Obsidian Brain MCP Server

Most planning and project tracking work still happens through a UI a human drives. Obsidian Brain MCP server moves it into the conversation instead. Standalone Node MCP server: semantic search + knowledge graph + vault editing for Obsidian, no plugin required.

The short version

A standalone Node MCP server that gives Claude (and any other MCP client) semantic search + knowledge graph + vault editing over an Obsidian vault. Runs as one local stdio process — no plugin, no HTTP bridge, no API key, nothing hosted. Your vault content never leaves your machine.

• Works without Obsidian running — — unlike Local REST API-based servers, obsidian-brain reads .md files directly from disk. Obsidian can be closed; your vault is just a folder
• No Local REST API plugin required — — nothing to install inside Obsidian for the core experience
• Chunk-level semantic search with RRF hybrid retrieval — — embeddings at markdown-heading granularity, fused with FTS5 BM25 via Reciprocal Rank Fusion. Finds the exact chunk, ranks on meaning
• The only Obsidian MCP server with PageRank + Louvain + graph analytics — — ask for your vault's most influential notes, bridging notes, theme clusters. Nobody else ships this
• Ollama provider for high-quality local embeddings — — switch to qwen3-embedding:0.6b, nomic-embed-text, bge-m3, etc. with one env var
• All in one npx install — — no clone, no build, no API key, no hosted endpoint. Vault content never leaves your machine

Getting it running

Because this one is hosted, setup is mostly authentication — you point your client at the endpoint and approve access. Nothing runs on your machine, so there is no runtime to keep patched.

The tools it exposes

The server publishes 3 tools. What each one is for:

• Chunk — level semantic search with RRF hybrid retrieval** — embeddings at markdown-heading granularity, fused with FTS5 BM25 via Reciprocal Rank Fusion
• Write — create_note, edit_note, apply_edit_preview, link_notes, move_note, delete_note
• Maintenance — reindex, index_status

What it needs from you

Configuration is passed through the environment: VAULT_PATH. Treat anything key-shaped as a real credential — scope it to the minimum the server needs, and rotate it if it ever lands in a shared config.

Things to watch

• Your data travels to the provider's service, so the usual questions apply about what you send and what they retain.
• Keep per-call confirmation enabled while you learn its behaviour; it is the cheapest safeguard you have.

How it compares

Plenty of planning and project tracking servers cover similar ground. The differences that matter in practice are scope of access and how much setup stands between you and a working tool call. Obsidian Brain's toolset — Chunk, Write, Maintenance — is a fair guide to whether it matches your workflow. It is maintained by sweir1; worth a glance at recent repository activity before you build anything load-bearing on it.

SyncDev reviews every entry in this directory against the project's own documentation before publishing, and revisits them as servers change.