Software Alternatives & Reviews

Roam Research VS Obsidian.md

Compare Roam Research VS Obsidian.md and see what are their differences

Roam Research logo Roam Research

A note-taking tool for networked thought

Obsidian.md logo Obsidian.md

A second brain, for you, forever. Obsidian is a powerful knowledge base that works on top of a local folder of plain text Markdown files.
  • Roam Research Landing page
    Landing page //
    2021-10-22
  • Obsidian.md Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-09-01

Roam Research

Categories
  • Note Taking
  • Todos
  • Task Management
  • Knowledge Management
  • Knowledge Base
  • Personal Notes
Website roamresearch.com
Pricing URL-

Obsidian.md

Categories
  • Knowledge Management
  • Knowledge Base
  • Markdown Editor
  • Markdown Viewer
  • Personal Notes
  • Note Taking
  • Notes
Website obsidian.md
Pricing URL Official Obsidian.md Pricing

Roam Research videos

This Note-Taking App is a Game Changer - Roam Research

More videos:

  • Review - ROAM Research: Our First Impressions
  • Review - A quick overview of Roam Research

Obsidian.md videos

OBSIDIAN: Getting Started, Facts & Pricing

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Roam Research and Obsidian.md)
Note Taking
22 22%
78% 78
Knowledge Management
11 11%
89% 89
Productivity
100 100%
0% 0
Knowledge Base
0 0%
100% 100

User comments

Share your experience with using Roam Research and Obsidian.md. For example, how are they different and which one is better?
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  1. Stan Bright avatar
    Stan Bright
    · over 2 years ago
    · Reply

    I think both Roam and Obsidian are great apps. Although I've used only Obsidian, I did a serious research about both a year ago. What tilted me towards Obsidian was that it's a desktop app, I own the data (syncing through iCloud or Dropbox), and there's Vim support.

    I recommend - Obsidian.md.

Reviews

These are some of the external sources and on-site user reviews we've used to compare Roam Research and Obsidian.md

Roam Research Reviews

Supercharge Your Productivity: Three Recommended Tools for Thought
Side note: Those who follow me may be surprised I’d choose Tana over Roam Research. I have extraordinary love for Roam — it was my introduction to this amazing TfT world! — but Tana is a more powerful environment.
Source: medium.com
Logseq vs Roam Research vs Obsidian: which one should you choose?
Recommending Logseq over Roam Research is easy if you are someone who is searching for a free alternative to Roam Research. You get almost feature-parity between both services and are not missing out on anything essential. But if the price is not a factor, and you just want to select the best note-taking app between the two, here are some reasons why you should select Logseq...
Source: medium.com
Obsidian vs. Roam vs. LogSeq: Which PKM App is Right For You?
Roam doesn’t have plugins like Obsidian, but you can embed scripts and code directly into Roam to extend its capability. One of the most popular Roam “extensions” is called Roam42. Roam 42 gives you a lot of extra stuff Roam doesn’t support by default, like:
11 Best Notepad.pw Alternatives To Use
Roam Research is an auto-back-linked-wiki that helps people to be more productive. Bi-directional links allow you to create pages as you type. When you visit those pages it lists all bullets in which you have mentioned the tag. You can build a network of interconnected notes, which is not linear or hierarchical.
Source: notepad.link
Best Next-Level Note Apps for 2021
Roam Research is a note-taking app for networked thought, creating groups of information and making knowledge associations naturally. Arguably, the comprehensive app made bi-directional linking popular for note-taking apps. Roam Research enables users an organized and personalized overview over all the notes taken. Known for their high user satisfaction, users new to these...
Source: zenkit.com

Obsidian.md Reviews

  1. The kind of software that may change your life

    Perhaps you know someone who swears by Obsidian, it may seem like a cult of overly devoted people for how passionate they are, but it's not without reason

    I've been using Obsidian for over 3 years, at a point in my life when I felt I had to handle too much information and I felt like grasping water not being able to remember everything I wanted, language learning, programming, accounting, university, daily tasks. A friend recommended it to me next to Notion (of which he is a passionate cultist priest) and I reluctantly picked it and fell in love almost immediately.

    Obsidian seems very simple, like a notepad with folder interface, similar to Sublime Text, but the ability to link files together in a Wiki style allows you to organize ideas in any way you want, one file may lead to a dozen or more ideas that are related

    If you want to do something specific, Obsidian has a plethora of community created plugins that expand the functionality, in my case, I use obsidian to organize my classes both as a teacher and as a student, using local databases, calendars, dictionaries, slides, vector graphic drawings, excel-like tables, Anki connection, podcasts, and more

    🏁 Competitors: Notion, Evernote
    👍 Pros:    Awesome community|Custom plugins|Local hosting|Beautiful themes|Highly customizable|Cloud storage|Becomes more useful over time|Markdown support
    👎 Cons:    Seems complicated/complex at first|Takes time to set up your personal workspace|Overwhelming for first time user
  2. My personal knowledge-base of choice

    I've been using Obsidian for more than a year. It's been great. I think it offer a great balance of control, flexibility and extensibility. What is more, you own your own data, that's been a must-have feature for me. I just can't imagine putting all my knowledge into something that I don't have control over.

    I think two of the most popular alternatives that people consider are Logseq and Roam Research. Although Logseq is a bit different, it's considered compatible with Obsidian. Supposedly, you can use them with a shared database (files. Both use simple text files for storage). I tried that once, a few months ago. It worked, yet it messed up a bit my Obsidian files ¯_(ツ)_/¯.

    🏁 Competitors: Logseq, Roam Research

The best encrypted note taking apps
For a consumer coming from Evernote, Notion, OneNote, or a similar product, we would advise trying Obsidian along another product on this list as it has the largest learning curve. However, if you are an expert with markdown, experts, linking, and graph views, Obsidian could be an excellent choice. Like many other configuration options, Obsidian leaves end-to-end encryption...
Source: www.skiff.com
Supercharge Your Productivity: Three Recommended Tools for Thought
One of my AP Productivity: Cohort mentors has a powerful system pairing Obsidian with OmniFocus. In OmniFocus, he builds his project and task structures, and in Obsidian he develops and organizes the project support materials as well as other relevant information. Because it’s easy to link to an Obsidian note or an OmniFocus project, he can seamlessly navigate back and forth...
Source: medium.com
Logseq vs Roam Research vs Obsidian: which one should you choose?
Block Reference and block embeds: Adding block reference and block embeds in Logseq is simple. You use double-open parentheses (( and type to search the block you want to link. In Obsidian, you have to first add the link to the note and then use # to embed headers and ^ to embed blocks.– Obsidian also makes it hard to see the origin of block references, as they are only...
Source: medium.com
Best 5 Obsidian Alternatives
Bi-directional note-taking applications have become more and more popular on the productivity scene this past year. Obsidian is one of the fastest-growing productivity tools right now, based on plain text Markdown files stored in a local folder, it gives your notes the security and longevity they deserve.
Obsidian vs. Roam vs. LogSeq: Which PKM App is Right For You?
Obsidian as an application sits on top of qlocal files stored on your computer. The files themselves are not imported into Obsidian, they are simply opened and viewed there. That means that if you ever decide to stop using Obsidian, what you are left with is a folder full of plain text files and images. While some features in Obsidian may use special formatting, the...

Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, Obsidian.md seems to be a lot more popular than Roam Research. While we know about 1451 links to Obsidian.md, we've tracked only 101 mentions of Roam Research. We are tracking product recommendations and mentions on various public social media platforms and blogs. They can help you identify which product is more popular and what people think of it.

Roam Research mentions (101)

  • How do I render HTML (and render hyper links in particular) in the field of a card
    Many of my cards include links back to my notes in https://roamresearch.com/. Source: 4 months ago
  • Philosophy of Science 101: What Is the Problem of Induction?
    Popper's criterion in a vacuum could seem to be exclusionary, but his philosophy of science involves his underrated idea of evolutionary epistemology. That all theories, seemingly pseudoscientific and the rest, compete to explain something, testable or not. Explanation is the most fundamental aspect, the rival statements compete to solve some problem in terms of how and why. Read Popper's Ch. 1. Conjectural... - Source: Hacker News / 9 months ago
  • What are your top productivity tools?
    Other tools I use: Superhuman for Email, Akiflow for tasks and calendar, Roam for notes/PKB, and one sec to reduce opening distracting apps. Source: 10 months ago
  • Xerox PARC's NoteCards in a Nutshell (1987) [pdf]
    That link would be https://roamresearch.com. - Source: Hacker News / 10 months ago
  • How to improve my workflow? Need help.
    Also glasp.co and https://roamresearch.com/ look interesting. I haven't tried them yet. Source: 11 months ago
View more

Obsidian.md mentions (1451)

  • Replatforming from Gatsby to Zola!
    So I've had my fair share of personal websites and blogs. I have built them on stacks ranging from the most basic HTML and CSS, to hosted frameworks like Wordpress and Laravel, to the more modern single page applications built in Vue and React. For a simple content blog I think you can't go wrong with a Static Site Generator though. These days I am almost exclusively writing everything in Obsidian. Which is great... - Source: dev.to / 17 days ago
  • Show HN: Godspeed is a fast, 100% keyboard oriented todo app for Mac
    Consider making an Obsidian[^1] plugin, or writing to Obsidian-compatible Markdown files :) [^1]: https://obsidian.md/. - Source: Hacker News / about 1 month ago
  • Setting Up Obsidian for Content Planning and Project Management
    Obsidian is a writing application created to allow for offline / private note taking in markdown format, in an interface that looks a lot like our regular programming IDE. It is very flexible, with a good collection of community plugins that you can use to customize Obsidian to your heart contents. - Source: dev.to / about 2 months ago
  • Where Is Noether's Principle in Machine Learning?
    Thank you! In the beginning, I used kognise'z water.css [1], so most of the smart decisions (background/text color, margins, line spacing I think) probably come from there. Since then it's been some amount of little adjustments. The font is by Jean François Porchez, called Le Monde Livre Classic [2]. I draft in Obsidian [3] and build the site with a couple python scripts and KaTeX. [1]... - Source: Hacker News / about 2 months ago
  • Show HN: Reor – An AI note-taking app that runs models locally
    Great job! I played around with this on a couple of small knowledge bases using an open Hermes model I had downloaded. The “related notes” feature didn't provide much value in my experience, often the link was so weak it was nonsensical. The Q&A mode was surprisingly helpful for querying notes and providing overviews, but asking anything specific typically just resulted in less than helpful or false answers. I'm... - Source: Hacker News / 2 months ago
View more

What are some alternatives?

When comparing Roam Research and Obsidian.md, you can also consider the following products

Notion - All-in-one workspace. One tool for your whole team. Write, plan, and get organized.

Joplin - Joplin is a free, open source note taking and to-do application, which can handle a large number of notes organised into notebooks. The notes are searchable, tagged and modified either from the applications directly or from your own text editor.

Logseq - Logseq is a local-first, non-linear, outliner notebook for organizing and sharing your personal knowledge base.

Evernote - Bring your life's work together in one digital workspace. Evernote is the place to collect inspirational ideas, write meaningful words, and move your important projects forward.

Workflowy - A better way to organize your mind.

OneNote - Get the OneNote app for free on your tablet, phone, and computer, so you can capture your ideas and to-do lists in one place wherever you are. Or try OneNote with Office for free.