When comparing Draft vs Roam Research, the Slant community recommends Roam Research for most people. In the question“What is the best cross-platform note-taking app?” Roam Research is ranked 27th while Draft is ranked 32nd.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Markdown to-dos
Draft supports Github style Markdown Todos.
Pro Hemingway Mode
Draft will turn off the ability to delete anything in the document. It will be possible to only write at the end of what's already written. It won't allow going back; only forward.
"Write drunk; edit sober" -Ernest Hemingway.
Pro Cloud sync
Documents can be imported from cloud services like Dropbox, Evernote, Box, Google Drive.
Pro Version control
With documents shared with Draft, any changes collaborator made by collaborators are on their own copy of the document, and the user gets to accept or ignore each individual change made.
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 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
