How to Set Up Obsidian Copilot and Chat With Your Notes
Obsidian Copilot is a community plugin that puts an AI chat panel inside Obsidian and lets you ask questions answered from your own notes, a feature called Vault QA. You install it from Community Plugins, paste an API key from OpenAI, Anthropic, or a local model, and start chatting without leaving your vault.
Setup takes about five minutes. The part worth understanding is the difference between chat mode, which answers from general knowledge, and vault mode, which reads your markdown files. Mixing them up is why people say the answers feel wrong.
What is Obsidian Copilot?
Obsidian Copilot is an open-source plugin maintained for the Obsidian note app. It adds three things: a chat sidebar, command-palette actions like summarize and rewrite, and a retrieval layer that indexes your notes for Q&A.
It is not a hosted product with its own model. It is a front end. You bring the API key and pay the model provider directly.
Is Obsidian Copilot free?
The plugin itself is free and open source. You still pay for model calls.
With a local model through Ollama, the whole stack costs nothing but your electricity and RAM. With a hosted key, light use runs a few dollars a month; heavy vault indexing of a 5,000-note collection can spike token costs, so check your provider dashboard the first week.
How do you install and connect a model?
- Open Obsidian settings, go to Community Plugins, and turn off Restricted Mode.
- Search for Copilot and install it, then enable it.
- Open the plugin settings and pick a provider — OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini, or Ollama for local.
- Paste the API key and choose a model such as gpt-4o-mini or claude-3-5-sonnet.
- Click Test to confirm the connection returns a response.
For Ollama, the base URL stays at http://localhost:11434 and you type the model tag you already pulled, for example llama3.1:8b. No key needed.
What is Vault QA and how do you turn it on?
Vault QA is the mode where Obsidian Copilot searches your notes and answers from them. Enable it, then kick off indexing from the plugin settings.
Indexing embeds each note and stores the vectors locally as a file in your vault folder. On a 2,000-note vault this takes a few minutes and produces a file you should add to your sync-ignore list so devices do not fight over it.
Chat mode vs vault mode
| Mode | Answers from | Use when |
|---|---|---|
| Chat | Model’s training data | General questions, drafting |
| Vault QA | Your indexed notes | Finding what you wrote, summarizing a project |
Does it send your notes to the cloud?
In vault mode, yes — the relevant note chunks go to whichever provider you configured. That is how retrieval works; the model cannot read files on your disk unless they are sent as context.
If your notes contain client data or anything sensitive, use a local Ollama model. Then nothing leaves the machine. Hosted keys mean the text you query travels to that vendor’s servers.
Who is this for, and who should skip it?
Writers and researchers with a big markdown vault get real value from asking “what did I decide about the pricing model” and getting an answer pulled from their own notes. It suits people comfortable managing an API key.
Skip it if you want a zero-config tool, or if your vault is under a hundred notes — the indexing overhead is not worth it, and plain search finds things faster.
Quick Summary
- Obsidian Copilot is a free, open-source plugin that adds AI chat and note Q&A inside Obsidian.
- The plugin is free; you pay for model calls or run it free with local Ollama.
- Vault QA indexes your markdown and answers from your notes; chat mode uses general knowledge.
- Vault mode sends relevant note chunks to your model provider — use a local model for sensitive data.
