Two kinds of Obsidian browser extension

I published Vault Lens a couple of years ago. Out of curiosity I went back to see what the Obsidian browser extension landscape looks like now, and it splits into two groups. Some extensions save new content into your vault, whether that’s a web page or an AI chat. Others pull existing notes back out while you’re browsing. According to install numbers most people only know the first one exists.

Capture: save new content into your vault

These write files. Nothing needs to be running inside Obsidian for them to work.

Web pages

Obsidian Web Clipper, the official one, is the safe default. It saves articles, recipes, and pages as clean markdown, has an AI-assisted extraction mode, and is actively maintained by the Obsidian team itself. If you only install one capture tool, it’s this one.

Obsidian Clipper by Joost Plattel is a simpler, unofficial take on the same idea: select text, clip it, done. It hasn’t been touched in years, and the recent reviews I read describe it breaking on a lot of sites. I’d skip it.

Clipsidian does right-click-to-clip with templated note paths, which is a nice idea. But it has almost no review history to judge it by, so you’re mostly trusting the pitch.

Save to Obsidian maps clipped page fields onto Obsidian frontmatter properties, openly modeled on “Save to Notion.” It’s been stuck at version 0.1 since late 2023, and the one recent review I found says it shows an icon and does nothing. I’d wait for evidence it actually works before installing it.

Sidenote2Obsidian is a Chrome side panel for quick notes and bookmarks, synced via Local REST API instead of writing files directly like the others here. New, barely any users yet.

Obsidian Clipper, Clipsidian, and Save to Obsidian filled a gap that existed only as long as the official Web Clipper didn’t. Now that it does and keeps actively improving, I’d default to it: the official clipper is deep and configurable enough to cover what each of them was separately trying to solve. Sidenote2Obsidian is the one exception, since it’s for drafting a note in the browser as you read, not clipping the page itself, a flow the official clipper doesn’t really try to cover.

AI chats

This corner exploded while I was researching the rest. There’s now a small industry of extensions whose entire job is taking a ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, or Perplexity conversation and turning it into a markdown file for your vault.

Worth saying upfront: if you already work with an agentic coding tool like Claude Code or opencode that reads and writes files in your vault directly, most of this corner solves a problem you no longer have. You can just ask the agent to write the note itself. Where these extensions still earn their keep is if the only AI you use lives in a browser tab, ChatGPT.com, claude.ai, Gemini, whatever, and you have no other way to turn that conversation into a file.

Obsidian AI Exporter by sho7650 is the one I’d trust: free, open source, covers ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, and NotebookLM, and writes straight into your vault via the Local REST API plugin instead of just downloading a file.

Save ChatGPT to Obsidian, Claude to Obsidian & Markdown Export, Export Gemini Chats to Obsidian, and Perplexity to Obsidian - Batch Export are the same operator (Aluo, aka chatgpt2notion.com). Free to install, but they only download a markdown file for you to import yourself, and batch export or auto-sync needs a subscription, around $50 per reviews.

AISaver is a different operator running the same playbook for Perplexity, similar subscription model.

ChatGPT Exporter and Gemini Exporter (yueshan) bundle PDF/Word/Markdown export with an unverifiable “one-click Obsidian sync” claim. Single-digit installs on both; Obsidian looks like a keyword here more than a real feature.

Obsidian ChatGPT Notes adds a save button under every ChatGPT reply. No plugin, no local server: it hands the message off to Obsidian’s own obsidian://new URI scheme, using the clipboard as a workaround for longer messages that would blow past a URL length limit. Simplest setup in this whole corner, at the cost of only doing one message at a time.

Obsidian AI Video Notes & Screenshots by HoverNotes is a different kind of tool entirely. It watches a video, YouTube, Udemy, Coursera, and uses Gemini’s vision model to generate structured notes with screenshots and timestamps, written locally to your vault. It’s the most genuinely useful thing in this corner, probably because it isn’t competing with an agentic coding tool. Transcribing and screenshotting a video isn’t something you’d hand to Claude Code either. Freemium, with a paid tier once you’re past a chunk of free processing.

Retrieval: pull notes back out while you browse

These need Obsidian open in the background, with a plugin exposing a local server: either the community Omnisearch plugin or Local REST API. That’s a real cost. You’re trusting a browser extension to talk to a server on your machine, and the plugin has to actually be running for anything to work.

Search Obsidian in Google by YuNing Chen inlines vault search results into Google. Both its repos are archived, the UI was left bare bones, and Omnisearch Companion, below, is its named successor per Omnisearch’s own README. Skip this one.

Omnisearch Companion does live search-as-you-type against your vault through Omnisearch’s HTTP server, plus a right-click context-menu option to search a link or a text selection directly, and is the extension Omnisearch’s own README points to for this. Open source, a real if modest following on GitHub, though its last release was over a year ago now. Still very few Store reviews to go on.

Recall for Obsidian (renamed from Obsidian Web) by Adam Coddington just shipped a genuinely impressive v4.0 update, and recall, not clipping, is now clearly the whole point. It remembers how you judged pages you’ve already visited, rejected, interesting, done, and surfaces that judgment while you browse: dismissed links grey out, hover cards show your note and when you made it, a badge counts relevant notes for the current page, and you can right-click a link to judge it without opening it. A dated history log tracks why you decided what you decided, months later. Clipping still works and picked up rating/note template variables in this release, but it’s clearly secondary now, which is why this belongs here rather than in the capture section above. Everything runs against a local index of your vault’s URLs, nothing leaves your machine. It’s still built for people already running Local REST API, and setup friction was the main complaint in reviews before this release.

Vault Lens is mine, and it’s the one built primarily for retrieval rather than capture. It embeds live vault search into Google, Bing, Kagi, and DuckDuckGo results as you type, and separately shows you any notes that already mention the page you’re currently on. Its own Note Recall overlaps with Recall for Obsidian’s older, pre-v4.0 approach: same frontmatter format, so notes tagged for one tool’s recall feature are picked up by the other, plus a few additions on top like the embedded live search & sidebar. With the Local REST API plugin it also lets you open and edit notes directly from the sidebar, and quick-capture into your daily note, so it’s not recall-only, but resurfacing what you already have is the reason it exists. I paired it deliberately with the official Web Clipper: clip with one, get it resurfaced automatically with the other.

Why I built Vault Lens

Omnisearch Companion and Recall for Obsidian (back when it was still called Obsidian Web) each covered half of what I wanted, and neither UI felt nice to sit next to a search engine every day. Omnisearch Companion’s live search-as-you-type works well, but it never told me when I’d landed on a page I already had notes about, there’s no URL-based recall. Obsidian Web had recall, but no live search at all, so you don’t get vault results as you type into Google, you only find out you’ve saved a page after you’re already on it. Vault Lens is the merge of the two: live search styled to look native to whichever search engine you’re on, plus the automatic recall on any page you revisit, in one sidebar instead of two separate extensions.

Credit where it’s due: the v4.0 update above pushes the recall side of that trade further than anything Vault Lens does. Judgment tracking, rejected, interesting, done, with a dated history log, is a more opinionated, more developed take on recall than my “here’s a note that mentions this page” approach. If that depth is what you want and live search isn’t a dealbreaker, Recall for Obsidian is worth a look. It only just launched, so there’s no read yet on how it holds up in practice.

The honest summary

None of the retrieval tools, mine included, have much of a track record yet. Review counts across this whole category are small enough that star ratings aren’t meaningful. That’s not spin, it’s the actual state of the ecosystem: recall extensions for Obsidian are a thin category, and asking someone to run a local server just to get notes back in their browser is a genuine ask.

I think it’s worth it anyway, if you already research heavily inside your browser and keep losing track of what you’ve already written down in your vault. If you don’t have that problem, the local-server requirement isn’t worth solving for.

Where that leaves you

Capture and retrieval solve different problems, and most people only need capture. Install the official Web Clipper and stop there unless you specifically feel one of the other pains.

If you export AI chats into your vault and don’t already have an agentic tool with file access, Obsidian AI Exporter is the one I’d trust over the paid bundles. If you do already have one, Claude Code, opencode, or similar, that whole corner is probably solving a problem you’ve already automated away.

Finally, if you keep losing track of notes you’ve already written, that’s the actual market retrieval tools like Vault Lens and Recall for Obsidian exist for, and it’s still small. Go in with that expectation.