Logseq vs Obisidian | Which personal knowledge management app should I choose?

so we're officially going to enter into some Muddy Waters with the log seek versus obsidian comparison video and a lot of people have been asking for this recently so I figured now is a good time obviously it's also the sort of video that lots of people like to see so I might as well get into it it's going to be a long video but I hope it's going to have all the information that you need to help you make the decision or just make you aware of what logseek is and how it differs from a obsidian so a couple of disclaimers I'm obviously not an obsidian expert I have used obsidian side by side with log seek not extensively I've used log seek extensively I prefer log seek and it's helpful to say that up front and I'm obviously incentivized by my own log C course which I will give details at the end of this video so that might color my perception a little bit I'll be using log C to go through the outline of this video and as I usually do I share my screen and I'll show you the notes but I'll also jump into obsidian every now and again but it's mainly going to be take taking place from the logseek interface now it's important to clarify that this is not a winner takes all sort of debates both tools are working on the same back end of files and we'll get into that and you can use them both as I will show later in the video so don't worry you don't have to ditch obsidian or log seat you can use them both in this wonderful happy Harmony of tools for thought the first thing that I'm going to look at is how the tools are similar they both have the same DNA running through their veins to some degrees so let's have a look at that so both tools are built on top of graph databases that use bi-directional linking to relate information to other pieces of information now I think I should have added another disclaimer that I'm going to assume that most people who watch this video are familiar with bi-directional linking being either a log seek or obsidian user so I'm not going to go right into the basics with what all these things are there's other resources for that now what this gives you is a hypertext-like interface that enables you to click between different pieces of information this is common to both applications that I can click between things and use as hypertext linking then when I look at file storage both are local first with a sync option so what local first means is that the files are stored on your PC and then both now have a custom sync option so log seek uses markdown or org mode test text files and they have log seek sync which is available for open Collective backers people who are giving more than five dollars per month on the on the donation website and then obsidian has markdown files only so it doesn't have org mode files and obsidian sync costs eight dollars per month okay so having said that the pricing comes next both are free forever for personal use so if you're not using sync or if you're not using some of the other features which are priced then you have the ability to use these applications for free which is quite great and that is one of the big draw cards I think of both log seek and obsidian okay looking at operating systems and mobile apps they both work across Windows Linux and Mac OS and then they both have mobile apps so IOS and Android however for the Android app on log seek you need to download it by GitHub you won't find it on the Play store okay extensibility both of these tools have extensive plug-in environments that enable you to add features on top of a core feature set that you get and then Community both of these have strong communities on Discord and then the final point there which is a little bit more complicated which is why it's at the end is transclusion of information and translucent just means that I can use a source of or some information from some source and reference that in another place and I can also change it in the other place if I want to so that's a that's an embed the reference is just I'm showing the original text so if I make an edit to the text in the original place it will reflect everywhere else okay so don't want to get into the nitty-gritty and and go into examples for all these things but that's how the tools are similar I want to then illustrate the major difference between the tools so log seek is fundamentally a block based outliner so you can see here that I've got these bullet points basically that show different blocks and you can think of a block almost as a paragraph that's one mental model to think of it to illustrate this outliner approach I'm going back to the full video description and showing the breakdown so these are all the main sections in the video but then what I can do is expand and collapse each of the different sections to show just the information that I want at any given time and I can also zoom into this block over here so this is going into a specific block and that outline enables me to just see the piece of information that I want to see and work on this piece of information at the same at any time so I can go here and I can edit this over here and if I go back another way to illustrate this is just with this mock map plugin and if I go to level two over here it just shows this breakdown of this video in this tree like structure so now that's the main thing about vlogseek it is a block based interface so each of these is a block another important part about outliners is this inheritance of links so this would be a parent's block which has got some children block underneath it and if I specify some sort of relationship here or link what it means is that this child block also inherits that relationship over there okay so that's important now obsidian can do all of these things with plugins it's important to put that caveat out there I'm sure someone's going to give you some comments about like what oxygen can do with plugins yes obsidian is very powerful with all these plugins and you can have an outline obsidian but it's fundamentally a page-based editor so what that means is that it's a long form text editor so if I go to obsidian and I say create new file I'm going to say an example file over here and then I can start entering in this example file okay so this is some text there are no blocks yeah yeah now if I wanted to make those blocks I could make them blocks by just saying Dash there and then Dash there and now I have the blocks and I've got the outliner plugin and I can say Tab and I can say shift Tab and I can do all the things that I'm doing in log seek but fundamentally it is a page-based editor so you won't see these blocks from the start there we go it's just plain text like a Word document theoretically okay so that is the major difference it sounds almost trivial when you look at it but in terms of the way they work and the workflows that you can build in log SQL subsidian this is an important difference Okay so it's almost underwhelming so we're back in log seek and I now want to look at where the tools stand out this is obviously my opinion so some may differ or someone might argue with this but this is my view of the tools okay log seek has more native functionality out of the box so when you install logseek onto your computer I feel that there's more power in the the core program and obviously you can do these things with plugins in obsidian but logseek has them natively what am I talking about here it's got query functionality so you don't need to add any plugins you can just add queries in logseek it's got built-in task management functionality and then easy access of linked references so if I had to go back up to the page uh or let me just say yeah let me go back up the page I can go to the bottom of the page and I can see here all the link references so all the times that I worked on this page it's available there at the bottom of the page can do this with obsidian with plugins but we're not talking about that now so open source development logseek is an open source project now there's a core log seek team that are doing the majority of the building but anyone in the community can theoretically contribute to the code base and if log SQL to all the developers work to theoretically follow for the face of the Earth tomorrow you could go get the code base and create a version of logseek for yourself or download a version of logseek for yourself from a longevity perspective that means that logseek will be around forever because the code is going to be around forever and that's a major benefits to a lot of people okay so the next thing is the block based model benefits it sounds almost trivial but the block based drag and drop so the ability for me to like drag and drop that block over there and drag and drop that block over there is a game changer for me I still have not cracked how to do this in obsidian so if you know how to do that please comment below but what this means is that if I open up the right sidebar that was using the shortcuts Escape TR and if I want to move a block for instance I want to move it to a different page I can literally click that block over there and drag and drop it yeah I didn't drop it there there we go and the second thing there is block based retrieval so if I go to a page I can see all the blocks that are linked to that page which is great so it shows me if I just go to some example here let me go to obsidian for instance here and I can see there all the times that I have used the link obsidian in my database now it shows me where I used it so the page that I used it on was April the 5th and it shows me the full breadcrumbs here of where I use that block and here we go a video that I watched with Danny Hatcher some insurance performance results block reference mechanisms those are all times that I've linked obsidian in my database and I find that block based retrievals to be very powerful this one is very subjective language Let Me Close That there the more intuitive user interface obsidian is a highly customizable program there are multiple panels and menu bars and it feels a little bit overwhelming at first or at least it felt that way to me and everyone's setup that I've seen looks different so one side effect of this is the inconsistency of tutorials and I'm sure you've experienced this if you're an obsidian user trying to like figure out what people are doing now logsig has a much simpler interface with the panels the left sidebar and the right sidebar so out of the box simply to use although you can configure it with CSS as well it's not as customizable as obsidian in my opinion log seek linking is easier to navigate showing those hyperlinks where everything opens up I can open up in the main panel I can open up side panel that just feels easier to navigate I go to the bottom to see my link references you can customize all those things and obsidian to do that but out of the box log seek feels more intuitive and then this one is going to be contentious but logseek defaults to the Daily Journal approach okay I feel like I'm caviating all the time yes you can do this with a plug-in and obsidian but logseek by default starts you in your Daily Journal now at first this seems trivial and it probably annoys a couple of people but what it enforces is a new way of working where you start from your Daily Journal and you just use that as a scratch Pad now this is some content from our course and if I can actually just shift click open that up in the right sidebar there over here and yeah every time you enter log Seek You Are confronted with this equivalence of an A5 Journal calendar and this is sort of your scratch pad on the side of your page or the side of your disk and that enables you to like jot down things as they happen and then link them out to or link them into the important places that you need to find them later on so what this allows is very efficient input so I don't have to think where do I put this information I don't think okay this is a page or this is the folder whatever I just go to my Daily Journal I start typing it out and then I add a link or a tag so that I'm able to find that information later on okay so let's go to obsidian to see the obsidian wins obsidian the page based model will feel more familiar to Sun so if you're coming from Microsoft Word or Google Docs obsidian's inclusion of the file and folder approach is going to feel more natural to you so yes you can have folders in obsidian and lots of people still like it and there's nothing wrong with having folders but I like the whole backlinked approach for everything that's just organized by tags and links and in my outline so I use outlines a lot for my organization but for a lot of people this page-based approach is going to be more familiar okay speed slash performance okay this is undeniable obsidian is much quicker than log seek log seeks important performance has improved dramatically over the last year and I'll get to that now but indexing your graph navigating to pages and using your graph view it's lightning quick and obsidian now to highlight this it's important to carry out this is at the beginning of last year what this shows is the importing speed for a number of different files and this is a little bit more probably but like at the top here for two thousand five thousand and ten thousand files obsidian crashes it all in under 17.8 seconds log seek failed to import 10 000 files when this test was done as I said this was done in January 2022 so there's been a lot of developments since then but it just goes to show that obsidian really is Speedy out the box okay the extensive plugin environment now as I I've probably alluded to there's a lot of plugins that can do everything but there's a really cool differentiation with these core plugins that are supported by the development team of obsidian and that's a real one and then there's a community Plugin or a list of community plugins which can do absolutely anything you want you can get a plugin for basically anything and you can also stitch together these plugins to customize your workflows so for some people who love tinkering with their workflows this is great for me not my cup of tea and continuing those points everything is customizable in obsidian okay as I mentioned this could be a cotton and I'll get to that right now but if you know what you're doing you can configure your preferences and your themes and everything to just be perfect exactly what you want log seek not quite there you're still limited by the interface with that left sidebar the right sidebar Etc okay the downside of this though is a proliferation of settings if I go to my settings now there's all these menus to try and get it to what I like in logseek or to at least be familiar to what I have in log seek and then certain things only work in certain themes which doesn't feel very resilient but I'm sure log seek is actually the same where some things don't work for certain teams so it's probably not just a obsidian drawback okay next one here is the obsidian graph view obsidian's graph view is phenomenal it's much quicker than log Seeker it's much more easy to navigate and search there are plugins in log seek now I'm talking about logseek plugins which enable you to get to the same well actually a similar functionality to obsidian graph but hands down obsidian graph wins okay and this is a very cool feature obsidian has an in-house publish feature this enables you to one click publish your notes to the web this costs 16 a month but for a lot of people that's worth it and I cannot wait until blog seek has a similar feature again the plugins on a log seek side but I don't like using plugins so maybe this is why I started using obsidian first sorry log seek first okay and then the markdown compatibility okay let me go here so whilst log seek uses markdown files they're not always 100 compatible with other files so let me open this up in the right and then open logseek up in the left so just to say a little bit more it strips out blank lines and sometimes they're inconsistencies and I just play with that it's okay but it doesn't allow for multiple headings in a single block so this is a block here then there's some text then there's another heading and there's a block this is not how I want it to be I want it to be um let me delete this here and then shift enter there and then insert it and then putting this all in one block and log seek is unable to render it it says yeah log C doesn't support multiple unordered lists or headings in a block and obsidian does it no problem so that's just something to be aware of the markdown is not always 100 compatible across different programs whereas obsidian is okay I'm gonna close this up I'm going to maximize log seek and jump into the next section why did I choose log seek over obsidian now a lot of people have asked me this question so I just figured I'd add this over here I was looking for the familiar block based interface of Rome so I started using Rome like a lot of log C users I think did and at the end of 2020 I started sort of just like figuring out how to use it but I wasn't using it enough to justify the 15 a month and so I went looking for other applications now to be honest I wasn't even very cognizant of this whole block based idea I wasn't using block references I wasn't doing any of that fancy stuff I was just I liked this outline interface where I could see that block there this block here I can collapse it expand it zoom into that block that's what I was looking for and that's what I found in logseek and I didn't grasp the way obsidian worked first okay so Rome was a cloud-based web app and obsidian was using local storage now logseek uses local storage so how does this make sense well luxyc bridged those two worlds for me I understood how this outliner block based app would work on a local file system so I could see the markdown files and understand that what I was seeing on my computer or in the logseek interface was working on my file storage system which was a huge win for me and when I bridged those two worlds it was just fantastic it worked out the box that I was able to do what I was doing in Rome and easily migrate everything over and run from there okay and obviously I wasn't interested in the plugin environment in obsidian you can see I'm a little bit hesitant to using plugins I do use them now I use probably about 10 plugins for for logseek but to get what I needed in the beginning I didn't know how I would go about doing that in obsidian so that's why I just stuck with logseek my verdict I feel like this goes without saying I I prefer the block based outliner functionality of logseek the fact that it works out the box and that there's like more of this functionality like queries accessible to you right from the get-go that seems to me like a real big draw card and there are still some initial hurdles to overcome when you are learning an application and I'll speak more to that later but the block based outliner approach just works for me however I like working with them together now all that I've said about the plugin interface I have eventually adopted some plugins and I want to show you how I use obsidian to build my dialogue so if I actually just go here to control K and I say dive um let's see my dive logbook it's wider all the Dives that I've done so I've done 46 Dives I'm sure I have more anyways I haven't added them in and what this is is just a query that is looking at all the blocks that have a property dive number okay so let me just turn this off so that it looks a bit better there we go okay so here I've got all my Dives and I could go and and look at the dive dates and I could look at the location but now if I go to obsidian and let me go over here I've got this interactive map view which comes from a plugin and I'm going to zoom in here and these are all the places that I've been to in a country in South Africa and over here I can see my diving trip so if I open up seduana Bay I can see the location and I can see that I've got 36 references this is using the strange new walls plugin which gives me some nice functionality and I can see they all my Dives in Sedona Bay I've just scrolled up to another place that I thought would be interesting a few years ago I did the community of Santiago and I took all my notes digitally and I now have all those notes in here this is actually linked to another page this would be linked to a date page so if I just go to logseek and let me just say Laredo because I saw that there you can see there that I've added photos and notes from all those days and that's all in log seek but it also interfaces nicely with obsidian so just an indication of the things that you can do okay so this last Point here getting document mode and log seek when you enter it always enters the new block but what you can do is you can say Escape TD and that enters document mode so now I'd start typing now I type and there are no blocks so I think that will be useful for someone who is looking at obsidian thinking ah but I can't do this in log seek you can sort of there will be a block over there and if I open the file page so let me just go here and then say well let me just go back to the full video and if I open that with the default app you'll see there that I'll zoom in here there is the original block over there but then it's not entering any more dashes to enter new blocks okay so let me turn document mode off and then go to some resources a good resource if you're looking to get familiar with those blocks and Pages approach I made a full video which I break down in an analog way how to think about blocks and Pages this is a great article by TFT hacker talking about obsidian versus logseek they are the performance results that I was speaking about so I'll add all these links below and then just to get that outlining sorted in obsidian you can have a look at that resource which will be linked to below of course this is also my course if you're looking to learn log seek and master these these Concepts I have gone deep into logseek and this course took a long time to build I was working on it over the whole of last year and I'm still adding and refining things so it represents all my knowledge of how to use log seek and it's all in there it really is a Zero to Hero guide to using log seek so go have a look at that if you're interested great so that's about all that I have to say about log seek versus obsidian have a look at the course let me know what you think in the comments be nice and uh yeah have a great day thanks so much for watching the video to the end I really do appreciate your attention if you'd like to support the channel in some way have a look at log seek Mastery which is now available in two parts tutorials and workflows and systems tutorials are specific to log seek but workers and systems can be applied to other personal knowledge management software you can also have a look at my coffee page or the link tree page for affiliate links thank you so much

Channel: CombiningMinds Knowledge Management & Productivity

Views: 28,601

Keywords: logseq vs obsidian, obsidian vs logseq, obsidian logseq, logseq obsidian, logseq tutorial, personal knowledge management system obsidian, note taking apps for students, logseq vs obsidian 2023, obsidian vs logseq 2023

Id: TW_UpX5Gk3E

Length: 24min 19sec (1459 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 11 2023