Obsidian Vs Dendron
Dendron is your IDE for General Knowledge, see how it stacks up vs. Obsidian.
Obsidian is a knowledge base that works on your local Markdown files. Unlike Obsidian, Dendron is open source, hierarchically structured and scales with you so can organize (and find) any amount of information. Additionally, Dendron natively supports multi-vault workspaces so you can separate notes in various contexts and selectively have them open in any combination.
A Knowledge Base that Scales
Most PKM tools help you create notes but slam into a wall retrieving them once your knowledge base reaches a certain size threshold. That threshold varies with the tool, but virtually everything stops working past 10k notes unless the user was extremely diligent about organizing their knowledge. Past this threshold, entropy wins and every query becomes a keyword search and scrolling through pages of results.
Dendron's mission is to help humans organize, find, and work with any amount of knowledge.
It not only helps you create notes but also retrieve them - retrieval works as well with ten notes as it does with ten thousand.
Our main differentiator is our focus on structure - we provide gradual structure for your PKM that is both flexible and consistent.
This means you can start with daily journals, capture thoughts in zettel's and create consistent hierarchies over time which you can enforce using schemas and change through refactoring.
Extensible and open-source
Dendron is built into VS Code and can take advantage of all the extensions you've come to love. Whether you want Vim keybindings, mermaid diagram support or snippet support, the extension ecosystem has you covered. And if you can't find something that you need, we also offer Hooks so you can build advanced workflows, right into Dendron.
Hierarchically structured
Whereas notes can end up in a tangled mess when you only have backlinks and folders, Dendron has a flexible and emergent series of tools to help you structure your data. Hierarchies function as support beams, they help enforce the foundations of your knowledge base. Dendron encourages you to be flexible with your mental models by allowing you to refactor them. And once you've got a handle on a particular topic, schemas can help you scale out to other domains and see patterns that you otherwise wouldn't.
Multi-vault support
There are times you want to separate the context of the notes you take.
This could be a work-life separation, or a separation between different domains of your interest.
Most tools will allow you to open one workspace at a time, and don't allow links or references to notes outside of the current workspace.
Dendron on the other hand, allows multiple vaults to exist in any number of workspaces you choose to create. At work, you could have a workspace with only your work-related vault added. At home, you could have a workspace with only your life-related vault added. If you wish, you could have a separate workspace that has both, and you can make links and references across these two as if they are in the same vault.
Going further with Self Contained Vaults, a vault could describe another vault as dependant, and Dendron will automatically have the dependent vaults added and up to date for you to reference easily.
Backlinks