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Best Obsidian Plugins in 2026: What Still Ships

Quick answer: The Obsidian plugins worth installing in 2026 are Excalidraw, Templater, Tasks, Obsidian Git, QuickAdd, Omnisearch, Linter, Self-hosted LiveSync and Notebook Navigator. Every one of them shipped a release this month. Several plugins that almost every recommendation list still names, including Calendar and Mind Map, have shipped nothing for more than four years.

Most lists of this kind rank by popularity, and popularity is a lagging indicator: a plugin that was excellent in 2021 keeps its download count long after its author stopped answering issues. So we pulled the numbers first.

How we checked all 7,893 plugins

Obsidian publishes its community plugin registry as two public files in the obsidianmd/obsidian-releases repository: community-plugins.json (every listed plugin and its GitHub repo) and community-plugin-stats.json (download counts plus an updated timestamp). That gave us 7,893 plugins with stats and 150,222,376 downloads between them.

The updated field is the plugin's last release date. We spot-checked 15 plugins against the GitHub releases API and it matched the published release date exactly every time, so it is a trustworthy freshness signal. For the 100 most-downloaded plugins we also pulled each repo's last commit, which separates "slow releases" from "nobody is home".

What that turned up:

  • 1,470 plugins (18.6%) have not shipped a release in 12 months. 877 (11.1%) have shipped nothing in two years.
  • The top 100 plugins account for 67.8% of all downloads, and 32 of those 100 have no release in the last 12 months. 22 have none in two years.
  • Of the 95 top-100 repos we could resolve, 25 have had no commit at all in over a year, and 14 none in two years.
  • Only one top-100 plugin has a formally archived repository: Full Calendar, at 463,434 downloads, whose repo was moved to a community archive org.

Abandonment almost never announces itself. You have to look at dates.

Which popular Obsidian plugins are actually dead?

These are all still widely recommended, and all still installable:

| Plugin | Downloads | Last release | Last commit | |---|---|---|---| | Calendar | 3,126,086 | 2021-04-20 | 2024-06-22 | | Mind Map | 888,262 | 2020-12-13 | 2024-02-25 | | Advanced Slides | 837,614 | 2023-02-15 | 2024-06-29 | | Periodic Notes | 764,247 | 2022-04-14 | 2024-08-23 | | Highlightr | 724,005 | 2022-08-31 | 2023-11-15 | | Full Calendar | 463,434 | 2023-04-06 | repo archived | | Banners | 351,940 | 2022-04-20 | 2024-01-18 | | cMenu | 239,338 | 2021-09-14 | 2022-09-05 |

Calendar is the striking case: the seventh most-downloaded plugin ever, on practically every beginner list, and its last release predates most of the vaults it sits in. It still works for now, which is not the same as being maintained.

The best Obsidian plugins, ranked

Ranked by what they do for you, with the download count and last release date so you can check our work. Every plugin below shipped a release within the last month unless stated.

  1. Excalidraw (8,117,486 downloads, released 2026-09-06). Hand-drawn diagrams that live in your vault as editable files. The most-downloaded plugin in the ecosystem and still shipping weekly. Install this one first.
  2. Templater (5,669,619, 2026-09-19). Templates with real logic: dates, prompts, JavaScript, file moves. Everything people build in Obsidian eventually routes through it.
  3. Tasks (4,286,792, 2026-08-25). Query checkboxes across the whole vault with due dates, recurrence and filters. The best answer if you want task management without a second app.
  4. Obsidian Git (3,178,223, 2026-09-17). Automatic commits and push to a remote. Version history and a free backup in one, and the closest thing to a safety net your vault has.
  5. QuickAdd (2,137,085, 2026-09-20). Capture, macros and template-driven note creation from one keystroke. Pairs with Templater rather than competing with it.
  6. Omnisearch (1,908,838, 2026-09-05). Fuzzy, relevance-ranked search that also reads PDFs and images. Obsidian's built-in search is literal; this one finds what you meant.
  7. TaskNotes (1,659,982, 2026-09-19). One note per task instead of checkboxes in a list. The better fit if your tasks carry context, and the fastest-growing task plugin of the year.
  8. Linter (1,073,875, 2026-09-11). Formats notes on save: heading spacing, YAML order, trailing whitespace. Invisible until you turn it off.
  9. Notebook Navigator (996,687, 2026-09-14). A two-pane folder and file browser. It replaces File Tree Alternative, which has shipped nothing since June 2024.
  10. Self-hosted LiveSync (949,225, 2026-09-18). End-to-end encrypted sync via your own CouchDB. The maintained free alternative now that Remotely Save has been quiet since November 2024.
  11. Advanced Canvas (839,300, 2026-09-20). Presentations, portals, styled edges and shapes on top of core Canvas. The most active plugin in its niche.
  12. Commander (723,344, 2026-09-06). Put any command anywhere: ribbon, title bar, status bar, page menu. The modern replacement for cMenu, which stopped in 2021.
  13. Latex Suite (610,342, 2026-09-09). Snippets and auto-fractions that make maths typing feel like handwriting. Essential if your vault has equations in it.
  14. Note Toolbar (377,354, 2026-09-21). Per-note toolbars driven by properties or folder. Shipped a release yesterday, which is more than the two toolbar plugins it replaces have managed since 2022.

Handle with care

Four heavyweights that are not dead but are not what they were:

  • Dataview (5,009,198). The third most-downloaded plugin, and its last release was 2025-04-07 with the last commit in November 2025. Still the default answer for querying your vault, but the successor from the same author, Datacore (335,058, released 2026-03-23), is where the work is going.
  • Kanban (2,688,913) last released 2024-05-31 but has commits into 2026. Slow, not gone.
  • Style Settings (2,703,568) last released 2024-08-24 with commits as recent as July 2026. Same story, and most themes still depend on it.
  • PDF++ (804,434) has had no release or commit since August 2025. Excellent when it works; watch it.

How do you tell if an Obsidian plugin is still maintained?

Four checks, about a minute each:

  1. Open the plugin's GitHub repo from its entry in Settings, then look at Releases. A release older than a year on a popular plugin is a real warning.
  2. Check the commit history. Commits without releases means slow; neither means abandoned.
  3. Look for an archive banner at the top of the repo, or a repo that has moved orgs.
  4. Search the issues for "unmaintained" or "fork". Successors are usually announced there first, the way Datacore was.

How many plugins should you install?

Fewer than you want to. Every plugin is third-party code with access to your vault, and each one can break on an Obsidian update. A practical ceiling is around 15, weighted toward recent releases. Picking between two that do the same job? The release date is the tiebreaker.

Obsidian plugins are not in our directory, and we would rather say so than pretend otherwise: of 1,153 live entries, not one is an Obsidian plugin. What the directory does cover is the surrounding toolkit, in productivity, writing and documentation.

FAQ

Are Obsidian community plugins safe? They are unreviewed third-party code running with access to your vault and, in many cases, the network. Obsidian requires you to opt out of Restricted Mode before any of them load. Prefer plugins with many downloads, recent releases and an open issue tracker, and read what a plugin asks for before enabling it.

How many Obsidian plugins are there? 7,893 community plugins carry download stats in the official registry as of September 2026, with just over 150 million installs between them. Two-thirds of those installs go to the top 100.

Do I need a sync plugin if I pay for Obsidian Sync? No. Obsidian Sync handles it, and stacking a second sync tool on top is the most common cause of conflicted copies. Self-hosted LiveSync and Obsidian Git are for people who would rather not pay, or who want the vault in a repo.

What happens when a plugin stops being updated? Usually nothing, until an Obsidian release changes an API it relied on, and then it breaks silently. This is why the release date matters more than the download count: a plugin last touched in 2021 has no one left to fix it when that day comes.

Which plugin should a new Obsidian user install first? Excalidraw if you think visually, Templater if you want structure, Obsidian Git if you care about not losing anything. All three are actively maintained and none changes how your notes are stored.