Obsidian 1.9

本地优先的 Markdown 笔记软件，1.9 版以核心插件 Bases 把笔记变成可筛选可编辑的数据库

knowledge management note-taking tools Markdown

https://obsidian.net/

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In-depth Report

Obsidian 1.9 is the most important major version update of this local-first Markdown note-taking software in 2025. The core highlight is the new core plug-in Bases. It automatically aggregates users' notes scattered in the warehouse into a filterable, sortable, and editable database view based on YAML attributes. It is generally called the "official version of Dataview" by the community. For personal knowledge management users, this is a landmark update that fills in long-term shortcomings, but it is still significantly weaker than Notion in relational and cross-database aggregation capabilities.
Obsidian was developed by the Dynalist team, founded by Shida Li and Erica Xu. The company is headquartered in Canada and the team size has been kept streamlined for a long time. Since the product was made public in 2020, it has always adhered to the philosophy of "local first, plain text Markdown, and the data is completely owned by the user". It does not rely on the cloud, does not collect telemetry, and does not sell data to third parties. The business model is 100% user-funded, relying on optional paid services and licenses to maintain independent operations, and does not accept venture capital to prevent external capital from affecting product direction. The Bases function first entered Catalyst members' early experience with version 1.9.0 on May 21, 2025. After about ten version iterations, the view types were gradually completed in the 1.9.
Bases is the protagonist of 1.9. It is an official core plug-in that converts any collection of notes into a database view. The bottom layer is based on Obsidian's existing local Markdown files and YAML pre-properties, and adds a dedicated .base file format and a set of declarative syntax. Users can filter notes by attributes in the view, use formulas to derive dynamic fields, group and sort results, and directly edit attributes inline in the table. Changes will be written back to the frontmatter of the original Markdown file, and the original text itself will not be changed. View types have gradually expanded from the initial table to cards, lists, boards, calendars, and maps (the latter two are extended by the community and the 1.10 Bases API). The syntax level is described by four blocks: filters, formulas, properties, and views. It can be completed bit by bit with a pure GUI, or you can directly edit the .base file to write complex formulas. There is no coding threshold for ordinary users, and it retains sufficient flexibility for advanced users. In addition to Bases, 1.9 also brings the Footnotes view core plug-in, which facilitates centralized management of footnotes in the current document in the sidebar; it also makes a number of experience and performance optimizations for tab management, outline view, Canvas card, PDF view, synchronization history, etc. A destructive change that needs attention is that the singular form of tag, alias, and cssclass attributes is officially deprecated, and the plural form of tags, aliases, and cssclasses is used instead, and the attribute value must be a list. If the old notes are still in text format, they will no longer be recognized and need to be corrected in batches.
Obsidian's personal note-taking function is completely free, with no function restrictions and no registration required. Its revenue comes from optional value-added items: Catalyst is a one-time fee of US$25 in exchange for early access to beta versions and community badges; a Commercial license is US$50 per person per year, for organizations that use Obsidian in work scenarios; Sync synchronization service is US$4 per person per month, providing end-to-end encrypted cross-device synchronization and version history; Publish publishing service is US$8 per site per month, publishing notes into web pages. Sync and Publish offer a 7-day unconditional full refund, while Catalyst, Commercial and the credit itself are non-refundable. The overall pricing strategy is clear: core products are permanently free, and cloud-enhanced services are charged on a subscription basis, deliberately drawing a clear line from the "local first" concept.
Positive feedback was highly focused on “finally having official database capabilities.” Many old users previously relied on third-party Dataview plug-ins and faced the risk of incompatibility once the plug-in was discontinued. Bases, as a core plug-in, is officially maintained for a long time and is more secure to use. It can be operated without writing code or GUI, and is extremely fast. Even if the warehouse has tens of thousands of notes, it responds almost instantly, and the mobile terminal is equally smooth. Because the data is a local Markdown file, and the Bases configuration itself is also plain text, it can be easily shared and transplanted without cloud lock-in. Some users bluntly said that they directly canceled Notion’s personal subscription after getting Bases, thinking that it is the cleanest alternative to Notion and Airtable in personal knowledge organization. Negative feedback revolves around capability boundaries. First, views and models are "not quite like databases": Bases currently does not support cross-database relationships (Relations) and rollups (Rollups) like Notion, and lacks 1:n associations. If you want to establish complex associations between author pages and book pages between notes, you still need to manually maintain internal links, and you have to change the names one by one. Second, it can only read the attributes in the YAML frontmatter and turns a blind eye to the inline metadata written in the text by a large number of old users. Some people complained that the development team "ignored the inline metadata supported over the years", causing the workflow accumulated over the years to suddenly become invalid. Third, compared with Dataview, Bases is still lightweight in terms of complex aggregation, list view, and query flexibility. Advanced players will have to use dual-track parallelism for the time being. Fourth, the destructive change in attribute renaming in 1.9 requires that labels and aliases of existing notes need to be manually migrated.
English technology media Heise positioned it as "Dataview light" - it has a lower threshold to get started, official maintenance, and local files will not be modified, but it is not as flexible as Dataview. The conclusion of a comparative evaluation by the minority is more direct: in terms of currently released functions, Bases is better said to be the officially launched "upgraded version of Dataview", which provides a more friendly interface and higher performance, but it is far from a true "database". It is more like a view container that organizes pages, rather than Notion's top-down centralized data structure that builds the framework first and then fills in the content. Obsidian Rocks believes that Bases is faster than Datacore and does not require learning programming languages. It is the best form of "official Dataview". The industry consensus is that Bases complements Obsidian's long-missing visual data layer, but the design philosophy determines that it will not become Notion.
There are three main points of controversy. The first is conceptual tension: Sync and Publish are cloud subscription services, which are somewhat inconsistent with the "local first" brand, and offline parties need to make their own choices. The second is the uncertainty of early experience: Bases was in the early testing phase of 1.9 for a long time, the syntax had a major revision in 1.9.2, subsequent views and APIs are still evolving rapidly, and the workflow may change with the version. The third is the migration cost: relying on the Properties system means that the inline metadata and old property naming of old users need to be cleaned up, which is a one-time burden on the warehouse that has been accumulated for many years. In addition, as a closed-source commercial software (although the core is free), its long-term route is still controlled by the company. Although the maintenance risk of the community plug-in ecosystem is reduced by the core plug-in, it has not disappeared.
Obsidian 1.9 is most suitable for people who give local priority, value privacy, and are already using double-chain notes for personal knowledge management. It is especially suitable for users who want to use a set of tools to replace the Notion personal knowledge base, but do not want to entrust their data to the cloud. Project management, reading lists, travel planning, and academic literature organization are all natural scenarios for Bases. It is not suitable for team scenarios that require strong relational databases, cross-table aggregation, or real-time collaboration between multiple people. Such requirements should still be left to Notion and Airtable for the time being. For old users who already rely heavily on Dataview's inline fields, it is recommended to first use tools such as Linter to organize metadata into frontmatter, and then gradually move the tables to Bases, leaving Dataview to handle complex queries as a transition.
Obsidian 1.9 uses Bases to supplement the official database capabilities: local priority, code-free, and portable. It is a milestone self-complement in the PKM field. But after all, it is "not quite like a database". Its relational and aggregation capabilities are weaker than Notion's, and its positioning is more focused on personal knowledge organization than a team database. For users who are sensitive to privacy and want a second brain that won’t disturb them, this is the most worthwhile upgrade in recent years.

User Reviews

剑客163

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Overall very satisfied, free, local, fast, Bases has made up for the last breath. The only hope is to support true cross-database relationships as soon as possible, so that we can say goodbye to Notion completely.

KBrooksK_667

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The mobile Bases experience is better than expected. Just change the status attribute on the subway and it will be synchronized without turning on the computer. Even the small screen editing formula is still a bit crowded, I hope to optimize it in the future.

Samuel_King_Pro0

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After the Bases API came out, the community created a map view, marked all the business trip locations, and used formulas to calculate mileage. There are more ways to play than imagined. The dual engine of official + community is really stable.

HelenRamirezX60

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My only dissatisfaction is that the attribute name change was too sudden. I hope there will be a smooth transition period or automatic conversion script for destructive changes in the future, so as not to stun old users at once.

ABennett168

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Use Bases to sort out ten years of reading notes and filter by status, rating, and tags. The efficiency is several times higher than before. The data is your own md file, which gives you a sense of security.

Henry.SmithQ

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Moving from Notion to Obsidian was painful at first, but Bases made the database part actually bearable. Still miss relations though.

zcso3

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The Commercial license is fifty dollars a year, and the company's purchase was approved easily. Supporting independent development teams is worthwhile in itself.

MadisonKim

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After version 1.9, Obsidian has really made up for its shortcomings. People have been complaining about not having a database before, but now there is one, and it is a local-first, code-free implementation, which is very consistent with its tonality.

beautifullion612

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The card view is surprisingly useful for making travel album lists, and it is very comfortable to view them in rows with cover images. It would be perfect if the official added a gallery view.

Web3Wave_btc

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The fact that Bases cannot read inline fields in the text is a disaster for people like me who have been writing inline metadata since 2020. The linter plug-in saved my life, but the migration cost was really high.

JudeOrtiz

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Heavy Dataview users report that both sets coexist for the time being. Complex aggregation is still better in Dataview, and simple lists have all been moved to Bases. After all, official maintenance is more reliable.

MadisonMorrisIII

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The company does not allow the installation of note-taking software that requires an Internet connection. Obsidian's local priority is directly passed, and Bases can be used as a lightweight project dashboard. Several people have been integrated into the team.

Roger_FloresSr263

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After the Kanban view and calendar view are completed, it is basically enough, and daily GTD is no problem at all. I just hope that Publish will be supported soon, otherwise I will still have to take screenshots to share it with friends who don’t use Obsidian.

史琪

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The formula function felt redundant at first, but later it was used to calculate the percentage of reading progress and the number of overdue days to do, which was really nice. The syntax is close to JS but easier to understand than Dataview's DQL.

Aaron_Taylor_66

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To say it is a database is actually a bit of a misnomer. Without Relations and Rollups, if you want to do cross-table correlation, you still have to get Notion, which is at most an advanced table view.

whBEL

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Bases allows me to visualize my reading list and project progress, and the configuration is a plain text file that can be sent to colleagues for use. There is no cloud lock, which is more comfortable than Notion.

Alice.Chavez007

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The free version is completely functional, which is the fundamental reason why I stay. I also bought Sync for four yuan a month. It has end-to-end encryption and gives me peace of mind.

JesseSimmonsZ

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Changed tags to tags and aliases to aliases. That update messed up my warehouse. All the old links were invalid, so I spent almost an afternoon manually changing them. Can you provide a migration tool for destructive changes?

AlyssaHoffmann

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The speed is really amazing. I can open a form with more than 10,000 notes in seconds, and there is almost no lag on my mobile phone. This is much better than Dataview.

CryptoNet_eth

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Bases only recognizes YAML attributes, which really discourages old users. The metadata of thousands of my notes is written in the text, but now it can't be seen at all, which is like giving it to me for nothing. Can’t the official support inline fields?

HaroldMyers_Plus

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It took two weeks and I returned the personal version of Notion directly. You have local files at hand and the speed is fast. You no longer have to worry about the server being down one day and not being able to open your notes.

i5np1u5

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After waiting for several years, the official finally added database capabilities. The key point of Bases is that you don’t need to write code. In the past, Dataview had to debug query statements every time, but now it can generate tables in just a few clicks, which is very friendly to ordinary people.

Obsidian 1.9

In-depth Report

User Reviews

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