Obsidian VS Roam Research: Why I Chose Obsidian

[Music] hello and welcome back to my channel if you're new here my name is brian jenks and today we're going to be talking about obsidian versus rome if you don't know what rome research and obsidian are they are two very popular applications right now in the pkm space or personal knowledge management pkm and the applications associated with it are really gaining popularity and traction nowadays a lot of people are using these applications and certain concepts like basb or build a second brain to use these tools to organize collect and link their knowledge together in webs and networks so that it aids not only in creating new insights but also finding new serendipitous like writing prompts or ideas for videos basically you collect information and knowledge and you distill ideas and insights from that record it link it to what you already have and then recombine and reconfigure all of this information into new ways for the purpose of a creative outlet be it writing video or anything of of the sort for those that want the tldr i chose obsidian for a few primary reasons one it is free two it deals with a local storage of your files your data is your data it's on your machine and there is nothing sent and to anyone there is no cloud hosting by default it's all on your local machine which means you control it it's plain text files and you can do with it whatever you wish along with those points obsidian is not a web app like a roam research is it is in an electron app but this means we can also use it offline so if i want to go up to the mountains just get away and do some writing i do not have to have an internet connection to do this and then finally i personally have felt that walking into obsidian is much easier to just get started and start playing around with things and getting things done than rome this is only my personal opinion and i don't hold anything against rome i think rome is a really cool application and there are just some subtle differences that made me choose obsidian and i'm not going to talk about a lot of the overlap that these editors have today because all these different types of you know note-taking applications text editors all these things have a large swath of overlap it's really those key defining features where they are extremely opinionated or different and set themselves apart that they really stand out so i'm only really going to touch on the things that are differences to a fairly large degree between these two aired editors and why i think obsidian is a better choice at least for my situation and maybe for yours if you've been around my channel for a while you'll know that early on in my channel i was using vimwiki for all of my knowledge management it has wiki links with the double bracket syntax by default and it's a very useful way of having all of your notes in plain text in a single directory a top level directory and using vim the key bindings and a terminal it was a really efficient way of collecting this information and linking it together i have since moved away from vimwiki in favor of obsidian for a variety of reasons that i will cover in subsequent videos but namely there is an amazing graph view this whole editor is geared specifically for pkm and you will the ability to configure your own workflow for the purpose of personal knowledge management not to mention there is extensive support for a lot of different uh parts and things of markdowns so we have you know presentations we have the ability to integrate like anki cards and some of the stuff does overlap with vim wiki and in the end you can use vimwiki and obsidian side by side so if you're the type of person that still really enjoys vim wiki but you want to try this out if you use the original vimwiki syntax i think tags are different because it uses the double colon syntax but with obsidian if you have the links with the double brackets you'll already have the ability to see the network graph of your current knowledge base all right enough about vimwiki you all came to hear about obsidian and rome research so i'm as i said i'm not going to talk about all the things that they both do or which one does that thing better i'm going to talk about the most glaring differences and things that might actually be you know deal breakers for one of these editors for you i'm not going to say obsidian does everything better than rome or that rome completely blows up sitting out of the water they are different they are geared for different purposes rome is very opinionated about what it's there for and you know it really depends on your use case it's not a matter of which one is better it's which which one is better for you and what you want to do with it so let's get right into these first and foremost the deal breaker for me i'm okay with paying a little bit of money for something if it's really worth it but what i do not like is something that i have to have internet connection for roam research is a sas application which means it is a software as a service meaning you need to have internet connectivity to utilize rome all of your data is on roams servers or wherever they do their hosting and if there's any sort of data loss sorry hope you certainly like exported all that stuff and backed it up now as i talk about all these items i'm not a hundred percent you know fully researched on what rome has to offer because i am obviously with obsidian i did a little bit of looking but if options exist please place those in the comments for other people but rome research is a sas app which means you need to have internet access and connectivity to utilize it you can't just go up to the mountains and continue using rome but obsidian and this is one of the reasons why i really enjoy obsidian is coming from linux and a unix-based system i really like local storage of my files i like my files being in plain text and i like being able to control my data and that is one of the main tenets of what obsidian stands for in their core values is your data is yours it's plain text files in a directory on your local machine no data is sent to anyone anywhere at any time unless you directly make it happen you can put your own files on a cloud storage system of your own dropbox icloud whatever you know whatever you want to do but that's your choice it's your data and it's plain text files and having plain text files also means your system is more portable you can put it up on github you can do version control on your files if you wanted to you can have it hosted on a cloud service you can have it hosted on many cloud services you can even share your vaults if you wanted to but ultimately it's plain text files are more portable and the proprietary format i'm not sure if it's proprietary or not but the format that rome does for its syntax when you export it is not like a lot of other editors obsidian does have a couple things that i think are unique to it but most of the syntax actually overlaps with common markdown specifications so currently one of the biggest contentions between rome and obsidian is block level referencing i know this is what people argue about nowadays is being able to reference certain blocks of text in a application rowan research really does well with block level referencing which means that i can be typing in a file and then have the name of that file be something like today's tasks and then in any document anywhere else in rome i can type two days tasks and it will find that block of text not the entire file just that specific block and because everything in rome is bullet points basically that whole block of text will now be returned when you were on the the page today's tasks and you can see all the things that reference that or that it references and even things that are not currently referenced called unlinked references and so this powerful system allows you to be able to have all of the text in your entire knowledge base indexed based on whatever you're currently looking at you can see every time anything else is ever mentioned so obsidian offers this in a way but not to this level of granularity what obsidian offers is the ability to link to specific pages or the headings in those pages where this becomes you know it up to you is how deep do you want to go on having these connections created so you can have all of your information available to you and you can link to it you can see where it's referenced and maybe not explicitly linked but what rome really does well is it provides all the links to all the pieces of text in the content by default the same behavior really only comes when you completely say the explicit file name of a markdown file or you link that document explicitly with a hard link so some might might even be asking okay block referencing why who cares why is that even useful or important so because rome takes such a granular approach to referencing not just files not just headings but individual blocks units of a page or document you're looking at it means that all the times it's mentioned or linked you have a complete history of all of your content that ever used or mentioned whatever you're looking at but also because you have that complete history you are also more able to serendipitously see the connections and large overview of your network of knowledge with this granular approach you can see more connections versus just a file to file connection or a file to heading in another file connection so if you need that level of granularity if you want that level of granularity currently obsidian does not offer that and likely will not officially offer that at any point because that is not one of the main goals but with obsidian's new api that will be coming out you know eventually i think they're trying to come out with it at version 1.0 at this time currently i'm an insider using 8.15 or 0.815 they do not and probably will not support block level referencing but with the new api that they're going to develop there are certainly going to be plugins that make this possible there's already some great ideas with foam which is the vs code using a bunch of extensions to sort of imitate a lot of rome's features they figured out some ways to make this work with like hashing and some auto assigned portions of code that goes at the end of certain paragraphs so this is possible it is possible it is potentially a future offering with some of the developers that make plugins for obsidian but as it currently stands rome blows obsidian out of the water with block level referencing so next we need to talk about the platform i've already mentioned some of this before obsidian is an electron application which means it's basically a web browser tab as an app now the downside of electron apps is that if you're running an older machine you have older hardware it can take up a lot of ram like i think it's upwards of like a gigabyte of ram sometimes in electron applications i'm not too familiar with that so don't quote me on that but it's an electron application it means you can basically run it on anything but it does have heavy resource needs so the pro of this is that you can also use obsidian offline that is a big pro some people just want to go up to the mountains for a while get some writing done do some research whatever you can do that with obsidian rome on the other hand is a sas app which means it's a software as a service it's in the cloud if they have their own database where your data is stored you need an internet connection to use rome maybe this will change in the future as it stands right now i'm pretty sure they do not have any other option other than sas app so if you need to do offline work or you want to disconnect from the internet you're not going to be able to utilize rome for your research at that point in time this one is less of a pro and con because i'm not too sure because i obviously haven't delved too deep into rome because i'm not willing to pay for a sas app in this case but with obsidian it is extremely easy to customize obsidian it has dot files which is something i really appreciate again from linux unix-based systems is it uses customization with dot files it saves your workspace it saves custom features like hotkeys you define and it has a custom css file if you choose a non-default theme so the community in obsidian creates a lot of css themes and a lot of features using custom css i currently am using a grovbox theme in obsidian and i have more than half of my css file is just custom css found from the obsidian forums that of stuff that i liked and yeah it's super easy to just copy and paste a lot of the stuff and customize your own obsidian workstation i'm sure that i'm pretty sure i've seen rome does have options for customization but i haven't looked into that too much so it might be just as easy i'm not sure if this isn't a pro or con for either side but customization from my experience in obsidian super easy if that's something that you care about so a big factor that many people are probably going to be caring about is that obsidian is completely free obsidian is still in beta a lot of people are not aware that i'm pretty sure romans 2 i think but these are beta applications they're not done yet they are rapidly developing rapidly increasing a new functionality and a better user experience but obsidian is free to use roam research on the other hand they have a 15 a month charge to use their software as a service application now that's not the only price there are special deals i believe for students full-time researchers and other people who qualify for that and they also have a early supporter where you can pay like 500 and i think you're good from there you're like you never have to pay again but in any event obsidian is free they have you know basically donation services like you can get early releases like i currently pay for the insiders uh the insider features so i get early releases of obsidian and it's basically like patreon but it's not recurring it's a single time payment you can either be a catalyst supporter insider or a vip and i just i went vip just because i love this application so much i wanted to support the devs and i just really enjoy it so i decided to become become a vip and get that early access so as is always important when you're talking about something that is basically a business is okay obsidian's free but where's the incentive to continue to develop this is this just going to go away in a while or the age-old question how do they make their money so obsidian's current model i believe is that they have syncing and um i think publishing features that they're going to offer as paid features that you know if you don't need that then you don't need that if you have your own cloud hosting that you want to do that's fine i put my stuff on icloud because i'm on mac that works just fine for me but they also have commercial licenses if you're going to use this in a place to make money so they're basically going to make money either by just services that they offer you around obsidian or if you use obsidian for business purposes so if you're just going to use this at home you're doing a phd or some degree you want to build a pkm build a second brain knowledge management system all this stuff if you're doing it for your own personal reasons you don't need to pay anything it's free originally my channel started out with a lot of linux content and i still really like linux and ultimately i will be returning to linux with a custom arch linux build but for a lot of the time being and for much of the foreseeable future i'm currently using my mac so why is that relevant obsidian and rome are not free in open source software applications shocker so with obsidian they're likely not going to open source and currently the justification is and understandably so the pace of development right now for obsidian is so quick that there's really not time nor is it really worth the cost benefit ratio to open source the project and as they put it as the devs put it and as i fully agree and understand is that if you're trying a rapid pace of development for something that is meant to be you know a business then putting it out on github right now when you're not even to the point where it's stable it's not even 1.0 yet then you have to do documentation you have to train people on your code base you need to you know set up issue templates set up ci cd you need to have all of this stuff set up just to prepare for people to maybe contribute people could come and go maybe they're not like really active contributors you might get a couple maybe not but it's worth like ultimately it's a lot of effort to set something up to be open source already of this size and right now the cost of that is not worth the effort of doing so maybe long term they might who knows it's been talked about on the forums it's been talked about on the discord server but right now it's not foss it's free but it's not open source software so as i said in the beginning a lot of the differences between these applications is irrelevant because it really comes down to what are your needs what are you going to use this for and which thing will better service your needs and for just speaking about myself and what i like what i'm using this for and how i'm using these things i got a list here that i'm just going to read off because i can't talk off the cuff completely all the time but the key things that sold obsidian to me versus rome are the freedom and portability of plain text files just like linux and a unix-based systems having it plain text having it in files having it on my system my local machine my data is mine i value that very highly i want my data to be mine it's private and only i decide what happens with it that is a very big plus for me the portable configurations obsidian has dot files it's not in the traditional sense where everything is customizable by dot files but your workspace your key bindings your custom css like these files are basically how you have your editor set up so i can easily just take you know my workspace my configuration and my css file send it to my my work machine have my obsidian distribution there and just put it all over there and now i have my complete setup maybe not all my notes but i have my setup my whole system is set up exactly the way i want it to now if you you combine that with say cloud hosting github whatever and you have all your files hosted that way you can pull them down you can push changes keep it private if you wanted to all of that super easy to do with obsidian your data is your own version control cloud hosting these decisions are up to you and this wasn't really a pro or con one but personally uh just editing obsidian super easy rome might be as well i just i don't know so i can't really speak to that but it's super easy to customize obsidian with css as long as you know what you're doing but honestly there's so much stuff already put out on the four rooms the community is super active that you can find ways or request ways of things that you want and it'll likely happen the benefit of markdown realm research does have block level referencing that's great if that is something that you absolutely need but with obsidian plain text files means that i could easily just write a bash script a python script run some code on my plain text files do you know any sort of the command line utilities that i'm very familiar with on those plain text files just fine and in fact i do this kind of often because some let's say you want to refactor a tag in obsidian at the moment it's likely going to come soon at this point it's just not there yet but it might be a feature they add soon but let's say i want to update a tag and i want to completely change all instances of a tag in obsidian to a brand new one well what can you do about that you pretty much have to go manually edit every file unless you do something like said you know use um stream editing to replace all instances of this tag with a different tag and you can do that with command line utilities it's super easy recursively grab every file replace all instances of this text with this text and you're done that's it so the fact that it's playing text and markdown files so it's not in any weird proprietary formats means that it's extremely easy to do any sort of text processing command line utilities whatever you want it's just a very common format markdown is ubiquitous so it's very easy to pick up understand and it carries over with everything else because markdown is everywhere nowadays and a lot of the syntax that obsidian uses is a common wiki syntax like a lot some of it's i think some of it is different but overall it's a common wiki syntax that is used in a lot of different other applications and so the crossover is really great it's easy to just walk in from one editor to another editor because it uses the same syntax rom if you type out certain things like they're to do toggle buttons sliders pomodoro stuff like a lot of that stuff the syntax by itself if rendered in plain text is not found i think anywhere else so like it's more ubiquitous to use markdown to have that syntax you have the downside of block level referencing is hacky at the moment like foam has an idea but in obsidian you don't have block level referencing yet you have file or heading at best and again for this one i haven't did mention this earlier but i can't speak to rome and their community and their developers but from experience with the obsidian developers there are they are super active super friendly they're always on the server because there's a big discord server there's a official forum but the server has such a welcoming and friendly community talking about pkm about how to modify obsidian what people are doing and it's just a really welcoming and friendly place there the devs are constantly active constantly fixing bugs trying to push out new releases over and over and over again they work very hard and it's a very nice and welcoming community environment one thing i can say in my opinion that obsidian does vastly better than rome is the graph view of your knowledge so with rome you have a different sort of graph view where it's i don't really know how to describe it you just have you can see the links you can see the density of links to different files and pieces of information but what i really like about obsidian is that every file is a point on the graph and it basically uses d3js and some other web technologies that i honestly couldn't even begin to tell you about but using d3.js and network charts you basically have a dot for every file and every time that file is connected through those linking features to any other file you can see a density of connections the size of the dots grow you can see where your information and knowledge pools around and you can see an emerging structure of what areas that you spend more information and time on and aesthetically it's nicer but also the interactivity you can easily move in these graphs select new dots and then open up those files see how things are connected follow that tree and get those serendipitous discoveries of how ideas are linked by using a graph and not only is it like a graph of your entire knowledge-based system but you also have local graphs so if i'm on a file i can see only things that are connected to my file and then i can click on a new one i'm adding a new file and so on and so forth and follow that pathway but you want to see a couple degrees of separation there's a feature for that i'm not sure if it's released to public yet or if it's insider only but local graph now has the ability to see degrees of separation so i can see things that are connected to the things that are connected to my current file up to several degrees this is all really great for discovery serendipitous discovery and just seeing how your information and network is connected together i love this feature about obsidian and currently it's been talked about on the insiders forum there's a lot of really great new functionality coming to the graph by the time i'm filming this video on september 21st the it hasn't been released yet it's likely going to be out before i even post this video if i'm honest it might be but the graph in obsidian in my opinion is currently and will blow rome's graph feature completely out of the water i think it is one of the best features about obsidian is just the graph view and being able to interact with that so ultimately in the end what rome could do for me that i what might use not need but might use is block level referencing am i willing to pay 15 a month and only be able to utilize the application online for block level referencing for me that's a hard no i also like my plain text files so that's my response that's why i chose obsidian over rome that does not mean i'm saying obsidian is better than rome what i'm saying is for my use case for what i use it for and for what i like out of my applications obsidian is perfect for me now rome might be perfect for you that's cool i actually think rome is pretty cool but for me it's obsidian so i hope you enjoyed watching this video and a quick shout out to my patrons who support this channel before i go thank you devin alberto klaus and brandon thank you guys for supporting the channel and i'll catch you all in the next one [Music] you

Channel: Bryan Jenks

Views: 13,825

Rating: 4.9593906 out of 5

Keywords: bryan jenks, macbook pro 16, new macbook pro, macbook pro, catalina, obsidian, obsidian.md, pkm, basb, personal knowledge management, build a second brain, research, roam, roam research, obsidian vs roam, should i pick obsidian over roam, is obsidian better than roam, roam vs obsidian, note taking app, note taking, zettelkasten, how to take smart notes, is roam better than obsidian, which should i choose obsidian or roam

Id: S1zU-sA4u74

Length: 27min 9sec (1629 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 28 2020