Cabinet vs the alternatives
Cabinet sits in a space that doesn't have an obvious incumbent. It's not just a notes app, not just an AI assistant, not just a file manager. It's the combination — and the combination is what's new.
At a glance
| Feature | Cabinet | Obsidian | Notion |
|---|---|---|---|
| AI agent orchestration | Yes | No | No |
| Scheduled cron jobs | Yes | No | No |
| Embedded HTML apps | Yes | No | No |
| Web terminal | Yes | No | No |
| Self-hosted, files on disk | Yes | Yes | No |
| No database / no lock-in | Yes | Yes | No |
| Git-backed version history | Yes | Via plugin | No |
| WYSIWYG + Markdown | Yes | Yes | Yes |
What this table is really saying
vs. Obsidian. Obsidian is great for personal knowledge. Cabinet keeps that — files on disk, plain markdown, plugins-style extensibility — and adds an AI team that lives in the same folder. The agents read your notes, write back into them, and run jobs on a schedule. Obsidian doesn't try to be a workflow tool; Cabinet does.
vs. Notion. Notion is great for collaborative docs and databases. But your data lives in their cloud, in their format. Cabinet inverts that: your folder, your files, your AI. The trade-off is real — you give up Notion's polished collab and embedded views, you get full ownership and a teammate that runs on your machine.
vs. ChatGPT / Claude.app. Chat apps are great for ad-hoc questions. They're terrible at long-running work — every session forgets, nothing persists, outputs get lost in transcripts. Cabinet's bet is that durable pages beat chat history. A research task doesn't end in a chat thread; it ends as research/competitor-brief-2026-05.md in your folder.
When Cabinet is the wrong choice
Cabinet won't replace:
- Real-time collaboration tools like Figma or Google Docs. Cabinet is single-user-first. Multi-user comes later.
- Tools with strong UI primitives — Notion databases with views, Linear's issue tracker, Airtable's relational tables. Cabinet is markdown + folders.
- Mobile-first workflows. Cabinet is desktop-first today (macOS native + browser). Mobile is on the roadmap.
What you can do that no one else lets you
- Write a
persona.mdand have an agent show up — same model, same prompt structure, every time. - Drop an
index.htmlin any folder and Cabinet renders it as an embedded app. AI-generated dashboards, version-controlled. - Schedule a cron job that runs Friday 5pm: read this week's notes, write a summary, commit it.
git logyour entire knowledge base and see exactly when each idea showed up.
Read on
- What is Cabinet App — the in-app feature surface.
- Cabinet File Format — what's actually on disk.
- Principles — the values driving the design.