Pikos vs Obsidian

The short version

Obsidian is built for connecting ideas. Links between notes, a graph of how they relate, and a plugin for anything it doesn't do out of the box. It's the best tool there is for building a body of knowledge you'll come back to for years.

Pikos is built for the week you're in. A page is a note, a task, and a calendar entry at the same time. You write it, tick it off, and drop it on Thursday, and it stays one page rather than becoming three things in three apps.

Stay with Obsidian if

You link notes heavily and use the graph. Pikos has search but no links between pages yet, and no graph view.

You rely on plugins. Obsidian's ecosystem is enormous and Pikos has none. There's no plugin API and won't be one until the data model stops moving.

You need your notes on a phone today. Obsidian has mobile apps and a sync service now. The Pikos iPhone app is being built and isn't out.

You write in Markdown and want the file on disk to be the source of truth. Obsidian's files are plain Markdown in a folder. Pikos keeps a SQLite file and exports Markdown, which is a different promise: you can always get the files out, but the folder isn't what the app reads.

Try Pikos if

Tasks in Obsidian have never quite worked for you. Checkboxes in Markdown plus a plugin to collect them is a workaround, and it shows when you want a due date, a priority, and a sort order.

You keep a calendar in a second app and copy things between them. Pikos puts the week beside the editor, and you can drag a page onto a day.

You'd like it all in one window. Obsidian plus a couple of plugins gets close to what Pikos does, and if you've already built that setup and you like it, there's no reason to move. Pikos is for when you'd rather not maintain the setup at all.

What Pikos doesn't do

No backlinks, no graph, no plugins, no phone app yet, no sync yet, and a much smaller community to ask when something breaks. Obsidian has been around since 2020, and Pikos went public in June 2026.

Moving a vault across

Pikos reads an Obsidian vault directly from disk, with no export step on the Obsidian side. Frontmatter, callouts, and image attachments come through. Wikilinks arrive as plain text, since Pikos doesn't link pages yet, and nested folders arrive as separate folders named after their path, like "Projects / Work". Point it at the folder you'd open in Obsidian and it walks the whole thing, skipping .obsidian and any other hidden directory.

The full walkthrough is on the Obsidian import page. Your vault stays where it is; the import copies rather than moves, so you can run both for a while and decide.