Visualizing Data with Mermaid and Charts in Obsidian

2 min readby Rouven Bardtke#guide #obsidian #mermaid #charts

Date8 May 2026

AuthorRouven Bardtke

Two of the most powerful ways to make your Obsidian notes visual are Mermaid diagrams and the Charts plugin. Here's how to use both — and what renders when you publish to Sidian.

Mermaid diagrams

Mermaid is built into Obsidian and fully supported by Sidian. Wrap any Mermaid syntax in a mermaid code block.

Flowcharts

flowchart LR A[Write in Obsidian] --> B[Sync with Sidian] B --> C{Password set?} C -- Yes --> D[Visitors enter password] C -- No --> E[Visitors read freely] D --> E

Sequence diagrams

sequenceDiagram participant You participant Plugin participant Sidian You->>Plugin: Save note Plugin->>Sidian: POST /api/v1/sync Sidian-->>Plugin: 200 OK (pushed: 1) Plugin-->>You: ↑ 1

Entity relationship diagrams

erDiagram USER ||--o{ SITE : owns SITE ||--o{ NOTE : contains SITE ||--o{ FOLDER : contains FOLDER ||--o{ NOTE : groups

Gantt charts

gantt title Sidian Roadmap dateFormat YYYY-MM-DD section Beta Plugin v0.1.0 :done, 2026-04-28, 2026-04-28 Plugin v0.1.1 :done, 2026-05-07, 2026-05-07 section v1.0 Public plugin store listing :active, 2026-05-08, 30d Custom themes :2026-06-01, 21d

Mermaid renders on Sidian

All Mermaid diagram types render correctly when your vault is published. No extra configuration needed.

Obsidian Charts plugin

The Charts plugin lets you render bar, line, pie, and radar charts from YAML inside a chart code block.

Charts plugin requires Obsidian

The Charts plugin renders inside Obsidian using a JavaScript library bundled with the plugin itself. When published to Sidian, these blocks appear as a plain code block — the chart isn't drawn.

Workaround: Use Mermaid's xychart-beta for bar and line charts, which does render on Sidian.

Mermaid as a Charts alternative

xychart-beta title "Notes written per month" x-axis [Jan, Feb, Mar, Apr, May] y-axis "Notes" 0 --> 35 bar [12, 18, 9, 24, 31] line [12, 18, 9, 24, 31]

For pie charts, Mermaid also has you covered:

pie title Time spent in Obsidian "Writing" : 45 "Linking notes" : 25 "Reading" : 20 "Configuring plugins" : 10

Summary

Feature	Obsidian	Sidian
Mermaid diagrams	✓	✓
Charts plugin	✓	✗ (shows code block)
Mermaid xychart-beta	✓	✓

Stick to Mermaid for anything you want to look great when published.

Updated 20 May 2026