Alternatives compared

Strut vs Obsidian

Obsidian is the best linked-notes application available, and it is free for personal use. The question is not which is better. It is whether your problem is notes or drafts.

Obsidian is a local-first Markdown vault with backlinks, a graph view, and a large plugin ecosystem, free for personal use. Strut is a hosted workspace that takes rough notes through structure to a finished draft, with AI operations, version history, and review built in. Choose Obsidian to build a lasting knowledge base; choose Strut when the knowledge base keeps failing to become a finished piece.

Where Obsidian is the better tool

Obsidian is free and beloved, which earns it the first word here.

Your notes are plain files you own

A vault is a folder of Markdown on your disk. No lock-in, no export step, readable in fifty years by anything. This is the single strongest argument for Obsidian and it is a very good one.

Free for personal use

The application costs nothing for personal use. You pay only for optional Sync and Publish. For a student or an independent writer, that is hard to beat.

Linking and the plugin ecosystem

Backlinks, transclusion, and a community plugin library that covers nearly any workflow you can imagine. If a feature is missing, someone has probably built it.

It is a genuinely good thinking tool

For accumulating and connecting ideas across years, a well-kept vault compounds in a way a project-based workspace does not.

Where Strut is the better tool

Notes are a stage, not a destination

Obsidian is superb at accumulating notes and neutral about whether they ever become anything. Strut's whole shape is the path from fragment to structure to draft, which is where most vaults stall.

Drafting long-form without assembling plugins

Version history, comments, review links, exports, and AI operations are there by default rather than configured from a plugin list that each need maintaining.

Sources with page structure

Import a PDF and its pagination survives, so a claim traces back to a page. In a vault, a PDF is an attachment.

Review by people who do not use your tool

Send an editor a read-only link with an expiry. Sharing a vault note with someone who does not run Obsidian means exporting a file.

Obsidian and Strut side by side

	Obsidian	Strut
Storage	Local Markdown files you own	Hosted project, exportable any time
Cost model	Free for personal use; paid sync	Free tier, then subscription
Strength	Linking and accumulating knowledge	Carrying notes through to a finished draft
Long-form drafting	Possible via plugins you assemble	The default path
AI	Community plugins, bring your own key	Built in, scoped to a passage
Research	PDFs as attachments	Page-aware sources you can question
Review	Export a file	Comments and read-only snapshot links
Best for	A knowledge base that lasts years	A piece that has to ship this month

So which should you use?

If your vault is thriving and your drafts are not, the missing piece is a drafting surface, not more notes. Keep the vault for what it is excellent at and move a project's material into a workspace when it is time to actually write the thing.

The demo opens without an account if you would rather look than read, and pricing covers the free plan in full.

Strut vs Obsidian questions

Can I import my Obsidian vault?

Import the Markdown files relevant to one piece as documents or sources in a project. Wiki-style links between notes do not carry across, because Strut organises by project rather than by a global graph.

Is my writing locked in?

No. Every document exports as Markdown, plain text, PDF, or Word at any time, and exports keep working on the free plan and after a subscription ends. That said, local files in a folder you control is a stronger ownership guarantee, and Obsidian wins that comparison outright.

Why not just add AI plugins to Obsidian?

You can, and for many writers that is the right answer. The trade is maintenance: plugins to keep current, an API key to manage, and no version safety net before a rewrite replaces a passage.

Which is better for a thesis?

Obsidian for the literature you will accumulate over years; Strut for the chapters you have to produce and revise on a deadline. Using both is common and sensible.

Guides that go deeper

How to build a second brain for long-form writing — Build a lightweight note system that keeps reading, meetings, and stray observations in a form your next essay, report, or book can actually use.
Knowledge base hygiene for writers, without busywork — Keep your notes searchable and trustworthy with small repairs made on contact and one short monthly reset, instead of an endless organising hobby.
6 note-taking methods compared for writers — Zettelkasten, PARA, bullet journaling, commonplace books, progressive summarization, and dated logs: what each is good at and where each fails.

Other comparisons

Strut vs Scrivener
Strut vs Notion
Strut vs Google Docs
Notes app, doc editor, chat window, or workspace? — the four approaches compared by category rather than by product.