Smart Connections is an Obsidian plugin that surfaces related notes and passages from your vault while you write, using semantic search instead of manual links or keywords. A local embedding model indexes your notes on your own machine, so related research, decisions and drafts appear beside the note you are working on with zero setup and no API key required. The project has earned more than 5,500 stars on GitHub and was still actively developed in 2026.
Large Obsidian vaults quickly grow beyond what anyone can keep in their head: ideas meant to be revisited get buried, and the background behind a decision becomes hard to recover. Smart Connections acts as a link-building copilot, continuously matching the current note against the whole vault by meaning and presenting relevant excerpts in graph and list views. Because embeddings run locally by default, your notes stay private, and matches do not depend on you having linked anything beforehand. Companion plugins from the same author extend the workflow: Smart Context lets you review and pick the sources sent into an AI request, and Smart Chat keeps a link to AI conversations inside the note they relate to, so past work keeps contributing to the next task instead of sitting forgotten in the vault.
Freemium. Smart Plugins Core, including Smart Connections, is free. The optional Pro tier adds visual exploration with Smart Graph, passage-level Inline connections and advanced ranking controls.
Obsidian users with growing vaults โ researchers, writers and knowledge workers โ who want relevant past notes to resurface automatically while they write, without sending their notes to a cloud service.