When comparing Roam Research vs Logseq, the Slant community recommends Logseq for most people. In the question“What is the best cross-platform note-taking app?” Logseq is ranked 22nd while Roam Research is ranked 27th. The most important reason people chose Logseq is:
Logseq is a privacy-first tool for thought.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
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.
Pro Privacy-first
Logseq is a privacy-first tool for thought.
Pro Networked notes
Similar to Roam's technique of letting the notes flow with links to each other.
Pro Local-first software
Every topic is its own flat file. Nothing is better than keeping your data in the file system with an option of git source control or online backup.
https://www.inkandswitch.com/local-first/
Pro Daily journal is capture on Steriods
The daily journal feature allows you to quickly capture disparate topics under today's date and by way of tags make things organized and findable from any topic page.
Pro Open source
Logseq is opensource.
Pro Structured data over willy-nilly formatting
Lots of apps are too graphically flexible in how they allow content to be entered, placed, and formatted. They act like Word when what you want when authoring content is Markdown. Content and semantic structure, not graphical frills.
Pro Org syntax
Logseq support Emacs Org syntax out of the box.
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
Con Keyboard-driven editing/navigating is descent but average
It is only because I was a long-time Checkvist user that I say this. Checkvist has keyboard-driven controls which are in a league of their own.
Con Still in Alpha
Logseq is still in Alpha and is under heavy development.
