Quartz is the most popular open-source way to publish an Obsidian vault. It generates a fully static site — fast to load, free to host, and SEO-friendly out of the box — while preserving the wiki-link, graph, and backlink experience that makes Obsidian useful in the first place. The sites below are real Quartz deployments you can browse for inspiration.
What is Quartz?
Quartz is a free, open-source static-site generator built specifically for Obsidian vaults. You point it at your notes folder, configure a couple of things in a config file, and it produces a deployable static site with backlinks, a local graph view, full-text search, dark mode, and recent-notes lists — all with zero runtime database. It's currently on its 4th major version and is actively maintained.
Quartz vs Obsidian Publish
Quartz is free, self-hosted (deploy to GitHub Pages, Vercel, Netlify, or anywhere static), and infinitely customisable — but you'll touch a config file and a deploy pipeline. Obsidian Publish is one-click, hosted by the Obsidian team, and just works — but it's a paid subscription and less flexible. Most people pick Quartz when they want full ownership and Publish when they want zero ops.
Get started
Clone the Quartz starter, copy your vault into the content folder, run the build command, and deploy the output to any static host. The official docs walk through every step. Once your site is live, browse the examples below to see how others have customised the layout, theming, and navigation — and check the project's GitHub for community-contributed plugins and themes.