Obsidian vs. Logseq - A High Level Overview

you've probably narrowed down your choice for a note-taking and personal Knowledge Management application to obsidian or logseek in this video we're going to discuss the similarities and differences of both and why you might want to pick one over the other both of these applications are fantastic from note-taking and personal Knowledge Management they have mobile applications as well as desktop apps they have paid sync Services as well as the ability to roll your own sync using Dropbox Google Drive OneDrive sync thing get you name it but one of the big things that they both do really well is the fact that they're highly customizable both have thriving communities of developers who are working to extend the softwares add extra functionality build on top of them theme them so that you can make them look the way that you want them to it's the thriving Community around these applications not just with developers but also with users that I think puts log seek and obsidian at the front of the line when it comes to a note taking or personal Knowledge Management application these days they really just have the people there the momentum and the way that they handle their communities are very healthy in a lot of ways I mean obsidian one of the reasons that I got involved with obsidian is because I saw one note-taking apps Community start to take this real almost toxic feeling turn but obsidian's Community was warm and welcoming and enjoyable and they were full of passionate people who wanted to not just see obsidian succeed but they wanted to help one another find the best way for people to store and organize their notes part of the reason why I'm making videos on these topics another strong point of both these applications are their Integrations obsidian and lock seek both have fantastic Integrations mainly developed by the community and one that I look to as a prime example of this is read wise read wise has a plug-in for both log C and for obsidian where it allows you to pull in all of your highlights from Kindle books and articles and things of that sort right into your note-taking database or vault it's a really excellent way to start gathering in things from outside but the point here is that it's the integration that makes life so much easier obsidian has Integrations that have been developed for applications like todoist and things and there are countless others out there really if you can code an interaction with an application you can make an extension inside of logseek or obsidian basically to interact with that app in some meaningful way another big selling point is the offering of end-to-end encrypted sync services this isn't a thing for everybody and not everybody trusts it and that's totally okay but both long seek and obsidian start with files locally on your computer which you can sync any way that you want to but then they also offer a paid version of a sync service that is end to end encrypted meaning the owners of obsidian the owners of logseek they cannot access your files they don't own the keys to decrypt them you do and this is a really great thing now granted a lot of people don't store stuff that's hyper sensitive in their note-taking space but some people do and other people just don't want someone reading through their highlights or their journals that they're syncing through a service like that I know this is one thing that I had an issue with with Evernote back in the day was because they started allowing their Engineers to poke through personal note databases to try to understand how they could better use recommendation features and and to be able to develop those out a little bit further enough of the similarities let's get into the differences and why you might choose one over the other obsidian and log seek are very different in terms of how they handle their source code obsidian is a closed source application meaning the source code is the app of the app is only available to the owners of the application they haven't released it freely available to the public log seek on the other hand is an open source app you can go download logseek from GitHub compile it on your device if you want to and you have a working application you're not dependent upon the developers to get those that get that code squared away and downloaded and compiled you can do it yourself if you like the other thing with open source means that you can contribute to the application if you're a software developer and you want to change or you see a bug you can dive into that fix it yourself and submit a request to have that fix merged into the project you can't do that with obsidian open source apps can also build a lot of trust with their users because because you can go in and audit your code the code you can see what the application is doing if it has Telemetry in it if it's sending data somewhere else or something of that sort it's a lot more easy to trust an application that is open source because that code is visible however obsidian's developers have been very clear on their stance being a closed source application there's a long discussion that took place a couple of years ago about this on the obsidian Community Forum the obsidian developers have said hey we love open source but we don't really feel like it's a viable business decision for us to open source this consumer-facing application having worked in the open source Community for a few years I totally understand that business to business applications are a lot easier to monetize and make a living off of then a consumer focused application in open source if you're open source people tend to expect that you're free that being said both obsidian and log seek do offer paid Services while logseek is open source and obsidian is closed Source I guess we'll see in the long run what's viable and what's not that being said obsidian's developers did say also that if they felt like they had to shut the application down or shut down development that they would consider open sourcing the app so that it could continue to live on which I think is a great choice given the Lively community that obsidian has around next let's take a look at the way you interact with both of these applications in terms of how you take notes in them obsidian is very much a paragraph oriented Note Taker what this means is that it's primarily writing based yes you can take outlines in here there are plugins that enable you to do that but it's not the most effective way it's not the way the application was designed it was designed as a right trading tool in a lot of ways so if you want to keep your notes in long form or you want to have zettel cost and style Atomic notes obsidian is a great choice for that because you can split those out really easily into different files and they're organized nicely logseek on the other hand is an outliner so everything is in a bullet point format yes you can turn the bullet points off so it looks more like a page in a document but it really has a WorkFlowy style to it where you can click on a bullet and zoom in or you can zoom out and you can collapse bullets and I think that works really well if you can lean into that format for it otherwise it can get a little clunky in my opinion to try to write long documents inside of an outlining tool like that this is an excellent way to take notes if you're someone who loves to just jot down little things and maybe come back and flesh them out later or if you just don't really take long notes you like little short quick quippy bullet points in your notes an outline format is a is a really excellent way to handle that the other thing too is that logseek can be really heavily focused around chronology where obsidian does not have to be at all you have a daily note that pops up a Daily Journal that pops up inside of logseek and that tends to be where a lot of your note-taking takes place you capture inside of there you link from there and then you can build out your notes from that point but then in obsidian what you do have daily notes that you can engage with then you can use on a regular basis you don't have to you can build things out by subject area or maps of content or you can organize it really in whatever way that you want to and that's most effective for you both applications you can organize very well like that but obsidian has more of a free-form approach to it and log seek kind of pushes you more in the direction of a daily note in my mind but you definitely don't have to use them it just baked a little bit more into the process of using it when it comes to markup in the files underneath actually on your file system with the nodes that you take both obsidian and log seek are pretty good when it comes to being able to access those files obsidian I think is a little bit better because it's not an outline based tool so when you take a note in there and you open it up you're getting literally a markdown text file when you upload other file types you get those files as well it's the same inside of logseek except there's a bunch of extra markup because it has to figure out the way to denote an outline inside of those files and so it can be a little bit more difficult to sift through when you're actually going through the file on your file system as opposed to using a tool like obsidian ultimately if I were to boil this down to a couple of pieces of advice is that obsidian in my mind is what Evernote could have been it's this excellent longer form note-taking tool you can put anything into it you can organize it in whatever way that you need to or want to and it integrates really well with other types of applications I loved Evernote but then started to not love it over some time and that's where obsidian really captured my attention there wasn't really an application that could fill Evernote space for me in terms of note-taking until obsidian came along when it comes to log seek if you like Rome or Tana but don't want to be baked into a software as a service app hosted in the cloud that's got a 100 percent guaranteed uh annual or monthly subscription with it it's the log seek is the friendlier open source version if you love open source if you love that Community if you want to know your developers if you want to know the code behind the application and you don't mind an outline or style logseek is the option for you this is what I really think it comes down to close versus open source paragraph versus outline and full on text files behind the scenes or a little bit of extra markup that can make it a little bit unwieldy to use outside of the application both logseek and obsidian are fantastic note-taking apps whichever one you choose you really can't go wrong if you're still on the fence after watching this video I highly recommend downloading both using each for a week or two and then making your decision the beauty is that you have a file system underneath both that you can grab those notes out of there and pull it in from one to the other really quite easily that's it for this video thanks so much for watching I'm Justin with effective I'll catch you in the next one but until then stay effective

Channel: Effective

Views: 45,704

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Id: RtZWVoTWv74

Length: 12min 1sec (721 seconds)

Published: Fri May 05 2023