Notion vs Roam vs Obsidian | ULTIMATE Note-taking App? For Students

hello there everyone in my last video a lot of you requested that i make a specific video dedicated towards a comparison of notion and obsidian if you haven't seen my video on obsidian for students please do check it out i also got a few extra questions about rome so i included that in the mix as well i have done a lot of research for this video and compiled all the information i had access to so that you all can get the most concise knowledge i really hope that it helps some of you out as usual you can find timestamps for this video in the description below and i really do value your time so i'm going to give you an upfront short summary of the make it or break it points that helped me decide which app to use and which app is best for each type of student if you're interested to find out more please watch the rest of the video so here's a quick rundown of what i will be discussing in the rest of this video deciding on a note-taking app all depends on what works best for you fundamentally all three of these apps were made for different purposes and are thus essentially extremely different i'm covering the note-taking aspect but the rest of the apps aren't exactly comparable i would say that it seems like notion has the smallest learning curve and its interface seems to be extremely neat and simple to use everything is pretty self-explanatory and you probably won't need to scour the internet for tutorials on how to use it if you don't need a graph view bi-directional linking or anything extremely complex notion is probably the way to go for you if you happen to work in teams notion seems to have the best group work set up at the moment as well and it's great for taking class notes reading notes etc and also has a great app for your phone or your tablet rom research is great because it has a beautiful graph view with bi-directional linking to connect your thoughts and the ability to link to blocks of content and markdown it also has tagging features and varieties of transclusion or toggling in combination rome is extremely powerful you have a lot of freedom in terms of designing your content and i've read that a lot of people are able to spend more time creating instead of worrying about other factors like making your notes pretty you get straight to producing and writing down your thoughts and there's no mental friction involved it makes working a lot more enjoyable and rome works best for people who are writing a research paper or a book and is constantly needing to link ideas and compile information if that's you definitely consider using rome unfortunately though rome does not have a mobile app although i do believe that they are working on developing that at the moment i discuss obsidian in much more depth in my student overview of the app which i will put in a card on screen right now that you can go to the link is also in the description obsidian on the surface is very similar to rome and also has great bi-directional linking features one of the issues with their linking is that you cannot link to blocks of information like you can on roam but you are able to link to headings which is quite similar another problem is that you aren't able to zoom in on specific blocks either like you can on rome that feature alone makes a huge difference for some people so if that's you make sure to stick with rome instead data on obsidian is stored locally on your hard drive instead of through the cloud like with notion in rome although you can link to it with google drive or onedrive or really any other cloud storage option if price is important to you obsidian is completely free at the base level and is currently up in the air whether or not rome will be adding a free tier to their service so in more detail there's actually quite a few differences between rome and obsidian but i'll dive into that later in this video i have been using notion for a large amount of my schoolwork and life management for the past year the interface is really smooth and as a student who is constantly on the go the great benefit of having mobile and tablet apps really made me stick with it so some of the main pros for notion include it's great team integration so from what i've seen it seems that most people in the note-taking and organization realm all greatly appreciate the team collaboration aspects of notion it seems to be the main winner in that respect so if that's something that you value you should probably try notion out another pro of notion is its general layout visually notion has so many options from columns to tables to being able to highlight your notes notion has the simplest and cleanest design out of three's three apps you don't need to worry about how your notes will look since you can spend so much time customizing their appearance for some though this can also be a con as well i can touch on that a little bit later a major pro of notion is its easy learning curve everything is really easy to manage so as long as you are generally comfortable with the computer you probably won't need to be studying much about the app before getting straight to using it another pro is its block organization structure and toggling by being able to toggle blocks notion is a great tool for students to use in terms of active recall you can type questions into a block and then hide the answers under the toggle to test yourself it's also really easy to move around blocks so that's a great plus as well in terms of the cons of notion i think that the main one that stands out is its inability to link ideas you can make pages within folders and make subpages within those pages but there's no way to link back between the sub pages as i said earlier some people also think that the customizability of your content can be a con as well since you have so many options to organize your work with pretty headings tables bullets etc you spend less time actually doing your work than the time you spend decorating your note page so i have not personally spent a lot of time with rome research but i have gathered a lot of information about the app through others who are regular users of rome so hopefully you will all still find this to be helpful it seems that one of the main pros for rome is that it guides the natural process of your brain in other words by providing the abilities of bi-directional linking you are mimicking the way that your brain organizes thoughts this can help you astronomically while you are putting together research ideas another pro is that rome allows for the toggling factor or transclusion method of notion but in conjunction with the bi-directional linking so you are able to link together blocks of information to refer to different ideas throughout different pages you can also zoom into these blocks of information so that one block fills up your whole screen and you are no longer distracted by the other blocks of that same original parent note file a very important advantage of rome is the ability to have unlinked references rome allows you to open up a page of your links and mentions but it is specifically unique in that it also automatically finds all the references to a specific idea that you never linked and provides a page for that as well this way you can look back at older notes and connect those ideas with new ones another point that a lot of people love about rome is its ability to get you to fuel your creative juices so what i mean by that is rome's interface encourages you to just jot down any ideas very quickly instead of wasting your time trying to make your notes pretty you are more likely to be creative and productive if you just get straight to work i have read so many posts about how rome has allowed people to work more effectively and it's cleared their minds i personally also really enjoy the bullet point lines that follow your notes on rome it really makes it easier on your eyes and this is something that obsidian doesn't have at the moment a great feature of rome is its graph overview this allows you to see a big picture connection of all of your ideas and it is absolutely game changing here are some of the cons for rome the first is that rome does not have any mobile app so this is especially a struggle for students who might not want to bring their laptops with them everywhere you can still open the page on your web browser through your phone but it just doesn't look as nice as the notion app another issue is the integration of tables and other visual charts on rom these features don't seem to be incorporated as nicely as they are on notion so you should definitely make note of that the other issue is that the starting price for rome will be 15 a month or 750 for students which is a pretty hefty responsibility both notion and obsidian are free at the basic level you can take a look at my obsidian overview video if you want to learn more about obsidian but here i'll go over a few of the main pros and cons for comparison purposes so let's discuss obsidian's prose one of the pros is that you also have the bi-directional linking of rome it works very similarly to rome as well you can also link to specific headings within your note and although this isn't exactly the same as linking to a full block in rome it is quite similar in concept you also aren't losing the great graph view feature either and you have great multitasking features and are able to open everything at once something very similar to the sidebar feature on rome you have access to multiple plugins such as an audio recorder and smooth embedding of media all of your data is safely stored on your hard drive and you are able to sync it to the cloud if you'd like depending on your own preferences another really great thing is that the developers are there at your disposition the obsidian team seems to be working extremely hard on new features and they have been responding really well to customer feedback they have a forums page where they gather opinions of their users and reflected in their work and this is really great because it means that the app will constantly be growing and improving based on your input and what you want to see them add there's definitely a few cons to obsidian as well and one of the big issues is the way that you view all instances of a link so with rome you are able to have a page where you can see all links linked to a specific page including unlinked references on obsidian the backlinks bar just isn't as pretty and as aesthetically pleasing although you definitely are able to view them a bigger problem is that you cannot zoom into blocks like you are able to in rome meaning that you must view the whole page at once again there's definitely more to all these apps than just these points alone and please check out my video on obsidian to learn more so in the conclusion of this video i think it's important to note that i am a university student and i've only looked so far into these apps in terms of maximizing my learning and retention for my studies there are many great options out there from people who are using these apps from a non-student perspective and i encourage you all to consider them as well if you have thoughts on these apps too please let me know what you think in the comments looking towards the future it seems that notion seems to have the advantage as a note-taking app for students i have also heard a lot of news that it would probably be the easiest for notion to include what rome and obsidian have rather than the other way around i think that if notion were able to incorporate bi-directional linking along with its block structure most rome and obsidian users would certainly have to take a better look at it hopefully we hear more about that possible development in the future i hope i was able to help you all decide which app to use or at least give you a better idea of all of them i'd be happy to offer more insight in the comments if you have more questions if you enjoyed this video i would greatly appreciate it if you could leave me a like and a comment please also subscribe if you would like to see more of my videos and i'll be making a video regarding taking non-fiction book notes on obsidian in the very near future along with any other requests i receive if you have a suggestion please don't hesitate to leave it down below and i'll make sure to get back to you thanks again for watching and i hope i see you all in the next video

Channel: NotesWithRen

Views: 64,640

Rating: 4.9557071 out of 5

Keywords: notion app, notetakaing, notion notes, notion note taking app, roam research, roam, roam research notes, research note, roam note taking, obsidian, obsidian notetaking, obsidian note taking app, comparison, roam vs obsidian, notion vs roam, notion vs obsidian, note taking app

Id: SyV4xez9Lp0

Length: 11min 54sec (714 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 02 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/SmallYTChannelBot]

Thank you for submitting to /r/SmallYTChannel. You have spent 3λ to submit here, making your current balance 3λ. /u/m1nionl, please comment !givelambda to the most helpful advice you are given. For more information, read the FAQ.

Video data:

Field	Data
Title	Notion vs Roam vs Obsidian
Thumbnail	Link
Views	22
Length	11:54
Likes/Dislikes	8/0
Comments	3
Description	This is a comparison video of 3 different note-taking apps: Notion, Roam Research, and Obsidian from a student perspective!⤶⤶In this video, I go over a few of the pros and cons of each app, and discuss which app would be best for you depending on the type of student you are! I also talk about the future development of these apps, and where all of them could possibly end up!⤶⤶Video mentioned: Obsidian Student Overview⤶https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zKn9QaDglDI⤶⤶Let me know if you need any help with these apps and I'll do my best to offer some insight!⤶⤶Timestamps:⤶Introduction - 0:00⤶Upfront Summary - 0:31⤶ Notion - 1:05⤶ Roam Research - 1:41⤶ Obsidian - 2:32⤶Notion - 3:38⤶ Pros - 3:53⤶ Cons - 5:13⤶Roam Research - 5:43⤶ Pros - 5:56⤶ Cons - 7:45⤶Obsidian - 8:32⤶ Pros - 8:36⤶ Cons - 9:46⤶Conclusion + Future - 10:22⤶⤶Mentioned Sites:⤶Obsidian Website Link: https://obsidian.md⤶Roam Research: https://roamresearch.com⤶Notion: https://notion.so⤶⤶Thanks friends! Like, Comment and Subscribe if you enjoyed! Please let me know if you need any help! Leave video suggestions below as well!⤶⤶⤶⤶⤶⤶⤶⤶Music: 샛별 - 그대 목소리에 눈 떠보니 봄이었다.⤶Link : https://youtu.be/zKn9QaDglDI

Channel Data:

Field	Data
Name	SingRen
Thumbnail	Link
Subscribers	159
Videos	4
Views	1989

^{/u/SmallYTChannelBot made by /u/jwnskanzkwk. PM for bug reports. For more information, read the FAQ.}

[u/m1nionl]

If you'd like to see the timestamps, please click into the video and view them there in the description :)

Much appreciated!