Obsidian for Work: Meetings, Projects, Clients and the Commercial License

Obsidian was built for personal notes, which is exactly why it works well at work: your meeting notes, project plans and client history live in plain Markdown files on your own machine, they link to each other, and nothing locks them inside a subscription. This guide covers the three questions people ask before using Obsidian for work: whether the license allows it, how to organise a work vault so it stays useful after the first month, and what changes when a whole team is involved.

Is Obsidian free for work? The commercial license explained

Yes. Obsidian's license overview, last updated on 20 February 2025, says the app is free for all purposes, including personal, commercial and non-profit use. You do not need a license to use it at your job or in your company. There are two optional paid licenses that exist to support development: the Catalyst license for individuals, which adds perks such as early access to beta versions, and the Commercial license, which lets an organisation appear as a featured supporter on Obsidian's website. Buying either one changes nothing about what you are allowed to do with the app.

Two practical points matter more than the license. Your notes stay on your device unless you choose a sync method, so check your employer's rules on where work data may be stored. And add-on services are separate: Obsidian Sync and Obsidian Publish are paid subscriptions, whatever license you have.

How to use Obsidian for work: one vault, five kinds of note

A work vault becomes hard to use when every note is a different shape. It stays useful when there are only a few kinds of note, each with the same properties, so Dataview can pull them together. Five kinds cover most office work.

Daily notes as the inbox

Start each day in one note: what is on the calendar, what is due, and a log of what happened. Anything that turns into real work gets its own note and a link back. The daily note template gives you that layout ready to use.

Meeting notes that produce action items

Every meeting gets a note with the same four sections: agenda, notes, decisions and action items. Because the action items are checkboxes with an owner and a date, a dashboard can list every open one across all meetings. The meeting notes templates cover team meetings, 1-on-1s, client calls, daily standups and retrospectives.

Projects with a status and a timeline

One note per project, with an owner, a status and start and due dates in its properties. The project management vault rolls them up by status and owner, and the Gantt chart template draws a timeline from task dates. For day-to-day flow, a Kanban board sits on top.

Clients and contacts in a personal CRM

People and companies get their own notes, and every conversation is logged with a date. The Obsidian CRM vault turns that log into follow-ups due this week, open deals by stage and contacts nobody has spoken to in two months.

Tasks across the whole vault

Tasks can live wherever they come up, in a meeting, a project or a client note, as long as they use the same format. A single query then lists them by due date. The GTD task vault builds a full system on that idea with the Tasks plugin.

A folder layout that matches these five kinds is enough to start:

Daily/
Meetings/
Projects/
Clients/
Templates/
Home.md

Obsidian for teams: what works and what does not

Obsidian can be shared, with limits worth knowing before a team commits to it. With Obsidian Sync, the owner of a remote vault can invite collaborators by email. According to Obsidian's help pages, every collaborator needs their own active Sync subscription, a shared vault can have at most 20 collaborators, and collaborators get the same permissions as the owner except that only the owner can invite people. There is no live co-editing of the same file: you do not see other people's cursors, edits appear once they sync, and simultaneous changes to one file are merged during sync, with version history to restore earlier versions.

That makes Obsidian a good fit for a small team that shares reference notes, meeting records or a knowledge base, and a poor fit for documents several people write at the same moment. Many people use it the other way round: a personal work vault for their own thinking and preparation, with the team's shared documents kept in the company's usual tools.

Keeping work and personal notes apart

Obsidian can open several vaults, each in its own window, and switch between them from the vault menu. Keeping work in a separate vault from personal notes makes it simple to follow your employer's storage rules, to hand the work vault over when you change jobs, and to use different plugins in each. If you would rather keep one vault, give work its own top-level folder and point your dashboards at it, as the queries in the Dataview guide show.