of your vault; if it doesn't click, your files go back to Obsidian untouched.
