Roam Research is great. Here’s why I switched to Obsidian.

00:00 Intro
00:49 What is Roam Research? And what for?
02:39 How to take smart notes · book by Sönke Ahrens
04:06 Can I use Roam Research for free?
04:42 Why I left Roam for Obsidian
07:09 Alternatives to Roam Research
07:53 Migrating from Roam to Obsidian

Roam Research is a note-taking and note-management software. Through features like bidirectional linking and block-based working, it mimics the way the human brain thinks. Roam calls itself a "note-taking tool for networked thought."

It was Sönke Ahrens who gave me the final push to try Roam – after Ali Abdaal, Thomas Frank and others had already sparked my curiosity.

Roam Research is useful for researching, as the name already states, and writing on various topics. Seemingly unrelated topics are not a problem in this case, but a feature. They bring out the strengths of programs like Roam Research or alternatives like Logseq or Obsidian.

The app Notion is also often mentioned and very popular right now. But Notion is only comparable to Roam Research at first glance. More on that in the video.

Some Roam Research ressources:

David via Social Media: Say hello! 👋

→ #roamresearch #obsidian #notetaking

[BrendanRoss]

Nice video.

I think there are so many of these kinds of apps floating around right now that it's very hard to tell who will survive and who will not. We do know that they won't all survive, however -- there are too many of them. Roam was the first to market, so they took advantage of that (which wasn't a dumb thing to do) and reaped some financial benefits both from the user fees and the attention that got from the financing world.

However, because there are so many of these apps, and because it is so easy to move and switch, the user bases are going to tend to be very fickle until there is some shake out in the market and the number of apps gets a bit more streamlined as people focus on a handful of them.

Obsidian is a great app, but I don't see it the way I see Roam and the "Roam-like" apps (things like Logseq, Rem) because it is fundamentally about Markdown text documents rather than a block/entry based database system. Obsidian has a great 2- person dev team that has performed heroically in adding things to Obsidian to make it kind of mimic the database-style features that the Roam-like apps have (like the ability to reference and/or embed things on a paragraph/block level), but it still feels a bit clunky to use as a database the way you would use, say, Remnotes or even Roam. Obsidian, to me, is more like a collection of Markdown text notes in paragraph format that you can organize however you like into files, and then link together using backlinks and use a graph to see relationships. That makes it extremely powerful and extremely useful, and I use it myself for higher level thought product (longer form writing, writing that is thought-complex in that it involves more than one thought, and writing that is text/paragraph based rather than outline based). It's a fantastic tool for this.

Still, I find that I prefer a native outliner app (yes, you can Outline in Obsidian, but Obsidian isn't built like an outliner, where each bullet is its own thought, it's a text editor where you can use bullets, and indent them) for early stage thought creation and development, and I like the granularity of the way Roam and the Roam-like apps treat each bullet as the base unit for the database. It takes thought creation and linking down to a much more granular level (linking of single bullet thoughts or a bullet with a few children) than feels natural to do in Obsidian, where the app really revolves around longer text based notes (even though you can now technically link paragraphs in Obsidian as noted above -- it feels very much like a workaround in an app that isn't based on paragraphs/blocks).

For my own workflow, then, I find myself using Roam-like for early stage thought collection and idea development based on linking at the granular level using bullets and outlines and the observation of relationships, and then I use Obsidian for longer-form text notes that take the ideas to more complex areas that are beyond the usefulness of outliners. This does split the notes up, but it's fine for me because there are two different levels of complexity in terms of thought complexity we are dealing with here, and so splitting it that way makes sense. After all, the Zettelkasten didn't have the actual published works and long form complex thought pieces stored away in them -- it was the early-stage granular-level stuff that was stored there, as the more granular-level designed apps emulate.

In all, these are all great apps, but not all of them will survive. Obsidian is a great app, and I love using it. Roam, Rem, Logseq are all great apps, too, and Logseq is local like Obsidian is, and free. At the end of the day I think a good deal of the moving around between these apps stems from the (understandable) desire of many people to use only one app to avoid splitting their thoughts and ideas up, and inherent preferences people have as between outliners vs text-based, cloud vs local, paid vs free, and so on. And all of that is fine. As I say, I do think it's an odd time for apps like these because there are, in a sense, too many of them right now relative to the number of people who are realistically in the market for them. It will be interesting to see how it plays out down the line as things consolidate naturally a bit, and how Roam fairs with its steep price -- I am sure Obsidian will be just fine given its large user base and its lightweight cost structure.

[johnwalkman]

Hey, I just discovered your channel and I really like your content. Thank you. I hope to see more tutorials on how to use Obsidian

[HectorHernandezFit]

Hey there! I just had to drop a comment and congratulate you on this amazing video! As a fellow researcher and former Roam user, I stumbled upon this video while contemplating whether to return to Roam or dive into the world of Obsidian. Your video has been an absolute breath of fresh air in my decision-making process.

The quality of your content, the pace at which you present information, and that touch of humor you added – it's all just spot on! 🙌 You've made this so much more accessible and enjoyable.

Wishing you the absolute best of luck in all your future endeavors! Keep up the fantastic work! 🚀📚💡

[toiyeuvietnam]

I like that! It's a very direct, no-nonsense approach to the problem, which is exactly how I feel about data. We own our data, and that's a good thing!

[HiltonT]

Obsidian is great. Double plus great with some of the addins such as Dataview, Calendar, Periodic Notes and many more...

[syzygysyzygy]

If you stared into into sun 2 hours a day wearing mountaineering sunglasses while sipping dry martinis deeply contemplating the human condition you'd look just like Brad Pitt.

[redhocs]

Roam is still a charm to use ! The only downside for me is the price, but you get a beautiful interface for that. Tried Obsidian and Logseq a few times but it isn’t really the same experience for me. Feels like a Mercedes compared to a Volkswagen. Plus I prefer to have all of my not

[anascancerjourney]

Your puns convinced me to like and subscribe! Thank you for the smiles and information! I am looking for a software that can help me research, organize, and synthesize practical protocols for blocking confusing metabolic pathways in stage 4 cancer. There is so many complex and overlapping mechanisms of actions and interfering and moving parts in anti-cancer compounds and it all get super jumbled in my head. Would you suggest a software that could be best in helping me map all of this out in a way that isn't a huge tangled mess?

[markupshaw]

I experienced the same thoughts. Considered investing 500. Decided Roam was not a priority for the founders, hence it may not be around in 2 years. And I landed on Obsidian for my book project. Sub'd after reviewing the titles on your previous videos.

[JasonChannelOne]

I'm also using Obsidian now and love it. Also love the community. Opposed to the Roam Community, where the founder seems like a jerk.

[kathypihlaja]

I would like to understand Obsidian. I downloaded it and tried to figure it out, gave up after 30 min

[BilalAr]

I tried Obsidian for several days but could not. There is a big difference when it comes to dealing with backlinks. Roam is a winner by far. I failed although I tried several ways to view backlinks in Obsidian. To add. Using all these plugins is exhausting in Obsidian. It depends on one's needs, but it is always good to learn several note-taking apps.

[marekkrzysztofiak]

Hi, obsidian for 2 years. What is destination you use it for to get?

[Azn_Bran]

Yup! I was huge on it back in 2020 but after about 6 months I jumped ship to Obsidian and never went back.

[SAUSLeadership]

Love your presentation and the background information you add.

[David-vbtg]

I don't want a decade of note taking and my own thoughts to be locked into some program I suddenly could have to start paying a lot of money to access.

[TacoMental]

Have you tried emacs at all? Org-mode with Org-roam package is pretty dang good. Just to put a tool on your radar.

[thewatcher]

Hi! Du gibst dir viel Mühe mit den Videos, das gefällt mir. Habe auch erst vor ein paar Tagen mit obsidian angefange, stecke da seither viele Stunden täglich da hinein. Habe mal spasseshalber einen Discord Server erstellt zu dem Thema (noch komplett leer). Wenn Du mal Lust hast dich auszutauschen per voice, sag bescheid :)

[bradford-vts]

Thanks for this. I got worried about Roam's leadership - being so rude and arrogant to wonderfully nice YouTubers like Tiago Forte. And besides OBSIDIAN does nearly everything ROAM does, without a the risk of a loss of data (obisidian database stored on hopefully to your local dropbox/onedrive rather than as ROAM does - in the cloud and no where else, if there is a dataloss - then big big risk). And you dont have to pay for it . And you can have several vaults - I have one for LIFE AREAS an one for WORK PROJECTS. But thanks for this great video.

[strictnonconformist]

If my guess on your age is remotely accurate, I’ve been moving through platforms with my code and files longer than you’ve been alive, and that right there is a HUGE point for me choosing Obsidian for notes management more complex than Windows Notepad.

Applications come and go, as do their companies behind them.

Platforms come and go, I have experience with that.

Even using ASCII has largely been there and gone in my time, though UTF-8 is an extension.

Using something as simple and human-readable as Markdown means even if Obsidian self-destructed, I can still use low-level tools like grep (known in C/C++/Unix realms) for searching things via the command line. The one thing I’d like to know the details to write code for backup purposes are the hashing algorithm used for transclusion of text from notes.

And as a personal user on multiple platforms, that it supports multiple out of the box, and it’s free, well, all the community plugins are icing on the cake.