Project Planner is built on the foundation of Obsidian's core values: local-first, privacy-focused, and future-proof. We believe that your project data, like your notes, should belong to you — stored locally, accessible forever, and never locked behind proprietary formats.
Your tasks and projects live alongside your notes as plain markdown files in your vault. No cloud sync required, no external servers, no vendor lock-in. Your data stays on your device, under your control. This aligns perfectly with Obsidian's philosophy that your knowledge base should be yours to own and preserve.
While Project Planner provides powerful visual interfaces for managing tasks, everything is stored in human-readable markdown with YAML frontmatter. Your project data will be readable decades from now, you can edit tasks in any text editor, version control works seamlessly, and migration to other tools is always possible.
We embrace Obsidian's extensibility by offering bidirectional synchronization between rich UI and markdown files. Create tasks in the visual interface or write them directly in markdown — Project Planner respects both workflows. Integrate with other Obsidian plugins like Dataview and Templater, automate task creation, and maintain compatibility with existing workflows.
Traditional project management tools separate your tasks from your knowledge. Project Planner integrates them. Your meeting notes can contain task definitions. Your project documentation can live alongside task lists. Your research notes can link directly to related tasks.
Following Obsidian's commitment to privacy, Project Planner never sends your data to external servers, doesn't require accounts or authentication, works completely offline, respects your vault's existing security measures, and gives you full control over where and how data is stored.
Like Obsidian itself, Project Planner is shaped by its community. We believe in open development and transparent roadmaps, listening to user feedback and feature requests, contributing to the broader Obsidian ecosystem, and sharing knowledge through open documentation.
There's no 'one right way' to manage projects. Project Planner provides multiple views and approaches because different projects, teams, and individuals have different needs. Whether you prefer hierarchical tables, Kanban boards, Gantt charts, or dependency graphs, the choice is yours.
Project Planner isn't trying to replace Obsidian — it's trying to enhance it. We follow Obsidian's lead by building on markdown and plain text foundations, prioritizing performance and user experience, respecting the vault as the source of truth, and keeping the power in the user's hands.
By embracing these principles, Project Planner aims to be more than just a plugin — it's a tool that grows with your vault, adapts to your workflow, and respects the philosophy that brought you to Obsidian in the first place.