Plugins are add-ons that extend a note-taking app such as 📝Obsidian, which divides them into core plugins built by its own team and community plugins built by third parties.
Obsidian Help states that core plugins are officially built and supported by the Obsidian team and are included within the application. Some are disabled by default and are switched on under Settings → Core plugins. 📝Graph View and 📝Obsidian Bases are both core plugins in Obsidian's documentation.
Community plugins are built by members of the Obsidian community rather than the Obsidian team, and add capabilities such as support for additional file formats or integration with third-party services. A user browses the directory from Settings → Community plugins or at community.obsidian.md, then installs and enables the chosen plugin. 📝Smart Connections, which finds related notes and excerpts while writing, is one listing in that directory.
Obsidian's documentation warns that "Community plugins run third-party code on your behalf that could potentially do harm." The app runs in Restricted Mode by default, which blocks community plugins, and the mode must be turned off before one can be installed. Obsidian's plugin security page states that it cannot reliably limit plugins to specific permissions, so a plugin inherits the app's access and can read files on the computer, connect to the internet and install additional programs. Each plugin version is automatically scanned for security vulnerabilities, code quality problems and malware, with the results shown as a safety scorecard on its directory page.