Does Obsidian have real-time collaboration?

No. Obsidian is single-user by design and has no built-in real-time multi-user editing. Obsidian Sync only syncs one person's vault across their own devices.

Can two people edit the same Obsidian note at the same time?

Not safely. Shared-folder and sync-plugin approaches replace whole files, so simultaneous edits create conflict copies or lost changes. You need a CRDT-based tool like Baalda for true simultaneous editing.

Is there a multiplayer version of Obsidian?

There is no official multiplayer Obsidian. Baalda is the closest thing: it uses the same local-first plain-markdown model and adds real-time collaboration, permissions, and AI, so a team can share one brain.

Will my notes still be plain markdown files?

Yes. In Baalda every note stays a real .md file in a folder you own, so there is no lock-in and you can open your notes in any markdown editor.

Multiplayer Obsidian: how to get real-time collaboration on your markdown notes

If you searched for "multiplayer Obsidian," you already know the problem. You love the local markdown files, the wikilinks, the graph, the fact that you own your data. But the moment a second person needs in, Obsidian stops being enough.

Why doesn't Obsidian have real-time collaboration?

Obsidian is a single-user application by design. Every note is a markdown file in a folder on your machine, and Obsidian assumes one person is editing that folder. There is no server coordinating edits between people, no shared session, and no admin layer. That local-first design is exactly why people love it, and it is also why real-time collaboration is not something Obsidian offers.

You can sync a vault between your own devices with Obsidian Sync. That is one person, many machines. It is not many people, one note.

What people try, and what it costs

Every workaround for collaborative Obsidian trades away something that made Obsidian good in the first place.

A shared Dropbox or iCloud folder. The classic move. It works until two people open the same file, and then one person's save clobbers the other's. Cloud sync does file-level replacement, not keystroke-level merging, so you get conflict copies (note (conflicted copy).md) and lost edits. Fine for handoff, unusable for real collaboration.
Git. Powerful for developers, hostile for everyone else. Merge conflicts on prose are miserable, and non-technical teammates will not learn git rebase to take meeting notes.
Third-party sync plugins. Community plugins can push a vault around, but they still sit on top of file-level sync, so simultaneous edits still collide. And you are trusting an unofficial plugin with your whole knowledge base.
Give up and move to Notion or Google Docs. Now you have real-time editing, but you have also given up local-first, plain markdown, and owning your files. Your notes live in someone else's database.

The pattern is clear: with Obsidian you can have collaboration or you can keep the thing that made Obsidian worth using, but not both.

Can multiple people edit the same Obsidian vault at once?

Not safely in real time. A shared vault over Dropbox, iCloud, or a sync plugin replaces whole files, so if two people edit the same note simultaneously, one set of changes wins and the other is lost or forked into a conflict copy. Sequential editing, one person at a time, mostly works. Simultaneous editing does not.

What true multiplayer markdown actually requires

Real-time collaboration on text is a solved computer-science problem, but you have to build for it. It needs a CRDT (a conflict-free replicated data type), the same class of technology behind Google Docs and Figma. A CRDT merges edits at the character level, so two people typing in the same paragraph both keep their changes and the document stays consistent, even if someone was offline when they made the edit.

Bolting a CRDT onto Obsidian after the fact is hard, which is why it has not happened. Building on a CRDT from day one is the difference.

Baalda: Obsidian's model, built for a team

Baalda keeps everything that made Obsidian worth using and adds the one thing it will not do.

Plain markdown on your disk. Every note is a real .md file in a folder you own. No proprietary database, no lock-in. Open the same files in Obsidian or any other editor whenever you want.
Real-time editing, done right. A CRDT merges every keystroke, so two people or ten can open the same note at once and never clobber each other, even offline. Changes appear in milliseconds.
Per-file permissions. Share a folder as Viewer or Editor. Your team brain is not all-or-nothing.
Wikilinks, backlinks, semantic search, and a graph view. The knowledge tools you already rely on.
An AI assistant that writes to the same files. Baalda exposes your notes over MCP, so an assistant like Claude reads and writes the same markdown you do, and its edits merge with yours in real time.
Open source and self-hostable. Apache-2.0. Use it locally for free, or self-host it. There is a managed Team plan when you want sync and hosted AI without running infrastructure.

You are not leaving the local-first world. You are bringing your team into it.

How to move a vault over

Because Baalda uses the same format Obsidian does, migration is a copy. Your markdown files, wikilinks, and folder structure come across as-is, and they stay markdown on the way out too, so there is no lock-in to worry about. Point Baalda at a folder, invite your team, open a note together.