shaqmughal/seekstone

Filesystem-direct · single-digit-ms keyword search · ~26 ms semantic · ~2 KB payloads · 25 tools · macOS · Linux · Windows
seekstone.dev →
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| | **Seekstone** | obsidian-mcp-server (#1 by downloads) | REST-proxy servers |
|---|---|---|---|
| Local REST API plugin | **Not needed** | Required | Required |
| Obsidian app running | **Not needed — works with Obsidian closed** | Required | Required |
| Search payload @ 10k notes | **2.0 KB** | 47 KB | up to **95 MB** |
| Warm search latency @ 10k notes | **5.6 ms** | 732 ms (~131× slower) | up to 1,550 ms |
| Structured frontmatter queries | **Built-in (query_notes) — property/date/size predicates, answers in a few hundred bytes** | JSONLogic via REST | Varies |
Same queries, same committed vaults, 20 runs each, one machine. In-process adapters were re-run on the fixture-v2 vault in September 2026; the REST-proxy rows (rest, obsidian-mcp-server, mcp-obsidian) plus obsidian-mcp and obsidian-mcp-pro are June 2026 captures on fixture v1 — per-row provenance in benchmarks.json, the generated source of truth every number here is checked against in CI — full results across eight servers and three vault sizes below, fully reproducible from the harness.
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What is Seekstone?
**Seekstone is an Obsidian MCP server** — it gives Claude (and any Model Context Protocol client) direct read and write access to your Obsidian vault. No Obsidian app needs to be open, no plugins are required, and nothing leaves your machine.
It reads your vault **directly from disk** rather than routing through the Obsidian Local REST API plugin, and holds a warm full-text index in-process. The practical difference is twofold:
- **Speed.** Keyword searches return in **single-digit milliseconds** warm and semantic searches in **~26 ms** — up to **~508× faster** than every other Obsidian MCP server we benchmarked, because there's no subprocess to spawn and no HTTP round-trip per query.
- **Context.** A broad search that returns **tens of megabytes** and millions of tokens via a REST-proxy server returns **~2 KB** via Seekstone — up to a **~47,000× reduction** that only widens as your vault grows.
Search comes in three modes: ranked **full-text search** (fuzzy and prefix matching), optional **local semantic search** (meaning-based, via a small on-device embedding model — opt-in, offline at runtime after a one-time ~30 MB model download), and **structured metadata queries** — query_notes filters by frontmatter properties (status, due, type, …), tags, folder, modified time, and size, answering questions like *"which draft notes changed this week?"* in a few hundred bytes instead of a search-and-read loop.
Claude can search and read your entire note library, in milliseconds, without burning most of its context window on a single tool call.
Published on npm as seekstone — install with npx -y seekstone. (Previously also published as obsidian-mcp-seekstone; that alias is deprecated but existing installs keep working.)
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Why Seekstone? The numbers.
Most Obsidian MCP servers return **full note content for every search hit**. On a broad query that's megabytes of text your LLM has to process — most of it irrelevant, all of it burning context window.
Seekstone returns short ranked excerpts instead (~120 characters by default, tunable per query). We benchmarked Seekstone against 7 other Obsidian MCP servers — 8 servers total — across **three vault sizes — 1,000 / 5,000 / 10,000 notes** (20 runs each). Every number below is fully reproducible: the vaults are committed to this repo (generated from the public-domain 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica), so you can clone it and run the exact same benchmark yourself.
The point of testing three sizes is that **this is where the architectures diverge** — a real vault only grows.
**Search payload — bytes returned per query (context tax; lower is better)**
| Server | Architecture | 1k notes | 5k notes | 10k notes |
|---|---|---:|---:|---:|
| 🥇 **Seekstone** | in-process index | **1.6 KB** | **1.8 KB** | **2.0 KB** |
| mcpvault | fs-direct subprocess | 1.7 KB | 1.9 KB | 2.2 KB |
| obsidian-mcp-rs | fs-direct, per-query scan | 5.4 KB | 5.8 KB | 6.2 KB |
| obsidian-tc | SQLite platform | 4.6 KB | 6.8 KB | 7.3 KB |
| obsidian-mcp-server | REST API | 55 KB | 47 KB | 47 KB |
| obsidian-mcp-pro | fs-direct subprocess | 25 KB | 84 KB | 114 KB |
| obsidian-mcp | fs-direct subprocess | 18 KB | 105 KB | 203 KB |
| mcp-obsidian | REST API | 9.8 MB | 45 MB | **95 MB** |