My Top 10 Obsidian Plugins for an Effective Workflow

There are hundreds of Obsidian plugins. Depending on your needs and what you want to use Obsidian for, some of them may be more or less useful. I’ll share with you my 10 favorite plugins, the ones I use the most.

10. Advanced Tables

This plugin adds new features to markdown tables in Obsidian. It enhances their navigation, formatting, and manipulation.

It adds a kind of spreadsheet feature to your vault because you can even use formulas like in Excel. You can also export your tables as CSV files.

This plugin works on Obsidian mobile, even if I find it a lot more difficult to deal with (anyway, I don’t think the Obsidian user experience is so good on mobile).

9. Full Calendar

Full Calendar is a plugin allowing you to interact with a customizable calendar directly from your vault. You can create custom calendars and display them, and you can also add calendars from external sources using iCloud, CalDAV, or .ics format.

The drawback is that it is impossible to use the reminders if your calendar is totally in Obsidian. That’s why I use it in conjunction with Google Calendar.

As I’m more often working with Obsidian than Google Agenda, having a calendar in Obsidian is very convenient because I don’t need to open Google Agenda every time. I also use Full Calendar to create calendars linked to Obsidian notes.

8. Obsidian to Anki

If you’re an Anki heavy user, you will love this plugin. It allows you to create flashcards directly from your vault and export them to Anki.

You can also insert backlinks to Obsidian in your flashcards, so when you’re in Anki, you can click on them and it will open the note in Obsidian. I use it to link to definitions or these kinds of things so that when I encounter hard flashcards, I can get more details about specific things just by clicking on a backlink.

So, in addition to being a plugin that allows you to create flashcards directly in Anki, it is also a plugin that allows you to extend the functionality of Anki by integrating it very well with Obsidian.

7. Periodic Notes

As the name suggests, this plugin allows you to work more efficiently with periodic notes in Obsidian.

It allows you to generate daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, and yearly notes, in a specific folder, with a specific filename, and with a specific template.

You can enable and disable the type of periodic notes you want to work with to simplify things. For example, I work only with daily, weekly, and monthly notes.

6. Dataview

Dataview is a plugin allowing you to turn your vault into a database which you can query notes from, without coding (even though it implements an API for developers wanting to build more complex things).

For example, if you’re a geek, you can turn your vault into a wiki of a game. Using Dataview, you can then query things such as “all the monsters”, “all the items costing less than 5 gold”, etc…

For me, I use Dataview to track the books I’ve read and I have to read, the same for the movies, etc… I also use it to have an overview of my daily notes or an overview of my projects.

For more details, you can check the story I made about dataview:

5. Excalidraw

Excalidraw is an Obsidian plugin allowing you to integrate Excalidraw with Obsidian to sketch diagrams directly from your vault.

I use it every time I need a visual representation of things I’m talking about in my notes. It’s very intuitive and easy to use, and you can embed sketches in your notes in a few seconds.

4. Tasks

If you like having everything in one place, you will probably like this plugin because it allows you to use Obsidian as a task manager.

Obviously, it lacks a few features from a real task manager such as reminders, but depending on your needs this plugin can be a good choice to track tasks.

It is very easy to use, and very powerful as you can build complex queries to retrieve tasks from your vault.

If you want to know how to build a task manager into your vault using this plugin, you can check the following story:

3. Sliding Panes

Sliding Panes is a plugin allowing you to open several notes at the same time and slide between them. I think it’s a killer feature because it can improve your productivity, by avoiding you losing time on things such as opening/closing several notes depending on when you need them.

With Sliding Panes, you can just open all the notes you need and quickly navigate between them so that you don’t lose time.

2. Templater

You’ve probably already heard about Templater. It’s one of the most downloaded Obsidian plugins.

It extends the native template feature of Backtrader to allow you to build complex templates using an API provided by the plugin.

Like Sliding Panes, it’s a plugin that can save you a lot of time if you use it correctly. When you spot repetitive things you write in your notes, you can just create a template and create notes using this template to avoid wasting time every time.

1. QuickAdd

My favorite so far. QuickAdd is a plugin allowing you to quickly add new things into your vault, such as notes, or captures.

I use it every time, and I can’t count how much time this plugin saved me. At first, it can seem a bit hard to use, but once you master it, you can automate so many things in your vault.

For example, I use it to plan my Medium stories and add corresponding calendar entries, so that I can directly have an overview of my Medium scheduled posts. I also use it to fetch data from external APIs into my vault. And a lot of other things…

QuickAdd is a very powerful plugin, and you can customize it a lot using user scripts in JavaScript if you know how to code. It also allows you to insert data into your vault using nice prompts. Below is an example of a prompt:

Final Note

I use a lot of plugins, but these are the ones I use most of the time. They extend so much the Obsidian’s features, now I can’t imagine working without them.

Also, this top is based on MY preferences, which means perhaps you won’t like any of the plugins in this list. After all, no specific plugins are needed to work effectively with Obsidian. It all depends on your needs and your ways of working with Obsidian.

If you want to know more about how I’m working effectively with Obsidian, you can check the following story:

Find all my Obsidian-related stuff here: Use Obsidian like a Pro

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