obsidian-copilot

Obsidian Copilot puts an AI assistant inside Obsidian without sending your notes to a service. The plugin is AGPL-3.0 frontend. You bring your own API key for OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini, Cohere, OpenRouter, or any OpenAI-compatible endpoint, including local models through Ollama or LM Studio. Your vault stays on your machine.

Install through Obsidian's community plugin browser, paste your API key, and you have chat over your notes, vault-wide semantic search with embeddings, command palette workflows, and image understanding for screenshots in your notes. Setup is a five-minute job.

Solo writers and researchers: free tier is genuinely useful with a personal API key. Plus tier ($0.99/month as of mid-2026, may vary) adds autonomous agents, time-window queries (find notes I wrote about X last month), PDF and video summarization, and web search. Teams: each user pays their own LLM costs, and Plus covers the heavier features.

The catch is the AGPL label is misleading. The plugin frontend is open, but Plus features run against a proprietary backend the developer controls. That is fine as a business model, but do not pick this expecting a fully self-hostable AI stack. If you need that, look at Khoj or pair raw Obsidian with a local Ollama setup.