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Add to SafariWhen comparing Roam Research vs Trilium Notes, the Slant community recommends Trilium Notes for most people. In the question“What are the best knowledge base systems for personal use?” Trilium Notes is ranked 10th while Roam Research is ranked 17th.
Specs
Question 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 Note encryption
Pro Free and open source software
Pro Excellent WYSIWYG interface
Pro Attributes that can be assigned to nodes and inherited
Pro Graph of node connectivity
Pro Note versioning
Pro Synchronization with a server
You can set up synchronization but you need a server to do this.
Pro Database storage rather than files
This enables the tool to do a lot of things that would be difficult with plain text file storage.
Pro Archival functionality
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 Interface can be confusing
There is a fair amount of flexibility to the interface but it can also become confusing, especially when some parts are not necessarily simple to use. Most of the basic features nevertheless are intuitive.
Con Database storage rather than files
This makes it a little less simple to work with (also has benefits).
Con Not markdown
It will import and export markdown but it does not store content as markdown. This isn't necessarily a problem if you don't need it.
Con Synchronization requires use of Trilium's sync server
This can be problematic to set up unless you have a web server that will support the requirements of this.
