Practical overview
When it fits
Use it when working in an Obsidian vault and you want related-note suggestions during writing or meaning-based search across existing notes.
Who it is for
- Obsidian users who want to discover related material while writing.
- People searching a vault by concepts rather than exact keywords.
- Users who want to choose between built-in local models and external embedding providers.
Documented uses
- Surface related notes beneath the note currently being written.
- Search vault content by meaning rather than relying only on keywords.
- Export active-note similarity results as JSON for an external coding agent to read.
Requirements & limits
- Built-in Sentence Transformer models require ONNX weights; repositories offering only PyTorch or safetensors may not load.
- Ollama support is documented for desktop; built-in models are documented for mobile and desktop.
- Cloud API providers receive note content for processing, so provider data handling matters for vault material.
- The similarity index is local to each device and must be rebuilt on a new device.
Check current requirements in the official documentation. Source-based guidance does not mean OpenViST has run or independently tested this project.
Install the plugin and build a local index
Set up built-in-model similarity results for notes in an Obsidian vault.
Before you start
- Obsidian with the Similar Notes plugin installed
- A device running Obsidian; built-in models are documented for mobile and desktop
Steps
Install the plugin.
Allow the default model to download; the one-time download is approximately 30 MB.
Allow the plugin to index notes in the background.
Open or write a note and view similar notes at the bottom of it.
Expected outcome
The plugin displays semantically similar notes beneath the current note.
Guide limitations
- The index is stored in device-specific IndexedDB and is not synced; another device indexes the vault again.
- Large models may cause crashes on mobile due to memory limits.
Export related notes for an external coding agent
Make the active note’s similar-note results available to an external coding agent as a JSON file.
Before you start
- Obsidian with the Similar Notes plugin installed
- An active note open in Obsidian
- An external coding agent able to read the plugin’s JSON export file
Steps
Open a note in Obsidian.
Run the command “Similar Notes: Export similar notes for active note.”
Have the external agent read
.obsidian/plugins/similar-notes/similar-notes-export.json.
Expected outcome
The export file contains the active note path and similar-note results, including paths, titles, scores and excerpts when the operation succeeds.
Guide limitations
- The documented export applies to the active note’s results; it is not described as a general-purpose agent API.
- The file can instead contain an error response if there is no active Markdown file or the search fails.
Sources & review
Source record details
- Source availability
- Active
- Sources checked
- 14 October 2026
- Original website title
- joybro/obsidian-similar-notes · Official homepage title · retained in its source language