Obsidian is really good. Very feature-rich and customizable.
I personally prefer Joplin for a couple of reasons. It’s fully open source and while it has less features and customizability, I also feel it keeps out of my way more to allow me to focus purely on taking notes and not messing around with other features. Obsidian encourages me to play with its extra features more, which for my case usually just reduces the productivity of my note-taking.
Probably just a me-thing. I tend to gravitate to more straightforward and minimalist solutions generally.
I’m sort of the opposite. I liked Joplin but found myself needing the features of Obsidian. I do know what you mean about Obsidian getting in the way. While it’s easy to start using it, there is a bit of a learning curve to using it well. And it can be a little quirky-annoying at times.
I think that’s one reason there are so many software offerings in this space. There’s a wide range of preferences when it comes to features vs simplicity.
For me, Obsidian is just about perfect without any extensions, but I’m also glad it is extensible if you need them. The configurability and customization, while using standard markup, and keeping the vault storage sizes small were the major pros for me.
Some other products I’ve tried in this space were just too much for me. Huge save files, overdone UXs, and proprietary formats. Joplin and Obsidian were both a breath of fresh air when I found them.
I love it, but I wish it were open source. I have since switched to LogSeq, and now I’m even trying out TiddlyWiki.
The Doom map generator? /s
Trilium for a database and therefore faster method that is actually foss.
Obsidian is reaching market criticality so I’m expecting enshitification any time now.
Obsidian is reaching market criticality so I’m expecting enshitification any time now.
You could be right, but I’m not 100% sure of that. From the article:
Keeping the team small and spurning outside investment is Obsidian’s way of avoiding incentives that might lead the company astray.
If they can stick to that, they can avoid going downhill. The main driver for enshittification is big shareholders that want the company to keep growing – shareholders don’t care about stable profitability, they need growth for their ownership stake to increase in value. If Obsidian is profitable now and they’re fine with just keeping it that way, they can make it work.
The driver of enshittification is extracting money from your user base and investors alike. Lacking one doesn’t stop it.
If I was going to trust obsidian, their code would be fully foss. Since it isn’t, there is nothing future proofing my notes in their software. Might as well switch now to something which largely works better and is more feature rich.
It’s completely markdown which is future-proof and easily portable to other software
Might as well switch now to something which largely works better and is more feature rich.
Which is relative to personal taste and needs.
If I was going to trust obsidian, their code would be fully foss.
I definitely agree that I wish it was fully foss, but i also think it is a far better option than notion, onenote, etc for most people (as long as it meets their needs and preferences) since with obsidian you do actually own your data and you don’t need to pay unless you want their sync.
Since it isn’t, there is nothing future proofing my notes in their software.
Even if, worst case, Obsidian enshitifies, all the notes are markdown or json (json for config and things that don’t work in markdown, but the community and the devs work hard to keep that to a minimum) so you can still access your stuff in any text editor and it will be fairly easy to get the important data migrated into anything else. (I often use vs code to manage my notes, for instance, esp for big find and replace or re-org tasks) Even the non-standard markdown from obsidian and the most popular plugins reads well and could fairly easily be replicated with remarked or other markdown libraries. In this way, i think Obsidians approach is far superior to a tool which uses a database to store its data, since a database would require some effort to use standalone, or some work to migrate it to another tool or some sort of minimal client interface.
By its design, Obsidian could also be replaced by reverse engineering their api. If obsidian takes the dark path, we will probably see a foss community grow from the plugin dev community to replace it and be as compatible with plugins as possible, even if its just the basic text and display components. Tbh, it could totally be a vs code plugin, an emacs mode, [insert any text editor with plugins here]… thats how portable the data is. The obsidian devs know this, and they are intentional about staying this way. A shift in attitude here would be noticed by the community very quickly.
Joplin user here. What does obsidian have that I might want? I remember briefly trying it years ago and disliking it.
Write 4000 notes
Get a new device
Sync
Die waiting
I do miss joplin, but not cuz it looked good or cuz it was good at syncing
Looks like Obsidian’s sync is $8/mo and is a bit messy to sync otherwise, if sharing between Android and Windows. Not a fan of that at all. Joplin sync just works.
Therns an addon that lets you use dropbox, oneD, aws3, or custom
Obsidian is great; I was a happy user for a couple years. But I recently switched to Logseq and I think I’m already liking it more, and it’s because of something Logseq doesn’t do.
Obsidian lets you write a full markdown file, so step one is deciding how to write something down. Is it a nested list? Or a table? Or headings and subheadings with paragraphs?
In Logseq, everything is a nested list. This feels like a limitation, but I’ve been preferring it. The decision is made for you: you’re going to jot this information down as a list. So then you just start writing it.
People often tout that Logseq is open source, and while that is great, IMO there is also a design consideration that makes it better. Pretty much any kind of information you want to write down can be represented as a nested list. Doing it that way keeps everything simple, consistent, and more searchable. (Logseq’s built-in querying feature seems to be more powerful than Obsidian’s Dataview plugin, although I can’t say much about it since I haven’t really played with it yet.)
Both Obsidian and Logseq save (kinda) standard markdown files, so if you spend a lot of time in a plain text editor, you can still use that. You don’t lose anything by editing a file in a separate editor – they will both parse and re-index the file next time you view it in the respective app.
In Logseq, everything is a nested list. This feels like a limitation, but I’ve been preferring it. The decision is made for you: you’re going to jot this information down as a list. So then you just start writing it.
I really appreciate you posting this. I’m a long-time Obsidian user, and an Evernote user before that, and I never “got” Logseq. I just couldn’t understand what people saw in an app that didn’t let you “write” anything. I’ve tried to start using Logseq so many times and just given up because the interface made no sense.
Thanks to your comment I finally get it! I prefer to be using something open-source, so I’m going to give Logseq another go, now that I finally understand it, and see how that approach feels.
Do you know cherryTree and if yes, how it compares to the two?
CherryTree is way clunkier, IMO, and has too many irrelevant options that get in the way, particularly around formatting. Obsidian is just markdown, so you don’t have the option of spending 15 minutes trying to figure out why code blocks are showing up as dark text on light background even though you’re in dark mode, which was my last experience in CherryTree. Looking and cross referencing documents is also super easy; I’m not sure if CherryTree even does that.
I have not heard of cherrytree before, I’ll check it out.
