FlowKit Health Dashboard

Something in your vault is broken, slow, or throwing errors. Find out which plugin is doing it.

Obsidian tells you nothing about what your plugins are doing to it. When typing starts lagging, when a shortcut silently stops working, when the app throws an error that names no one — the only tool you have is disabling things by hand until it goes away.

FlowKit is the tool for that afternoon.

Everything runs locally. The complete diagnosis is free — Pro is for the work you can't reasonably do by hand.

Find what's breaking your vault

The standard advice in every Obsidian support thread is "disable half your plugins and see if it goes away." It's correct. It's also twenty minutes of tedious clicking that most people abandon halfway through, having lost track of which half they were on and which plugins were off to begin with.

FlowKit runs those rounds:

Finding what's breaking your vault        14 plugins still possible · round 2 of 7
Testing for: typing lags in long notes

FlowKit has switched off 7 plugins. Reproduce what you were seeing, then
tell it whether the problem is still there.

  ▸ Currently switched off (7)

  [ The problem is gone ]  [ Still happening ]            [ Stop and restore ]

• Your setup is saved before it starts, and every plugin the search switched off goes back on when it ends — including if you stop halfway through, or restart Obsidian mid-search. The session survives a restart, because reproducing a problem often needs one. Anything you switch on yourself while it runs is left exactly as you left it: the search undoes its own work, not yours.
• The last suspect is actually tested before it's accused. Narrowing to one plugin isn't proof — so FlowKit switches that one off and asks once more. This is why "no plugin is responsible" is an answer it can give you, pointing at a theme, a CSS snippet or Obsidian itself rather than blaming something innocent.
• Nothing is uninstalled, at any point.

"It started right after that update"

FlowKit records every install, update, removal and toggle as it sees them. It already knew when each plugin's version changed, and separately when each plugin started throwing errors. Putting the two together produces the most useful sentence it can say:

Templater started throwing errors 2 hours after it updated v2.4.0 → v2.4.1.

Stated as a sequence, not a cause — because that's what it is. It's usually where to look first.

Metrics

Overall is a weighted blend of those five, renormalised over whatever data is actually available, and shown alongside a confidence figure so a score built on three signals doesn't read like one built on five. Below 60% confidence the letter grade is withheld rather than guessed.

Two things override the blend, because they are risk facts rather than quantities worth averaging:

• a plugin that can't load on your setup is capped at 20
• a plugin removed from the community directory is capped at 30

A missing signal can never raise a score. Select any row in the dashboard to see each metric's value, weight, and the evidence behind it.

What this score is not

It is not a judgement of whether a plugin is any good, whether its code is safe, or whether you should uninstall it. It measures four things: whether a plugin can run on your setup, whether it has thrown errors on your machine, whether it is still being worked on, and what it costs to load.

A plugin you love can score badly for being finished. A plugin you never open can score perfectly. Popularity is context, not health — a niche plugin is not a worse plugin. Treat a low score as a reason to look, not a reason to act. The dashboard says this too, under the table, and every exported report carries it — a letter grade quoted out of context is exactly the misreading it exists to prevent.

Footprint — what a plugin costs to run

Bundle size on its own is a misleading cost signal: a 60 KB plugin polling four times a second is worse for your vault than a 400 KB one that loads and sits idle. Footprint blends three measurements and reports the worst of them, because these are alternative ways of being expensive, not components of one quantity:

That last one is the number that explains a laggy vault. Obsidian's interface is single-threaded, so a callback taking 180 ms is 180 ms in which nothing you type appears — and a plugin can hold a slow callback on a slow timer and look cheap by every other measure here.

A plugin FlowKit couldn't observe is never penalised for it. Load time and timers can only ever lower a score, and only when they were actually measured — absence of evidence is never treated as evidence of idleness.

FlowKit times every plugin Obsidian loads after it, and every plugin you enable from anywhere afterwards. That's a partial sample on most vaults, and the startup strip says so rather than quoting a total that implies the rest are free. Profile startup fills in the gaps by restarting each remaining plugin in turn and timing it — explicit, confirmed, and it tells you exactly what it's about to do first. Single plugins can be measured the same way from the row menu.

Plugins that fight each other

Two perfectly healthy plugins bound to the same shortcut means one of them silently never fires, and nothing in Obsidian's own UI tells you which. No per-plugin score could ever surface that, because neither plugin is at fault — so FlowKit reports it as a vault-level finding, badges both rows, lists the clashes in each plugin's panel, and links straight to the hotkey settings.

Duplicate command names across plugins are reported too: they're indistinguishable in the command palette.

None of this is scored. Docking a plugin for a collision it didn't choose would be inventing a defect.

When Obsidian itself updates

This is the moment people actually open a plugin-health dashboard: a release landed and something stopped working. FlowKit notices the version change, re-checks everything against the new Obsidian, and leads the dashboard with what that update broke — by name, with a way straight to them. When nothing broke, it says that instead, which is worth just as much.

Reliability — errors, traced back to the plugin that threw them

When something in Obsidian throws, FlowKit reads the stack trace, works out which plugin the failing code belongs to, and records it. Over time that turns "Obsidian's been weird lately" into "Templater has thrown 40 errors this week, here's the one that keeps repeating."

• Uncaught exceptions and unhandled rejections are what the score is built from.
• Errors a plugin catches and logs itself are recorded and shown for context, but deliberately never counted against its score — a plugin that reports its failures honestly shouldn't rank below one that swallows them.
• Reliability reads unavailable until FlowKit has been watching for a few hours. A plugin that hasn't thrown in ninety seconds isn't thereby reliable.
• Errors that can't be traced to a specific installed plugin are discarded, not guessed at.

All of it stays on your machine. Error messages and stack traces can quote file paths and note titles, so they are never transmitted anywhere, and you can turn the whole thing off or clear the log in settings.

Maintained or not

Beyond the 0–100 maintenance score, every plugin carries a plain maintained/not badge derived from how long ago it was last updated:

Release age alone cannot establish abandonment, and this is deliberately worded so it doesn't pretend otherwise. Plenty of excellent plugins are simply done.

The repository can settle it. With Check repository activity switched on (off by default), FlowKit asks GitHub whether a plugin's repo is archived or still being pushed to — the one signal that genuinely separates finished from abandoned:

• an archived repository is the author saying, on the record, that nothing more is coming: it outranks the maturity carve-out entirely
• a repo pushed to this year reads as Active, however old its newest tag
• a repo untouched for two years overrules the carve-out the other way — many published versions means nothing if nobody has touched the code

Only plugins whose verdict is genuinely in doubt are looked up, a few per scan, cached for a week. Nothing is sent but a repository name, which is already public. It is off by default because it is the one thing here that talks to an API rather than downloading a public file.

Extra signals

Each plugin row also surfaces:

• Update available — a newer stable version is published than the one you have. Prereleases are ignored, so a -beta build doesn't nag you about an update you can't install.
• Delisted — the plugin was in Obsidian's community directory and has since been removed. Worth knowing why before keeping it.
• Local install — never in the directory: installed manually or via BRAT, so it skipped community review. A neutral fact, not a fault.

At a glance

What to fix comes first — a short, ranked to-do list: the incompatible plugins that won't load, the ones pulled from the directory, the ones throwing errors, the shortcut clashes, the updates waiting. Selecting any finding scopes the table to exactly the plugins it counted. Underneath it sit the vault-health score, the tiles, the trend, and the full scorecard as evidence.

Disable these first

Knowing what is wrong still isn't knowing what to do first. Ranking by badness answers it wrongly — the worst-scoring plugin is often the one you use daily, while the easy win is the broken thing you forgot was installed.

FlowKit ranks by trouble removed per feature given up, and says what each one would cost you: "You'd lose: 6 commands and 4 registered hooks", or, for a plugin that can't load at all, "nothing — it already isn't running." Anything you're watching is never recommended first.

Why is my vault slow?

The startup cost of the whole vault in one line — plugins loading, total code, measured milliseconds, how many are running a fast repeating timer — and one click to order the table by what each plugin actually costs to run.

Mute with a reason and an end date

A one-click permanent mute is a way to make a real problem invisible forever. Mutes now last 30 days, until Obsidian next updates (because "it's fine on this version" is a claim about this version), or indefinitely — with an optional note to yourself. Expired mutes lapse on their own, and FlowKit tells you when one does rather than letting a plugin quietly rejoin the counts.

Watch a plugin to have FlowKit lead with it whenever something about it moves. A vault-wide report is global noise; three plugins you actually depend on is not.

Free vs Pro

FlowKit is useful for free forever, and a one-time Pro unlock adds the power-user tooling. Pro is verified fully offline (a signed license key — no account, no server, no telemetry).

The whole diagnosis is free. Pro is for the work you can't reasonably do by hand — an automated search, a full startup profile, switching twenty plugins at once, and being told when something breaks while you weren't looking.

Changed in 1.4.0: bulk fixes used to be the headline Pro feature. Charging for the difference between one click and three — a thirty-second job in Obsidian's own settings — was the weakest claim in the product, so bulk fixes are now free, review step and undo included. Existing keys unlock everything below; nothing anyone paid for was taken away.

Free

• The complete ranked "What to fix" list — every finding, not a teaser
• Bulk fixes in one click — review exactly what will change and why, apply it together, undo if you disagree
• Disable these first — the ranked shortlist, with what each one would cost
• Which plugins are throwing errors, how many, how often, and the messages
• "Is this a known issue?" — search a plugin's own tracker for the error
• Your vault's change history, and when errors started right after an update
• Shortcut and command-name clashes between your plugins
• What each plugin costs to run — size, load time, timers and callback cost
• What the last Obsidian update broke, the moment it lands
• The full six-metric scorecard, weighted overall, and confidence figure
• Select any row to see why it scored what it did: each metric's value, weight, and evidence
• Copy bug report — a plugin's errors, versions and platform, paste-ready for an issue
• A 30-day health trend, recorded whether or not you open the dashboard
• A status-bar readout that names what's wrong, not just that something is
• Unlimited Markdown reports and copy-to-clipboard summaries
• Mute with a reason and an expiry, and watch the plugins you depend on
• Search, filter, sort, and the per-row menu (enable/disable, open settings, open on GitHub, measure load time, watch, mute)
• Fully offline-capable; both online lookups are optional

Pro ($9 one-time)

• Find what's breaking your vault — the automated binary search. Seven questions instead of an evening of manual toggling, with your exact setup restored afterwards
• Profile startup — time every enabled plugin in one pass, for the complete answer to "why is my vault slow" in real milliseconds
• Saved plugin sets — a Writing set, a Minimal set, a known-good set to fall back to; switch twenty plugins on and eighteen off in one action
• Background monitoring — get told when a plugin turns incompatible, goes stale, or is pulled from the community directory, leading with the plugins you're watching
• Full stack traces for every recorded error, and included in the copied bug report — see exactly where a plugin broke, and file something the author can act on
• CSV export, alongside the Markdown report that's free and unlimited
• 90 days of vault-health history, instead of the last 30

Every action shows you what it will do first

Nothing changes until you have seen exactly what would change. Pressing a fix opens a review screen listing every affected plugin by name, each with the specific evidence that put it there — not a count, not a restatement of the finding:

Disable these plugins?
FlowKit will turn off 3 plugins. Nothing is uninstalled, and you can
undo this straight after.

  Calendar        Requires Obsidian 1.9.0, but you run 1.8.4.
  Note Refactor   No recorded update in about 26 months.
  Kanban          Was in the community directory and has since been removed.

⚠ A plugin with no recent release isn't necessarily broken — some are simply
  finished. Cancel and disable them individually if you'd rather keep some.

                                        [ Cancel ]  [ Disable 3 ]

Afterwards an Undo bar stays on the page for the rest of the session, and undo only ever re-enables what the action actually changed — it can't switch on something you had already turned off yourself. Nothing is uninstalled, ever.

The same holds for everything that touches your setup: switching plugin sets lists every plugin it would turn on and off (and names any the set references that are no longer installed), profiling tells you it will restart everything before it does, and bisect saves your current set before its first move.

Purchase: Buy Me a Coffee — FlowKit Pro. License keys are verified offline (Ed25519) — no account, server, or subscription, and one key works on every device you own.

Key didn't arrive, or want a refund? Email [email protected].

Activate Pro

1. Purchase on Buy Me a Coffee.
2. Your license key is emailed to you automatically, within seconds — the whole thing is fully automated, no waiting on a human.
3. Obsidian → Settings → FlowKit Pro → paste the key. Pro unlocks immediately (offline verification).

Install

Community plugins (recommended): open Settings → Community plugins, search FlowKit, and install it — one click, auto-updates.

Manual install: copy main.js, manifest.json, and styles.css into <vault>/.obsidian/plugins/flowkit-health-dashboard/ and enable it in Settings → Community plugins.

Usage

• Click the activity ribbon icon, or run the command "Open health dashboard" — it opens in a main tab. On narrow panes and phones the table becomes one card per plugin.
• Diagnose in the header is the entry point when something is actually wrong: find what's breaking your vault, profile startup, and save or switch plugin sets.
• Start with What to fix. Selecting a finding filters the table to exactly the plugins it names.
• Select any row to open its reasoning panel: each metric's value, weight and evidence, plus enable/disable, open settings, GitHub, and mute.
• Search by name/author, filter (needs attention, no recent release, incompatible, delisted, local installs, update available, disabled, muted), and click any column to sort.
• Export writes a report — findings, scorecard and methodology — to a Markdown note or CSV. The Markdown report is free and unlimited; CSV is Pro.
• Refresh re-scores and re-downloads community data on demand. Otherwise the cached data is reused for a day so the dashboard opens instantly.

Settings

• FlowKit Pro — paste your license key to unlock Pro features (verified offline). Shows your Pro status and what it unlocks.

• Online enrichment — fetch popularity + maintenance from Obsidian's public community data. Turn off to stay fully offline (those two metrics then show as unavailable). Local-first: no telemetry, no accounts.

  The two files come from raw.githubusercontent.com, falling back to the jsDelivr CDN mirror of the same repository when GitHub rate-limits the connection. Nothing is sent — these are plain public downloads — and the result is cached locally for a day.

Every network call FlowKit can make

There are exactly three, all to GitHub, none of them telemetry, and each can be switched off or simply not used:

No accounts, no analytics, no identifiers, and nothing about your notes or vault is ever transmitted. Error messages and stack traces stay on your machine — the issue search sends only the message text of the error you explicitly asked it to look up, and only when you press the button.

• Check repository activity — ask GitHub whether a plugin's repository is archived or still being pushed to, so finished and abandoned stop looking identical. Off by default: it is the only thing here that talks to an API rather than downloading a public file. Only plugins whose verdict is in doubt are looked up, a few per scan, cached for a week; nothing is sent but a repository name.

• Measure what plugins cost while running — time plugin loads and notice repeating timers, so Footprint reflects what a plugin does and not only how big it is. Only measurements FlowKit witnesses are used; a plugin it couldn't observe is never penalised for it.

  To do this it wraps window.setInterval and Obsidian's plugin loader while it runs, so it can see which plugin created a timer and how long each load and each callback takes. Both wrappers pass straight through to the originals, record nothing but timings, and are removed when FlowKit unloads. Turn this off and none of it happens. Nothing measured here leaves your machine.

• Show disabled plugins — include installed-but-disabled plugins.

• Re-download community data on open — off by default; the cached scan is reused for a day, and Refresh always refetches.

• Background monitoring (Pro) — check quietly for plugins that turn incompatible, go stale, or get pulled from the directory. This is the only feature that fetches community data without you asking; switch it off and FlowKit only ever goes online when you open or refresh the dashboard.

• Muted plugins — what's muted, why, and when each mute lapses; clear the list here.

• Watched plugins — the ones FlowKit leads with and never recommends for a bulk disable.

• Other devices (only shown when there is more than one) — how many machines share this vault's settings, and a way to forget the ones you no longer use.

More than one device

Obsidian syncs your plugin settings and your installed plugins as two separate options, so a desktop with forty plugins and a phone with six can share one settings file. FlowKit keeps each device's view apart:

• A plugin missing from this machine is absent, not uninstalled. Its error history, measured load times and repository readings are kept as long as any device still has it — so your phone can't delete what your desktop recorded.
• The change history only reports what happened on the device that saw it. Without this, each machine reported every plugin the other had as "uninstalled" on every scan, forever.
• The trend chart shows this device's own readings. Two machines with different plugin sets do not have the same vault health, and averaging them into one line is the same mistake as plotting an offline reading beside a full one — which FlowKit already refuses to do.
• A device that stops syncing is forgotten after 90 days, or immediately from Settings → Other devices.

The device identity lives in local storage, not in the synced settings file — which is the only place it could mean anything. If a device has no local storage available, it shares one identity with any others in the same position, which is exactly how FlowKit behaved before any of this existed.

Development

npm install
npm run dev     # watch build → main.js
npm run build   # typecheck + production build
npm test        # run the scoring engine test suite

The test suite (test/) executes the real scoring code against mock plugin data — verifying compatibility, popularity, maintenance, footprint, hygiene, the weighted overall and its confidence figure, the incompatible and delisted caps, the guarantee that a missing signal never raises a score, the stability carve-out and the repository signals that overrule it in both directions, the runtime-cost blend (including that an unmeasured plugin is never penalised and that a load time from an older build is ignored), the bisect state machine (driven to completion for every possible culprit, plus the no-culprit case and the restore path), the change timeline and its error correlation (including that errors predating a change never correlate with it), plugin-set deltas, shortcut and command-name clash detection, mute expiry and migration, the safe-disable ranking, the persisted-cache round trip, the maintained/not status, update-available detection (including prerelease handling), the delisted-vs-local split, the offline license verifier, and the insights engine — so the core logic is checked even without a live Obsidian vault.

Licensing (author-only)

Pro is gated by an offline Ed25519 license key (src/shared/verifyLicense.mjs verifies against the public key in src/license/publicKey.ts). To mint a key for a customer you need the private signing key at scripts/.license-private.key (gitignored — back it up; it can't be regenerated):

npm run license:generate -- [email protected]

Copy main.js, manifest.json, and styles.css into <vault>/.obsidian/plugins/flowkit-health-dashboard/ to test in Obsidian, or symlink the repo there during development.

How scoring works

See src/scoring.ts — each metric is a small, documented function returning a value plus a measured | estimated | unavailable source tag. Data sources live in src/dataSources.ts.