Obsidian Smart Connections
https://github.com/brianpetro/obsidian-smart-connections
Obsidian community plugin. Generates embeddings locally with a bundled model (TaylorAI/bge-micro-v2, 384-dim); chat with notes + see semantically related links. No API key required for local; supports 100+ cloud models optionally. Privacy-first.
At a glance
- Type
- Local-first semantic search over notes
- Tier
- T2
- Created
- 2022-12
- Latest release
- 4.5.0 2026-05-05
- License
- Custom
- GitHub
- 4.9k★ +144/mo JavaScript
- Pricing
- Free core plugin; Pro (all-access) subscription — 14-day free trial then paid; Founding Supporter one-time lifetime…
- Funding
- searched not found
Taxonomy
- storage
- vector
- retrieval
- similarity
- persistence
- long-term
- update
- overwrite
- unit
- document
- governance
- user-controllable
- conflict
- overwrite
When to use
Optimised for: personal-knowledge-management UX + AI-augmented note-taking
Anti-fit: not for enterprise / programmatic use; not for compliance-regulated workloads
Pros & cons
Pros
Plugin to the most-extensible PKM tool — memory layered on top of your local markdown vault means full data ownership.
Cons
Obsidian-tied; community plugin so quality depends on maintainer; setup more involved than first-party AI.
Claims & capabilities
786,090 downloads from Obsidian community plugin directory (January 2026); ~4,400 GitHub stars + 270 forks; growth: <100k downloads early 2023 to ~500k mid-2024 to 786k by Jan 2026. Free open-source plugin from Brian Petro; local-first semantic search with on-device embeddings (or 100+ APIs)
Technical surface
- API surface
- not applicable — Obsidian plugin
- Backend storage
- file (Obsidian vault)
- Deployment
- Both (local-first plugin; optional cloud LLM APIs)
- Embedding model
- multiple supported
- Multi-tenancy
- not applicable — local
- MCP
- not applicable — file-as-memory paradigm (no API surface)
- A2A
- not applicable — file-as-memory paradigm
- OpenTelemetry
- not applicable — file-as-memory paradigm
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