Grove vs Obsidian for writing with agents.
Obsidian is the more capable tool by most measures, and if your writing lives in a heavily linked vault, you should probably stay there. Grove exists for one specific loop that Obsidian was not built around: write, run Claude Code or Codex, and review what changed.
Where Obsidian is the right answer.
Obsidian has years of development behind it: graph view, canvas, a large community plugin ecosystem, mobile apps, and sync across platforms. It is free, it stores notes as plain Markdown on your machine, and for a personal knowledge base with hundreds of interlinked notes there is not much that competes with it. Grove is a macOS beta with a much narrower feature set. If agents are an occasional tool for you rather than a daily one, Obsidian plus a terminal window is a reasonable setup, and plugins like Terminal or Open in Terminal bring the shell closer.
What changes when an agent edits your notes.
Run Claude Code on an Obsidian vault and it works, because the vault is just Markdown files. Obsidian picks up the changed files and reloads them. What it does not do is treat the agent run as an event. Nothing marks which text the agent changed. File Recovery, Obsidian's built-in snapshot plugin, saves on a timer (every five minutes by default, kept for seven days), so the version right before a run may or may not exist. And when you and an agent edit the same passage, there is no built-in step that shows both versions and asks which one to keep.
Grove treats each run as an event.
Grove saves the affected files before every supported agent run, exactly then, not on a timer. Each of those versions sits in the Timeline until you need it, and restoring one takes a click rather than a Git workflow.
Grove shows the work in the document.
Agent edits appear in the open document as they happen, with your cursor and scroll position untouched. When your edit and the agent's edit collide, Grove shows both and you choose: keep yours, take the agent's, or combine them.
You do not have to migrate anything to find out.
Both tools work on plain Markdown folders, and Grove opens folders in place without importing them. An Obsidian vault is one folder, so you can open that same folder in Grove, run an agent on it, and go back to Obsidian whenever you want. Your files never change format. The practical test is simple: if you spend more time reviewing what an agent did to your writing than you spend in your graph view, Grove will probably earn its window.
Try Grove alongside Obsidian.
We’ll email you when beta access is available.
Grove is free during beta and requires macOS 26 or later on Apple silicon.