Obsidian has over 2,500 community plugins. That number is impressive. It means thousands of developers have cared enough about the tool to extend it. It means almost any workflow you can imagine has a plugin waiting for you. And it means Obsidian's core team can focus on the foundation while the community builds everything else.
This is also Obsidian's biggest vulnerability.
The plugin model works brilliantly for power users who enjoy tinkering. But for everyone else, it creates a set of problems that compound over time: breakage, abandonment, security risks, and a growing maintenance burden that turns a note-taking app into a system administration job.
This is not an anti-Obsidian piece. I use Obsidian. I respect what the team has built. But after years of managing plugins across multiple vaults, I think the community deserves an honest conversation about which features should be plugins and which should be built into the core product.
The plugin trap
Obsidian's CEO has compared the plugin ecosystem to VS Code's extension model. The comparison is apt in more ways than intended. VS Code's extensions are also fragile, occasionally abandoned, and sometimes a security concern. The difference is that VS Code's core feature set is extensive enough that most developers can be productive without any extensions. Obsidian's core is deliberately minimal, which means plugins are not optional for most workflows. They are essential.
This creates a dependency chain. You install a plugin to get a feature you need. That plugin becomes part of your daily workflow. You build habits, templates, and vault structures around it. Then one day, it breaks.
Problem 1: Breaking updates
Every time Obsidian releases a major update, the plugin ecosystem holds its breath. XDA reported in September 2025 that "every time Obsidian updates, there's a chance one of your plugins will stop working." This is not speculation. It is the lived experience of the community.
The Obsidian team maintains a plugin API, and they do communicate about breaking changes. But with over 1,000 active plugins maintained by individual developers (many of whom are hobbyists), the reality is that updates ripple through the ecosystem unpredictably. Some plugin authors update within days. Others take weeks. Some never update at all.
If you rely on five plugins (a conservative number for most Obsidian users), the probability that at least one breaks after a major update is not trivial. And when a plugin breaks, the fix is not in your hands. You wait, file an issue, or find an alternative.
Problem 2: Abandoned plugins
The Copy as HTML plugin has not been updated in over three years. It still appears in search results. New users still install it. It mostly works, until it does not.
Plugin abandonment is not unique to Obsidian; it is a universal problem with community-driven ecosystems. But it hits harder when the abandoned plugin provides functionality that feels like it should be a core feature. Copying formatted HTML from a note-taking app is not an exotic use case. It is one of the most common things people try to do.
When a plugin is abandoned, users face an unpleasant set of options: find a replacement (which may not exist), fork the plugin and maintain it themselves (which requires development skills), or change their workflow to avoid the broken feature.
Problem 3: Security
Obsidian community plugins have full filesystem access. There is no sandboxing. A plugin can read any file on your computer, modify your vault, and make network requests. This is by design: it enables powerful integrations. It also means that every plugin you install is granted the same level of trust as any application you download from the internet.
The Obsidian team reviews plugins before they are listed in the community directory, but the review is primarily for functionality and basic quality. It is not a security audit. And once a plugin passes review, subsequent updates are not re-reviewed with the same scrutiny.
For most users, this is probably fine. The community is largely trustworthy, and malicious plugins are rare. But "probably fine" is not the same as "safe," and the lack of sandboxing means the risk profile is higher than it needs to be.
Problem 4: Performance
Each plugin adds load time. Each plugin consumes memory. Each plugin runs code on startup, on file change, on every keystroke (for editor plugins). With five or ten plugins, the impact is negligible. With twenty or thirty, which is not unusual among power users, Obsidian starts to feel slower.
This is a well-known tradeoff in plugin architectures. The user gets flexibility at the cost of performance. But it is a cost that accumulates invisibly. You do not notice the extra 200ms of startup time after installing one plugin. You notice it after installing twenty, and by then it is difficult to identify which plugins are responsible.
Problem 5: The sysadmin burden
When you rely heavily on plugins, you are effectively managing a software stack. You need to track which plugins you have installed, check for updates, test after Obsidian updates, find replacements when plugins are abandoned, resolve conflicts between plugins, and occasionally debug issues that could be caused by any of a dozen moving parts.
This is fine if you enjoy system administration. It is not fine if you just want to write and share documents.
Features that should be built-in
Here are the features that a significant portion of Obsidian users need and that currently require third-party plugins.
Proper PDF export. Obsidian's built-in PDF export produces passable results for simple notes. For anything with complex formatting, tables, or diagrams, the output is inconsistent. The Better Export PDF plugin exists because the built-in option is not good enough for professional use.
Formatted clipboard copy. Copying from Obsidian and pasting into Google Docs, Word, or Slack should produce clean, properly formatted output. This is arguably the most common cross-application workflow for any writing tool. It requires a plugin, and the most popular option for it has been unmaintained for years.
Table editing. Markdown tables are painful to write by hand. The pipe characters need to be aligned, adding columns requires editing every row, and there is no visual feedback. The Advanced Tables plugin provides a decent editing experience, but visual table editing is a basic feature in every other writing tool.
Word count and document statistics. A real-time word count is standard in every word processor, text editor, and writing tool. Obsidian shows character count in the status bar by default, but detailed statistics (word count per section, reading time, paragraph count) require a plugin.
Focus mode. A distraction-free writing mode that hides everything except the text is available in virtually every modern writing app. Obsidian's interface can be simplified by collapsing panels, but a dedicated zen mode with typewriter scrolling and dimmed surroundings requires a plugin.
Kanban boards. The Kanban plugin is one of the most popular in the ecosystem. Project management within a note-taking app is a common workflow, and Obsidian's flexibility makes it a natural fit. Yet it requires a plugin to achieve.
Calendar view. Daily notes are one of Obsidian's most popular features, but there is no built-in way to navigate them with a calendar interface. The Calendar plugin fills this gap, but a calendar view for date-based notes is a natural extension of the daily notes feature.
The Obsidian Publish problem
Obsidian Publish ($8/site/month with annual billing, $10 monthly) is Obsidian's own publishing solution. You pay for a hosted website that displays your vault contents. The problem is that community plugins do not render on published pages.
Dataview, one of the most popular and powerful Obsidian plugins, is useless on Publish. The queries you carefully crafted to display dynamic lists, tables, and aggregations simply do not execute on the published site. Canvas is not supported. Code-fence plugins do not render. If your vault relies on community plugins for its structure and presentation, what your visitors see on Obsidian Publish is a diminished version of what you see on your screen.
This means you can build an elaborate, plugin-powered knowledge base locally, spend $8 to $10 per month to publish it, and discover that the published version is missing the features that made it useful in the first place.
What the alternative looks like
The plugin problem is not about any single plugin being bad. It is about the cumulative burden of depending on a decentralized ecosystem for features that most users consider fundamental.
A different approach is to build these features directly into the product. Unmarkdown™ takes this approach. Templates (62 options, not plugins), AI editing (12 one-click actions, built in), multi-destination export (Google Docs, Word, Slack, OneNote, Email, Plain Text), and web publishing are all part of the core product. There is nothing to install, nothing to update, nothing that breaks when the app updates.
This does not mean Unmarkdown™ replaces Obsidian. The two tools solve different problems. Obsidian is a knowledge management system for building interconnected vaults over years. Unmarkdown™ is a document publishing tool for turning markdown into professional output you can share with others. But where the two overlap, in formatting, exporting, and publishing, the built-in approach avoids the entire class of problems that plugins create.
If you are spending more time managing your plugin stack than writing, it might be worth asking which of those plugins you actually need, and whether the features they provide should have been built into the app in the first place.
Try the Unmarkdown plugin for Obsidian
Unmarkdown is now available as an Obsidian community plugin. Right-click any note and copy it formatted for Google Docs, Word, Slack, OneNote, Email, or Plain Text, directly from your vault. You can also publish notes to the web with 62 templates.
How to install (Community Plugins directory approval pending):
- Download
main.js,manifest.json, andstyles.cssfrom the latest release - In your vault, create the folder
.obsidian/plugins/unmarkdown/ - Move the three downloaded files into that folder
- Open Obsidian Settings > Community Plugins > Enable "Unmarkdown"
- Go to Settings > Unmarkdown > Click "Connect account" to link your free Unmarkdown account
Once approved for the Community Plugins directory, you can install by searching "Unmarkdown" in Obsidian's plugin browser.
