They are your files, not rows in somebody else’s database.
Plain Markdown, always, even when you write in the block editor. Real folders, which you rearrange as you like. You export everything whenever you please, and what comes out is readable anywhere. If one day you stop using Cobrain, there is nothing to convert.
Why the format matters
A memory you cannot take away is not yours: it is on loan.
The memory of today’s AIs lives in a format you cannot see, inside a product you do not control. Change tool and you lose it. The product changes its mind and you lose it. Want to simply read all of it? Often you cannot.
Cobrain makes the opposite choice, once and for all: every note is a Markdown file. A text format twenty years old, read by Obsidian, Notion, GitHub, any editor and any AI. There is no «Cobrain format».
Real folders
Like on your computer. Like in Obsidian.
The notes live in folders you create, rename and move as you like, by dragging. A client is a folder, a project is a folder, and the structure you see is the one your AI sees when you ask it to look for something in clients/acme. No proprietary database, no compulsory tags, no «pages» inside «pages».
Two ways of writing, one format
Blocks or source. Underneath it is always the same file.
You can write in the block editor, with headings, lists, quotes and code, or open the source and see the Markdown as it is. They are two views of the same thing. If a note carries formatting the block editor could not preserve, Cobrain notices by itself and opens it in source, rather than ruining it.
Obsidian’s [[wikilinks]] and #tags work exactly as you know them.
Getting in and getting out
Import from Obsidian, full export. Without asking anyone's permission.
If you already have an Obsidian vault, you import it: folders and notes arrive as they were. And at any moment you export everything in one go: an archive of folders and .md files you open with Obsidian, with a text editor, with your computer. No need to write to us, no waiting, no paid plan.
The same holds at the end: if you close the account, you export first, and what you exported is already ready to use.
And the history
Every save keeps the one before it.
When a note changes, the previous version stays: who edited it, when, and the text as it was. Including when it was your AI. A wrong edit can be undone. On the free plan the last two versions are kept for three days; on Pro, the last thirty, for seven days.
Bring in what you already have.
Got an Obsidian vault? You import it in a minute. Not got one? The brain grows as you work, and it stays yours either way.
