2025-03-16 great thread on reddit about obsidian for enterprise which shows challenge for a markdown tool atm

https://www.reddit.com/r/ObsidianMD/comments/1jc0465/introduce_obsidian_at_work/

Problems of a tool like Obsidian in enterprise

Director of IT here. Couple things to think about/talking points if you really want to advocate for Obsidian in your company. (And I love obsidian and pay for Sync to support the devs.)

It’s only user-supported. No SLAs, no account management (account execs, business development reps, etc), no support agreements. When (not if) things don’t work as expected, who’s going to be responsible for support? Your people are going to IT, which is Yet Another Thing (TM) IT is going to have do, with no means of support escalation. That puts IT in the uncomfortable position of either accepting a new tool to support or decline/provide best-effort support, and potentially turn people away when they need help. Sucks for everyone.

Depending on your business’s requirements, not having support, a legal contact, security certifications/attestations, etc. could be insurmountable blockers for the company to pay for, especially if your team’s processes and data are critical.

Plug-in management’s gonna be a bitch. There will have to be mechanisms devised, whether policy- or technology-based, to vet plugins. Then there’s gonna have to be ways to ensure that disallowed/unvetted plugins aren’t installed. There’s a lot of potential risk here.

Another person mentioned potential solutions, but you’ll have to figure out data integrity and accessibility. How do you prevent or recover from file modification or deletion? Versioning? What about sharing files across teams who don’t use Obsidian? Are they going to have to use it and be granted access to your team’s GH repo or shared drive? Or be given access to the files directly? How are you going to track changes? If you’re going to use a devops workflow for some of this, now you’re not only dealing with a pipeline of tools, but if your team isn’t going to be the one building it, it’s additional support for IT/DevOps.

Other tools have solved concurrent editing+visibility. As annoying as I find it, we use Notion at work, and many of these problems are solved. Data portability is a problem, yes, but the enterprise security features (SSO, account permissions, collaboration permissions, plugin restrictions, etc) and collaboration features (commenting, edit log, page locking, page statistics, etc) are well done. Same with Google Drive, and I’m sure the same with the Microsoft suite or other enterprise applications. Obsidian just can’t do these right now.

On top of it all, other tools have much better experiences on mobile, especially when it comes to authenticating users. If you’re going to use some intricate workflow to handle permissions, etc, and you’re going to support it on mobile, now you have to make sure that everyone who needs it can authenticate on mobile properly, and as seamlessly as possible. Who gon’ do that? You guessed it, your not-much-longer-friendly IT team ;)

YMMV of course, depending on your specific use case and the requirements of your company, but these are the considerations that immediately came to mind for me that I’d like to work through if these discussions came up at my job.

Another comment

Okay, sorry if this sounds harsh, but as the senior decision maker for software at my company, I need to be blunt. You are not thinking this through. You barely know Obsidian, yet you are trying to convince IT to approve it? Why?

There is no enterprise version of Obsidian. What you are referring to is just an optional commercial licence. It changes absolutely nothing except allowing businesses to pay. More importantly, Obsidian is not built for collaboration.

I use Obsidian myself but if someone tried to pitch it to me as a collaboration tool, I would laugh at them. Yes, you can share files, but so can an email attachment. That does not make it a collaborative platform.

You do not like Loop. You do not like OneNote. Apparently, every other tool annoys you too. But here is the reality - those tools, whether you like them or not, are miles ahead of Obsidian when it comes to collaboration. They are built for teamwork, and to top it off, they are already available within your organisation’s software stack.

If you walked into my office with this pitch, I would shut it down immediately. Not because I dislike Obsidian, but because it is obvious you have not done the work to justify it. If you are serious about an external tool, go look at Notion. At least that was actually built for collaboration.