Smart Connections (Obsidian)

Fully offline

Local semantic search across all your Obsidian notes. Embed-once, query-fast, fully offline.

Editorial verdict: “Best local semantic search for personal notes. Foundational layer for Obsidian RAG.”

Editor plugin

Freemium

AGPL-3.0

★ 4.4 / 5

GitHub ★ 3,000

↗ Homepage ↗ GitHub

Compatibility at a glance

Which runtime + OS combos this app works against. Source of truth for "will it run on my setup?"

§ Runtimes supported

ollamaopenai-compat

§ OS / platform

macoslinuxwindowsiosandroid

§ Hardware + model hint

Minimum VRAM

4 GB

Recommended starter model

bge-small-en or nomic-embed-text

→ Build the rest of the stack with /stack-builder → Pick a GPU for this app

What it is

Smart Connections embeds every note in your Obsidian vault into a local vector index. Click any line, see semantically-similar passages from across your vault. Combine with Obsidian Copilot for full local RAG over your notes. Embedder runs locally; no cloud required.

✓ Strengths

+Genuinely fast local semantic search
+Embedding model + vector store all local
+Great with vaults of 1000+ notes

△ Caveats

−Initial embed of large vaults is slow
−Some power features behind freemium gate

About the Editor plugin category

Plugin for VS Code, JetBrains, Vim, etc.

§ Other editor plugin apps

Codeium (with local backend)

Best 'enterprise Copilot' replacement when self-hosting is mandatory. Paid tier.

Obsidian Copilot

Best Obsidian plugin for local LLM in your notes. Pair with Smart Connections for RAG.

Where to go from here

Stack Builder →

Pre-filled with this app's recommended use case + budget tier. Get the full rig + runtime + model picks.

Back to /apps →

The full directory — filter by category, runtime, OS, privacy posture, or VRAM.

Runtimes (/tools) →

What this app talks to: Ollama, vLLM, llama.cpp, MLX, LM Studio. The upstream layer.

Community benchmarks →

Did this app work for you on a specific rig? Submit the benchmark — it powers the model + hardware pages.