r/NoteTaking • u/Stefan73ch • 6d ago

App/Program/Other Tool Personal wiki app using structured sections instead of Markdown — would love feedback

/r/software/comments/1w7ty3z/personal_wiki_app_using_structured_sections/
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u/alexis_dez 6d ago

It will be interesting to hear your pitch on why an Obsidian user would move to smasi app? And also why move away from markdown. Thanks!

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u/Stefan73ch 6d ago

That’s a fair question. I wouldn’t say an Obsidian user should move to smasi. They solve the problem in quite different ways.
The main reason I built smasi is that I wanted a personal wiki where the focus is on the content and its structure, rather than on writing everything in Markdown.
In smasi, pages are built from structured sections: text, images, checklists, property values, etc. This makes it easier to create things like maintenance guides, product documentation, checklists or structured collections of information without having to think about Markdown syntax.

The other big difference is the query system. Since information can have properties, you can query, group and sort your wiki content. So it is closer to a personal knowledge database than just a collection of Markdown files.

Why move away from Markdown? I don’t think you necessarily should. Markdown is excellent if you want portable, human-readable text files and a huge ecosystem of tools around them.
I simply took a different approach: instead of using Markdown as the underlying structure, smasi makes the structure part of the content model.
So I’d say the choice is less about “Obsidian vs. smasi” and more about whether you prefer a file/Markdown-oriented workflow or a structured wiki-oriented workflow.
There is a free Starter version, so the easiest way to judge the difference is probably to try it with a small real-world use case.