BESIDE AN OBSIDIAN VAULT
GI JI stands beside a note library. It does not replace one.
If you searched for an Obsidian alternative, the honest answer starts with: keep Obsidian. GI JI is not a note-taker, not a plugin and not a vault. It is a separate desktop application for the step before a note exists — importing the sources, asking them questions, seeing the exact passage behind each answer, and being told plainly when the sources do not contain one. If your notes are working for you, nothing here is trying to change that.
Where Obsidian is the better tool — said first, on purpose
It is a better note-taker than GI JI will ever be, because GI JI is not one. Obsidian's own site states it is free without limits, no sign-up required, that it stores your notes locally as plain text Markdown files, and that it offers thousands of plugins with an open API. Its Commercial licence has been optional since its “free for work” announcement of 20 February 2025 — its licence page says Obsidian is free for personal, commercial and non-profit use, with the $50 per user per year Commercial licence kept as a way to support development. Sync and Publish are separate paid services on its pricing page. Every one of those facts is on obsidian.md, and we checked them rather than repeating them.
A practical consequence of that plugin ecosystem: if what you want is AI inside your vault, acting on your notes where they already live, an Obsidian plugin is the shorter path and you should take it. GI JI will not do that, and saying so costs us a sale we were never going to be right for.
Why this matters if you keep a Zettelkasten
A slip-box works because the note is in your own words, written after you understood the source. Most AI note tools skip exactly that step: text arrives in the library already written, and the understanding never happened. GI JI keeps the step. Imported documents stay as sources. AI can draft a candidate note from a cited passage, but it waits in a review queue until you read it, edit it, and approve or reject it — and Sources only ignores approved knowledge entirely, so you can always ask the original material on its own. Nothing derived becomes reusable because a machine decided it should.
How the two actually sit together
GI JI reads .md, .txt, .html, .docx and text-based .pdf files, and folders of them, so notes copied or exported out of a vault import as ordinary sources. What it is not is a vault integration: there is no Obsidian plugin, no sync between them, and the two applications do not know about each other. In practice people question their sources in GI JI and write the note they own in Obsidian — which is why this page describes a companion and not a migration.
The limits, said here rather than discovered later
GI JI does not do OCR, so scanned pages must be converted to text first. It refuses more often than a cloud assistant does — that is deliberate, and some questions you would call answerable come back as a refusal. A Personal licence activates on one computer at a time; deactivate it to move it. And it costs $79 once where Obsidian costs nothing, so it has to earn that on the one thing it does differently.
The one-line version
If you want AI in your notes, stay in Obsidian and add a plugin. If you want to question the sources your notes come from, see the passage behind every answer, and be refused honestly when the answer is not in your material, put GI JI next to your vault for $79 once — and keep the vault.
WATCH IT WORK
Answer, cited passage, and an honest refusal.
Ask a question of your own documents, open the exact cited passage, then ask something your library does not contain and watch it stop instead of inventing.
HOW GI JI COMPARES
Where GI JI wins, and where it does not.
Three comparisons with the tools you are most likely choosing between, each one naming the case where the other tool is the better buy.
WRITTEN FOR ONE READER
Four pages that answer one question properly instead of all of them briefly — what a citation is actually worth, what GI JI is and is not for a technical reader, how it stands beside a note library, and what it does for work whose material cannot leave the computer.