For an opensource alternative to Obsidian checkout Logseq (1). I spent a while thinking obsidian was opensource out of my own ignorance and was disappointed when I learned it was not. I mistook the extensive github presence for the actual product being open.
AFAIK it's still a flavor of markdown, with some modifications and extensions. Which is pretty common in markdown-land, but could prevent easy adaption of another markdown-tool, depending on what syntax you use heavily.
Yup, Logseq is simply too different. It basically wants to go farther than what Obsidian aims to achieve. That said, some features of Logseq are janky, as they are not refined enough. I think Obsidian hit the sweat spot that is easy to implement yet offers enough features.
Exactly like what was the case for Athens, the core features don't feel very refined (glitches in block editing and not good at all search) and the focus is on building arguably unnecessary features.
On a cursory look it seems like Obsidian puts more effort into having a solid core, which I appreciate.
But Logseq is actually FOSS and fits my needs better with its paradigms.
I don't know that it is really that much of a stretch. People move from Obsidian to LogSeq and vice versa. While some people use both, they are certainly both Personal Knowledge Management solutions.
Now, they approach the problem differently, to be sure, but so do vi and emacs and visual studio code. People choose between them for software development tasks though each has a wildly different approach such that you might use more than one.
Unless you can now edit long text blocks in logseq it's not an alternative. Last time i checked it was a pure bullet point note taker. If I recall correctly this was for performance reasons which was in itself extremely weird. A markdown editor in 2023 dying on a page long block of text is... not good.
Speaking of which, I wonder whatever happened to that project.
One nice thing about Roam is that because it doesn't use files, it has true transclusion, both at the level of documents and at the level of individual symbols (tags & links). Because of this, renaming a tag globally for example is trivially easy. (I don't think global tag renaming is possible in Obsidian natively (without plugin) yet.)
> I don't think global tag renaming is possible in Obsidian natively (without plugin) yet.
It's not tags, but this update brought global renaming of properties out-of-the-box. Properties are the data-fields in frontmatter, the yaml-part which acts as a header in Obsidian-files. Being yaml, makes this rather easy and safe to implement. Tags on the side can occur in freetext, which makes it easy to have false-tags found. Putting some automatism on this is a bit risky I guess.
> Tags on the side can occur in freetext, which makes it easy to have false-tags found. Putting some automatism on this is a bit risky I guess
I agree, especially if you copy paste tweets containing hashtags into your files you could end up with accident collisions.
On the other hand, I refactor my tags a lot so I really needed the feature. I ended up using a simple VSCode language server to piggyback on "rename symbols". It's not ideal but it reduced a lot of friction.
I use Joplin as open-source notes app. Haven't really tried Logseq or much of Obsidian, though, as seriously trying a notes app takes some commitment. Joplin is just the first one I tried that fit my needs after fleeing from Evernote, and I'm happy with it, but maybe I'm missing hepful features from elsewhere. It would be helpful if anyone who has tried several could give a comparison.
Joplin uses SQLite DB to store data, not markdown files. Moreover, you can't even change the directory where this database is stored, which is pretty funny for an open source application. Also, there are no internal linking and knowledge graphs in there. Also, there are UI/UX issues, for example annoying modal windows about updates can pop up at inopportune moments. But it should be noted that web clipper is quite usable. But it is not rocket science to make a web clipper. Obsidian is an app of a higher level of quality and usability.
I used Joplin for a few years and loved it. I quit evernote as soon as it lost all of my notes years ago.
Switched to Obsidian for faster startup time, which is at the top of my feature list for such apps. Joplin got worse over time with more notes. I considered Roam and Notion, but having to pay AND slow startup made no sense, although Notion features are quite nice.
Now thinking about adding Logseq to work with my Obsidian.
I also think DEVONthink is great closed source app for research especially where you can index and search all of your PDF collection and it will give you closest matching files and content with respect to your current file. Many other great features. But it’s Mac/iOS-only app, lacks of linux/windows support. Startup time is very slow. And UX for note taking is kind of unpleasant to work with. I really want to use it but I can’t for all of these reasons. It’s like an expensive car which you own but never want to drive.
I like to drop anything interesting I find throughout my day into daily journal in Obsidian (using iOS “Share via..”) for later review.
It works fine, but:
1. I prefer how logseq displays each day as a timeline so I can review the last few days easily (in Obsidian you check each file for each day one by one)
2. I like that logseq operates more granular on block level (bullet points) as opposed to pages, so I could reference blocks instead of pages.
I think interlinking thoughts and noted on block/bullet level would be helpful in finding content or thoughts I came across in the past. In Obsidian, it’s only possible via searching, manual tagging, and manual content management, which seems like a waste of time. I want to eliminate the friction for inbound information.
Both of these apps actually suffer from the same issue — on iOS, if the app hasn’t been initialized recently, it won’t actually drop the content using “Share via..” widget, it will just open the note for today. Sometimes you have to do it twice.
In terms of configuration, the way it would work is, in Obsidian, you configure the daily journal to use the same directory and naming convention to match Logseq. They both read/write the same markdown files, so it works seamlessly.
I did try Logseg, but here is my reasoning for choosing Obsidian over it. Logseg is smart and tries to manage the content for me, but I need to know where my content is.
I was pleased with Sublime Text tamed to play nicely when encountering MarkDown. But Obsidian came along and changed that. I still avoid Obsidian plugins that take over my content.
Looks cool! I couldn’t tell from the homepage, but it looks like they support cross-device syncing [1]. The big gap left is the rich plugin environment that Obsidian has.
with obsidian and IOS - you start a vault on your iphone it creates a vault in your icloud folder - then open the desktop client and open the vault from the icloud folder. perfect sync without subscription or git
You can use git with it. It automatically commits at configurable intervals, and with few hooks[0] you can make pushing automatic and also pull changes made elsewhere (which then get instantly shown on a running Logseq desktop instance).
The default git configuration was kinda weird, but I think I initialized the git myself and then added it in Logseq before adding the hooks and it's been good experience.
Another Obsidian alternative which I use every day is Anytype[1]. It's fully open source however under their own license which has some interesting terms to discourage commercial adoption. They seem to be very focused on individual use. The user experience is similar to Notion with some subtle differences, but overall very positive. The biggest plus for me was offline p2p sync and a really solid mobile app.
Honestly, it sounds like a judgment call because Notion is truly a monstrous thing. It slows down terribly and it's just plain uncomfortable. Why does "everyone" love Notion? It's horrible, how can you even use it?
Programs that do simple things should be simple and run fast. It's like a pencil that you simply use and don't think about how to use it, you don't notice it at all.
> It slows down terribly and it's just plain uncomfortable.
When was the last time you use it, and what's in your workspace? Notion did receive some improvements on performance over the years, but it still depends strong on which data you dump into your workspace.
> Why does "everyone" love Notion?
Because it's an awesome concept with a well-rounded implementation on the user side. It just sucks hard on the technical side. I mean, it's a good tool, but it has an upper ceiling of what one should do with it. But this is a general problem with all those young fancy tools. Obsidian or Logseq are not different in that regard. They all are scaling poor. They are simply not meant for this.
> Programs that do simple things should be simple and run fast.
I really, really want to like Anytype (longtime Obsidian user). I just cannot get through the general cludginess of it. “Similar to Notion” is exactly right, unfortunately.
The attempted switch to Anytype revealed to me how important it is that Obsidian feels like opening up a terminal or simple text editor.
> Any Association grants you (“Licensee”) a license to use, modify, and redistribute the Software, but only (a) for Non-Commercial Use, or (b) for Commercial Use in Allowed Networks.
> The license must not restrict anyone from making use of the program in a specific field of endeavor. For example, it may not restrict the program from being used in a business, or from being used for genetic research.
Any restrictions on commercial use make a license not open source.
> The terminology of FOSS was created to be a neutral on these philosophical disagreements between the Free Software Foundation (FSF) and Open Source Initiative (OSI) and have a single unified term that could refer to both concepts.
Conflating open source software with free software isn't precise which is why I prefer FOSS/FLOSS as a term. The conflation you put forward is a political stance, not factual.
You seem to be trying to redefine Open Source to mean something different than what it has meant for nearly two decades. Please don't. Open Source very much includes the principle of no discrimination against commercial use, and has done so from its beginnings.
Switched back-and-forth as well, and ended up with Logseq long term.
In practice, logseq’s block-oriented system works really good for the daily journal, and with obsidian I always devolved to just prepending points to a single file anyway.
Agreed. It's frustrating because both Obsidian and Logseq have deliberately removed a crucial feature. So people either have to pay a lot, or do janky workarounds to do their own sync.
Why have so many people waste their time with own custom solution.
Of course. But they should make their money in other ways.
A note taking app that I can't sync across multiple devices is useless. And you can't try the full version with sync to see if it would work.
All I'm saying is they're leaving a lot of money on the table.
I hear syncthing is good for this, but obviously it's messier on iOS.
I just know that $8/mo for sync is too much. You can get Office 365, or Google Drive/Dropbox with a TON of space for that price, and that space is usable by lots of different things.
The $8/month seems completely fair IMO. really good sync is hard to pull off. I ran my own hodgepodge sync service for over a decade out of a home server for exactly these kinds of notes, and it’s really easy for issues/conflicts/general jankiness to crop up.
Plus you constantly run into issues with compatibility between the sync app(s) and the Mac/PC/iOS apps you use to edit the files.
Nothing prevents me from running that exact same setup for Obsidian for free. But I’d much rather pay $8/month and not have to deal with server backups and maintenance, compatibility, or all of the other issues.
I guess, but without a good native sync, there's no way that less tech-savvy people will use it.
Personally, I wouldn't mind paying a small fee for a great note-taking app, but I would like to be able to share some notes with my mom and with my partner. But they wouldn't want to pay for it, as they wouldn't use the app as much.
I love Logseq, would even more if the performance wasn't so bad on my phone. It doesn't feel like an Obsidian alternative, though. I mostly use it for journaling.
I use it and mostly like it. It is excellent at being a WYSIWYG, markdown-first, stream-of-consciousness, note-taking application.
The plugin ecosystem is sparse/immature, and the special features like PDF embedding/annotating are not very usable. It is difficult to set up sync properly (I self host Nextcloud and usually have to resolve sync conflicts whenever I switch devices). There is an Android app, which works fine, but the integration with the Android system (e.g. creating a note from a "Share" dialog) is... obtuse.
Another nice thing about logseq is that you can use it as a self-hosted web app. Thus, there is no need for Electron, you can use a regular browser. However, this requires the File System API, which is missing in Firefox.
I use it casually. I really like it, except for the fact that the UI shows empty log days. So if I don't take any note for a week, I get a big blank scroll, instead of whatever my last note was.
Structuring everything into "nodes" is a paradigm that works well for me.
I use it daily for work. The core concept is a single time-sequential outline. Each entry in the outline is referenceable and can be included by reference in other pages. Pages are created wiki-style. Entries can have additional metadata. There is a “todo” system of metadata (that I don’t use.). There is a data log query capability. All content is markdown. The editor inlines images. Outline + markdown + inline images + wiki-ish system is a sweet spot for me.
I ended up on logseq after trying nearly every other notetaking platform and paradigm under the sun. Logseq is the only one I found myself using, and I've used it at nearly ever day at home and work for coming up on two years.
It works for me because I can just start typing. I don't have to worry about creating new pages. If I click on a reference (that is, a tag or page -- fundamentally the same thing), I can see all of the other places I referenced it. And all of the places I used that word but _didn't_ reference it.
I can go on and on about logseq and I'm happy to answer specific questions, but the important thing is: it works for me.
It has nice linking and macros, it is very painful when it comes to code blocks. It's also a bit weird that every paragraph is a bullet point. I prefer being able to write Markdown documents where not every paragraph is a bullet point.
For an example of macros, I have a macro that makes it so when I enter `{{mergerequest JIRA-1000, 2222}}` I get links to the JIRA ticket and the GitHub PR. JIRA-1000 is the ticket ID and 2222 is the GitHub PR number. Macros are really powerful and a lot of fun to customize.
Logseq has worse performance, undoubtedly, and the performance penalty scales proportionally to the size of your knowledge graph. I only notice poor performance if I'm trying to modify a large embedded block. Otherwise, it's typically fine.
That said, I actually _use_ Logseq due to the way it works (i.e., an outliner). Obsidian simply doesn't meet my needs.
1. Notes is completely open-source[1]. There are some awesome maintainers who help me fix and update things and sometimes even implement new features. When Plume will be released, of course, I'll put much less time into Notes (as already the case). But since Notes is licensed under MPL and Plume is built on top of it, all files used from Notes will be open source as well, so any improvement from Plume could be potentially incorporated into Notes.
2. The reason for creating Plume is that I always wanted[2] to create an advanced editor (a la Notion) but only recently realized how to be able to do it using C++ (handling the model) and QML (handling the view). I had to implement many things from scratch (undo/redo/copy/paste/multi-block-editing/etc).
3. I recently discussed my reasoning to go close-source[3]. I've been working night and day (every day) converting 4 cups of coffee into code for the last 4 months to create Plume. I don't want to risk not being rewarded sufficiently for it. But, I'm 99% sure that I'll either open source the core block editor or the entire app in the future.
That’s a good question. The built in tutorial is actually really good, you can launch it with “vimtutor” on the command line. It doesn’t give you everything, but its instructions and text to try things out on in the editor itself, which I find a good way to learn. It isn’t particularly programming focused either.
For getting used to the motions especially https://vim-adventures.com can be a fun way, in its game format.
For getting started I’d say don’t worry about plugins much, but get https://github.com/tpope/vim-sensible at least so the defaults meant for vi don’t get in the way. The only other thing you might want is a format syntax if your preferred note syntax isn’t highlighted well by default or something. Polyglot can be good to stave that off but really I’d say learn on a really lean config, and get used to using :help or similar. It’s the best way to learn the parts that work everywhere.
I forgot they even had a paid version, sorry about that. The benefit IMO is really just playing the first few bits a few times to help get the visual/muscle memory of moving around with vim motion keys. Not just HJKL but beginning/end, Find and Till, I assume the paid part comes after that but it’s been a while since I’ve used it.
Honestly I’d do the vimtutor, maybe try the free version of this, and just use it for a bit. Use the arrow keys, use the mouse (:set mouse=a turns it on just in case) but see how you like being able to use the <count><action><range> syntax to do things. That’s the real win in my opinion, things like reflow this paragraph gqip (reflow is gq, range for a paragraph is “ip” or In Paragraph), delete this sentence including surrounding spaces and period das (literally Delete Around Sentence), and with movements gU} changes the rest of the current paragraph to uppercase.
There are many lists of these things, but I learned it by treating it as notepad with some odd bindings for save and quit for a bit in college then whenever something was annoying looking up how to do it or how to build it. I’ve now been using vim as my main editor for notes, prose with latex or markdown, and programming for 20 years, and literally given courses on it for graduate students. That is to say, you don’t need to learn it all ip front to use it. Learn how to open it, get in insert mode, write and quit and jump in; hopefully it will fit you like it did for me.
It is a modal editor just like vi/vim/neovim, but way better/easier/sensible/helpful than its much older ancestors, especially for new learners. Even if you will later on decide to switch to something like neovim, this switch is going to be a relative piece of cake, after you had experience and understood the basic idea behind modal editing, compared to trying to go vim cold turkey.
According to my experience the vast majority of "vim beginners" actually already have a significant amount of experience with vim; it's just that the experience was negative, they didn't get far and were overwhelmed, unfoundly blaiming themselves and their own stupidity, hoping that all they are missing is a good tutorial. No, it's not you. It's the editor itself, build in 70s with the ideas, UI, hotkeys that are inapropriate for the current time. There is a much better way for modern times.
Install Helix, run it and type ':tutor' to access the tutorial. After that you will be ready to go.
I have been in the same exact boat. Trying to learn vim who knows how many times in the last 15 years, but without ever able to get over the clumsiness, illogical hotkeys, constant breaking of plugins, waste of time on configuring.
I guess though with Obsidian, even if you get locked out or they dry up tomorrow, you don’t lose anything in your knowledge base because it works on top of your existing directory structure
The only thing you could get locked out of is the convenient curation that Obsidian provides
Im normally opensource-or-bust but the way obsidian is set up is pretty low risk
Having watched this movie a few times, I like to have the insurance policy of open source licensing so that it stays true tomorrow.
Once something is proprietary it's arguably easier from a developer perspective - and preferred from an investor perspective - to make it steadily more proprietary over time.
Then one day you wake up and even if your notes still aren't saved in some some obtuse format that only loads properly in Obsidian, your experience has gradually degraded but by this stage you've got so much tied up in the proprietary extras that you stick around unhappily.
Earliest example might have been AOL. Some others would be Microsoft's embrace extend extinguish, much of cloud vendors' repackaging of OSS, evernote, to a certain extent the recent Reddit and twitter API changes, IoT devices which get buyin based on open standards and then move increasingly critical features to proprietary unpublished/out of band comms.
I feel like it's quite a well-worn page of the tech playbook and I'm probably only scratching the surface here.
There are ways to get around the lockin just like with Evernote. It's not easy nor clean as with any attempt to migrate but one way to do it is via Pandoc and Lua Filters to transform custom syntax to other forms. For Obsidian, I was able to write a Lua filter for Callouts to convert to Hugo shortcodes/Quarto's callouts based on someone's previous work.
I also want open-source for PKM software but I realized I value getting things done more if there were no near alternatives for my use case. I tried Logseq but it's straying even further from vanilla Markdown than Obsidian and is not as well-polished.
The good thing is that there are several options for similar apps right now. If Obsidian tries to do vendor lock in stuff, I’ll just move to one of the other options.
1: https://logseq.com/