Over the course of the last year I have been working on building a personal zettlekasten. I started in Notion, making several relational databases. However, after experiencing some down time, I decided to switch to Obsidian (https://obsidian.md/) it's a much, much better program, does not have slowdown issues on my mac, is fully cross platform (Mac, Windows, Linux) and has a sync system that works pretty seamlessly. Not to mention that the files are all plain markdown and stored locally.
Totally - you can also easily sync it with your own service, if you don't want to use their sync service. The flexibility is definitely a huge selling point.
The backlinks functionality is a little more hacked on than the built-in Obsidian tooling but I find most of the other editing tools and extensions to be superior. Having my knowledge database be edited in my normal text editor is easier and more powerful for me.
No it doesn't which is what is keeping me from moving from Notion to it. It's really clean and fast but all the hacks to get access to your notes on mobile (other apps that sort of work with the obsidian data structure) are a turn-off right now. When they do get mobile apps out then I really want to try to move to it.
