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harporoeder
brightball
It’s not open source but it doesn’t have to be because all of your documents are in portable, well organized markdown.
You can easily jump to any other tool that reads markdown thanks to that.
Open source would better, but I’m more concerned with avoiding lock in.
PurpleRamen
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.
asystole
Logseq is nice but to call it an Obsidian alternative is a stretch to the point that I'd call it straight up incorrect.
esjeon
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.
solarkraft
+1 for jank.
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.
ebiester
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.
Barrin92
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.
aragonite
Logseq started out as a RoamResearch alternative.
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.)
PurpleRamen
> 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.
Al-Khwarizmi
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.
espdev
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.
kelsolaar
Markdown is a blessing for any operation that needs to be performed across many files. Load up your favorite editor and get going.
repple
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.
unixhero
How would you use Logseq together with Obsidian?
Brajeshwar
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.
ssgodderidge
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.
1: https://docs.logseq.com/#/page/how%20to%20sync%20your%20logs...
shzhdbi09gv8ioi
I think sync is a non-feature, as you can just ride on your existing solution.
(Do one thing and do it well).
For example, I use syncthing [1] with Obsidian to sync files off-cloud.
INGSOCIALITE
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
bayesianbot
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.
hresvelgr
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.
espdev
> The user experience is similar to Notion
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.
PurpleRamen
> 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.
It's not simple, it's very far from being simple.
tamimio
>everyone loves notion
I don’t, I actually loathe it.
ethanbond
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.
yencabulator
That is not open source.
> 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.
hresvelgr
That's open source, it's not free and open source.
aliasxneo
Used both for awhile, and I much prefer Logseq. Haven't missed unstructured text since moving over like I thought I would.
cube2222
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.
compacct27
Shout out to Obsidian, my most-used desktop and mobile app of the year. Absolute game changer. Hacker News showed me this and the book “How to Take Smart Notes” and it’s been an immense aid for difficult technical work, and plenty of other things as well.
elric
Aside from using it for all kinds of notes (from work to book reviews to writing blog posts and other stuff I'm writing), I also use it as an RSS reader. Plain text is life.
Shoutout to the query features provided by the Dataview plugin. I have a work note which bundles all my TODOs from various work projects. It's great to be able to get an overview of all my stuff.
```dataview
TASK FROM "Work/Projects"
WHERE !completed
GROUP BY file.link
```Pathogen-David
Multiple books came up when I searched for the book you mentioned, who authored the one you're referring to?
moneywoes
link for taking smart notes?
superultra
I recently switched my note taking to Obsidian. I’d floated amongst apps, including Notion, Bear, Simplenote, and most recently Craft. When Craft started acting up, I decided it was time to redo my setup.
The standard advice for Obsidian is either to not touch the plugins, or install 100 of them after watching 50 hours of YouTube videos. It is possible to easily get into an obsidian rabbit hole for sure, but I did find a happy medium and I’m thrilled with my current setup. It’s not perfect but it’s quite workable.
Some of the quirks are tables - and it looks like that’s getting fixed. Thrilled about that. The mobile app is pretty wonky too but that’s not a huge priority.
Despite the quirks I’m more organized with my daily notes and project setup using obsidian than any app prior.
Great to see the team is continually updating an already great app.
e28eta
Do you do anything re: security of the plugins that you install?
Maybe I learned about the contents of [1] at the wrong time (like after a prominent supply chain compromise was found), but it made me avoid them completely.
1: https://help.obsidian.md/Extending+Obsidian/Plugin+security
elric
You don't need any plugins to be productive in Obsidian. But boy does a plugin like Dataview make life easier. Being able to run SQL-like queries on your notes was a game changer for me.
Other than that, the only plugin I use on a daily basis is Templater in combination with Quick Add, which lets me create advanced templates which can be executed with keyboard shortcuts. Starting a new work meeting? Hit a shortcut and I have a populated meeting note in the right folder, with today's dates etc. I have about 20 such templates for various things that I do frequently. It makes for tidy, structured notes which I can easily find later.
moneywoes
what issue did you find with craft? i’m currently trialing that after finding obsidian too complex haha
CrypticShift
I see that the recent releases have focused on tables and properties. The logical next step could be to integrate the two : creating a unified system of tables designed to handle properties — essentially, Notion-style databases. I'm aware of some existing plugins that tackle this, with a particularly ambitious one gestating for quite some time now [1], but I feel this could be a core plugin.
intellectronica
If you look at the roadmap, that’s exactly the plan. https://obsidian.md/roadmap/
PurpleRamen
The roadmap mentions only Dynamic views, which is not the same as interactive editing of databases, not even on Notions level. But as I remember, this was different at some point. Did this entry change?
Slackwise
No mention of Foam? https://foambubble.github.io/foam/
Fine, I uhh, I'll speak for it.
Foam is to VSCode, what Org (and Org-Roam) are to Emacs.
As a former org-roam user, I ended up preferring it because my end goal was to convert my notes to HTML and blog posts, and org is poor at that as HTML is not valid org code whereas it is in Markdown. There's just a whole host of markdown-it plugins [1] out there to add footnotes and all sorts of things to Markdown, and Foam also understands Jekyll frontmatter YAML, which is perfect for blog post tags/categories.
[1]: https://www.npmjs.com/search?q=keywords:markdown-it-plugin
And because it's just an extension to VSCode, it works with every other extension: https://foambubble.github.io/foam/user/getting-started/recom...
This gives it similar power and flexibility to Org-Roam, as you can extend the model to improve the editing experience.
So why don't I use Obsidian, Logseq, and others? Because they're dedicated apps, and now I have to bring various half-baked plugins into them to give me the power my editor already affords me. With notes, half your time is spent editing, so why wouldn't you want your editing to be as close as possible?
Secondarily, nothing stops me from using everything altogether, since it's all Markdown, I can load up my note repo in Obsidian or Logseq and others, and continue editing in VSCode and Emacs!
kid64
Yeah but how do you access your notes on mobile?
Slackwise
They're in a GitHub repo, so I just use that since GH renders Markdown.
I could probably use Obsidian/Logseq mobile if I wanted to. (Again, because it's Markdown... which is about universal now.)
And like, it's Markdown. It's meant to be readable as-is, so I can probably figure out any alternative method. I'd obviously miss out on tag searching and graphing, but I don't have heavy mobile use right now.
Edit: Yeah, the GitHub mobile app ain't the worst. I can probably find a way to get local git on my phone, and then just use Obsidian Mobile if I want to get fancy.
rbits
Finally proper table editing! Why has it taken so long? That was my biggest gripe with Obsidian, so glad they've fixed it. The new table editing UI looks great. I guess I won't need the advanced tables plugin anymore.
peterlk
Tables are tough. Thinking through the desired outcome of keyboard actions is a lot, and then implementing it takes a lot of work. As a simple example, if I have list inside a nested table, I highlight the list, and hit tab, what is supposed to happen? Should the cursor move to the next box in the table? Which one? Should it indent the list? There are _tons_ of these kinds of questions.
deafpolygon
The bullet lists and numbered lists don't work inside table cells. Not a deal breaker, but would have been nice to have the same level of formatting as outside the table.
ta988
https://www.zettlr.com/ is a really close Open alternative.
seanosaur
For an extremely specific and rigid use case / workflow, sure it's a close alternative.
For most people that want a flexible, extensible product that can do many things in many ways, it's probably not nearly as close an alternative.
kergonath
It’s an alternative for the “do not touch any plugin” crowd, which I would assume is the majority of Obsidian users. It’s not a replacement for the “install all the plugins” long tail, sure.
For my use I considered both and honestly Zettlr is not that far behind. Decent Zotero interoperability would have sold it for me.
rcarmo
I've tried Obsidian time and again, but the lack of mobile feature parity (even on an iPad) is still a big blocker for me.
rbits
In my experience mobile feature parity has been pretty good. All of my plugins are compatible, and I don't notice any missing features.
rchaud
What do you mean? I switched away from Logseq specifically because Obsidian had almost no differences between the desktop and mobile apps. Logseq on mobile could not run any plugins, Obsidian supports them all.
rcarmo
It’s not just the plugins, the editor experience (toolbars, menus, layout) is too kludgy to be useful.
ssgodderidge
Which features in particular?
lambdas
Really? The sole feature/plugin I’ve noticed not available is git, but working copy fills that hole for me.
Not noticed a single other thing, I’ve been super impressed with parity between the platforms in fact.
vergessenmir
I find the desktop and mobile experience you be fairly aligned. There are few plugins I've installed that won't work on the mobile version (e g Surfing plugin)
alecsm
I used to hop from one application to another then I realized almost all of them suited my needs so I settled with Joplin because I like the way the web clipper works.
moneywoes
what made you like joplin?
alecsm
Many things.
It's open source, which is a big plus to me. It's easy to use. I like to organize my stuff in "folders" and it's perfect for that.
The web clipper is great. I can save a whole page or only what I select as .md and except for a couple lines that I usually delete, the rest is saved perfectly.
Some say that not saving the files in plain .md files like Obsidian is not as good which I agree but I takes me only a couple seconds to export everything as .md.
adhamsalama
SiYuan Note is a fantastic open source alternative to Obsidian and Notion, as it's like a mix of both, but open source and local-first.
swah
"Most features are free, even for commercial use." surprised after your intro.
laurels-marts
I tried many, many note taking apps and the one that finally stuck was VS Code. I had been using VSC as my code editor daily for years so when it released "Profiles" I just created a "markdown" profile that contained all the markdown extensions, settings, customisations etc. that I needed and that's it. I realised this is perfect because there are no new keyboard shortcuts, UI or apps I have to learn. I sync all my notes to a private GitHub repo. It's fantastic.
Once I figure how to export my ad-hoc notes I've accumulated in my iPhone Notes app and sync it to the repo I will never need anything else.
OliverGuy
Is there a good way to do the graph type views Obsidian can do in VS Code?
r00tanon
The android app wants full access to the file system? With the "trust us, we'll only really access the folder you tell us to..."?
Am I reading that right?
kepano
You can find an explanation of the Android permissions on the Obsidian Help site: https://help.obsidian.md/Obsidian/Android+app#Storage+permis...
Obsidian can't use scoped storage because:
> 1. Scoped storage doesn't provide a way to watch for external changes, which is critical when using Obsidian with a third-party syncing tool.
> 2. Scoped storage performs many extra permission checks for every single file access, causing significant performance degradation when opening and using Obsidian.
freshchilled
Android has moved to a file system model that generally locks app out of having full control of any folder but the one created for the app. The only way to let your app have read-write-create permissions is to request access to the whole file system. And IIRC, you have to get permission from Google to even request it.
It makes it very difficult to have something like a Git client on Android as well, as the permission to request file system access is not easily granted.
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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.
1: https://logseq.com/