What Is Flowershow and What Can You Use It For?

Updated

Flowershow is a hosted publishing tool that turns a folder of Markdown and HTML files into a real website — a blog, docs site, wiki, digital garden, or one-page report — without a build step or coding. You point it at your files, and it serves themed pages with navigation, wikilinks, Mermaid diagrams, and LaTeX math. It's positioned as free forever with no credit card required, and your files stay plain text, so you aren't locked in.

What Flowershow actually does

The core idea is "one folder, any kind of site." You keep your content in a single directory, mixing file types, and Flowershow publishes it as a website rather than a raw file link:

File type What happens
.md / .mdx Become pages with your site's theme and navigation; wikilinks, Mermaid, and math work
.html Served exactly as written — scripts run, and relative links to CSS, JS, data, and images work
.json, .csv, images, PDFs Served as files at their own URLs, so pages can load and link to them
.canvas (Obsidian Canvas) Rendered as diagram pages
Obsidian Bases Rendered as tables, cards, and lists

Because everything is served from one folder, a page can reference a CSV dataset or a PDF sitting next to it, and an HTML page can pull in its own stylesheet and chart script.

What you can use it for

The site lists five main use cases, each with a distinct shape:

  • Digital gardens — a living collection of notes mapped by backlinks and an interactive graph.
  • Blogs — themed posts without wrestling a site builder.
  • Wikis — fast, searchable, with links wired up automatically.
  • Docs — sidebar navigation plus instant full-text search.
  • One-page reports — a single Markdown or HTML file published as a proper page.

The same folder can serve more than one of these; the difference is mostly how you organize files and which theme you pick.

Built-in features worth knowing

  • Rich Markdown: CommonMark, GFM tables and task lists, Obsidian wikilinks, Mermaid diagrams, and LaTeX math work out of the box.
  • Themes and CSS: four polished themes, or roll your own with CSS and Tailwind.
  • Own your content: files remain plain text — portable and Git-friendly. Flowershow describes itself as infrastructure, not a silo.
  • Custom domains, favicon, and social image: available on Premium.
  • Full-text search across every page: available on Premium.

Who it fits — and the conditions

Flowershow is a good fit if you already write in Markdown (especially an Obsidian vault) and want it online quickly without configuring a static-site generator, CI, or hosting. It's also a reasonable choice if you want to mix hand-written HTML pages and data files into the same site.

Two conditions to weigh before committing:

  • Search and custom domains are Premium features. If readers need site-wide search or you need your own domain, plan for the paid tier rather than the free one. Check the pricing page for current terms.
  • It's a hosted service, not a self-hosted generator. You get a managed site; if you need full control of the server or build pipeline, a static-site generator may suit you better. The plain-text files make leaving easy either way.

The site reports it powers 2,300+ sites, and there's a demo and themes gallery if you want to see the output before signing up.