I love Obsidian, have written a popular plugin, and my wife and I use it for TODO lists and various planning.

However, every few weeks the official Obsidian sync makes an absolute mess of our shopping list (which has fairly frequent edits and deletions across our laptops and phones). I have no idea how to fix it.

This thread shows other users having the exact same issue as us: https://forum.obsidian.md/t/obsidian-sync-incorrectly-duplic...

If it wasn't for this one issue I would be able to strongly recommend the tool but as it is now I just tell people it sort of works and I am mildly happy.

To be fair I don't think any of the popular alternatives like logseq or joplin even attempt to do automatic file merges and just dump files into a conflict mode.

For me, Obsidian started to silently and (seemingly) randomly replace the whole content of a note with the content of another random note. This has been happening to other people as well for some time now [1].

What makes this issue really terrifying is its silent nature. I only noticed one of the notes having had its content replaced while casually exploring my library.

It took me an hour to restore the original content, which I only managed to do thanks to a (very obscure) macOS feature that keeps versions of most text files. It is only possible to see these versions when opening the file (in this case, the note) in TextEdit. I haven't found another place in the UI where these versions are exposed, which is yet another interesting thing I did not know about the OS I have been using for years now. I wonder why Apple does not expose this feature in the right click menu in Finder, for example.

In any case, as much as I love Obsidian I have been rarely and cautiously using it since this happened. File safety is the bare minimum requirement, so I cannot recommend Obsidian as it is right now.

[1] https://forum.obsidian.md/t/content-of-a-note-totally-replac...

Almost all ways to sync Obsidian has a problem with multiple people editing the same file.

Although there are some tools for better collaboration, but if it's just for one particular file it might be a bit "overkill".

But to give them a mention: Relay and Screen Garden are two community plugins that do it, HedgeDoc is a different app but it is a collaborative markdown editor, then the core team of Obsidian is also working on the multiplayer update.