Add to Chrome
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Add to Firefox
Add to Opera
Add to Brave
Add to SafariWhen comparing Turtl vs Roam Research, the Slant community recommends Turtl for most people. In the question“What is the best cross-platform note-taking app?” Turtl is ranked 6th while Roam Research is ranked 27th. The most important reason people chose Turtl is:
Turtl has applications for all the major operating systems, as well as Android. In addition, there are extensions available for Firefox and Chrome that cooperate with the downloadable applications.
Specs
Question Ranking
Pros
Pro Multiple Platforms (Windows, Linux, macOS, Android, Firefox, Chrome)
Turtl has applications for all the major operating systems, as well as Android. In addition, there are extensions available for Firefox and Chrome that cooperate with the downloadable applications.
Pro Open source
The app is licensed under GPLv3 making it open source. This means that anyone can use the code and contribute. This also makes it easy to use on one's own server or for company solutions.
Pro Good security
After assigning a password to your account in Turtl, a key is created to encrypt the entire account. No data is stored on their servers meaning they have no access to unencrypted content. This is a huge leg up when comparing to other Evernote alternatives.
Pro In place page creation / linking with brackets or hashtags
Pro Rename a page and all everything that references it renames as well
No broken links!
Pro Each bullet point can be either linked to, or included in full in any page (including the page it originated on. Yay transclusion!)
Pro Shift click on a link pulls up the link in a side panel without navigating you away
Pro Each bullet point on a page is zoomable as it's own 'wiki page'
Pro Helpful slash (/) commands while editing for autocomplete, TODOs and more
Pro Easy page merging.
Pro Explicit linked references included on every page at the bottom
Pro Supports markdown
Pro Bi-directional links
Pro Graph overview allows you to easily see how nodes relate
Pro Supports in place datalog queries
Pro In place editing
Pro Supports hiccup syntax for HTML snippets
Pro A default place for "Daily Notes" means not having to worry where a new note *should* go.
Cons
Con No iOS app
While many other operating systems have a client, iOS does not have one yet (though it is planned).
Con No image embedding
Instead of image embeddings, there's a sort of poor man's substitute: image + description. If you add an image, you can create a description of any size and with all the formatting features. It can be used instead of image embedding but much more limited: only one image and only at the very top.
Con Internet dependent
Requires Internet connection to initiate offline mode, loses access to notes without Internet or server.
Con No mobile app
You can port Roam to Hermit, but there is no offline capacity.
Con No established pricing model, this could get expensive later
Rumored to be upwards of $30/month
Con No offline mode
The information can be accessed on the browser offline, but you cannot edit it.
Con Very expensive pricing model, no 'free' tier
For what still feels like beta-software, it's pricing model is very expensive in comparison with competitors that generally offer free tiers for example.
Con Forces you to edit with markdown, rather than wysiwyg
This issue is made worse by super basic formatting bugs, like if you want to for example unbold some text with control/cmd-b, it rather double-bolds it (e.g. it becomes bolded text), making the non-wysiwygness even more messy.
Con No vim mode
