Obsidian, Logseq, RoamReseach and others. Which tool to choose?
Choosing a platform for the introduction of projects and the knowledge base of the company? Then read this article carefully.
In fact, we in the company have analyzed a huge number of different tools. And today I want to share with you a list of tools from which we chose, and also to show the criteria on the basis of which the assessment was made.
Criteria.
After we had already tried Obsidian and were pretty much satisfied with it (except for the lack of collaboration between users), we chose certain criteria that are very important for us in a future tool.
- Availability of backlinks;
- Easy to use, move between screens, create and mention pages;
- Performance — stable performance even with 100,000 entities;
- Advanced task management system — set dates, display and filter tasks;
- Query language and metadata — all documents in Obsidian we have metadata so we can always find and display them easily. We don’t use folders, we just don’t need it when it’s possible to always display what we want. Documents will never get lost;
- The integrations are something that Obsidian, Logseq, Roam are sorely lacking. They have almost no two-way integrations. You can, of course, put a frame in, but I don’t consider that an integration. Integration with important corporate services, such as Intercom, Google, Microsoft, SalesForce — this is very important, because a huge amount of knowledge and information on projects is contained there;
- The possibility of collaboration and user access. Ability to work with different users in real time, as well as limit access to certain documents and files;
- Onboarding is a simple way to integrate any employee into a new tool. Web application plays a very important role here. Obsidian, Logseq are bad at this, because they need to download the application on the computer to integrate new people;
- Publish content for different groups or for the whole internet.
These are the criteria we used to compare 24 tools. For each criterion, we gave the tool a 0, 0.5, or 1, depending on how well the tool performed.
Results.
The maximum rating is 1. Since the maximum rating for each criterion is 1, I still divided everything by the number of criteria to calculate the average.
Here are the results of the evaluation.
I’m not going to take apart all the options we researched. I’ll tell you about the top 6 that came out.
Fibery.
A very cool and functional system. There are a lot of interesting things there. All the work is based on databases that you can filter, sort, and create relationships with other databases. There’s a built-in Miro that you can also link to databases and display relationships. And what I also liked was the ability to do analytics within the platform: who did how many tasks and for what period, how many projects were done for the period, etc.
RoamResearch.
I will not say much about it, it is quite a popular tool. The key difference from Logseq and Obsidian is that it has collaborations and users. It also has the ability to work with web applications. But the query language datalog is very complex and takes a lot of resources to understand.
Obsidian.
You can read all my thoughts about Obsidian in my last article.
ClickUp.
A large and complex system that, like Fibery, is designed to work for teams. It has boards, tables, documents, gantries, calendars and much more. But no query language, no ability to put metadata on objects.
Logseq.
Obsidian and RoamResearch style app, but very inferior. With large amount of documents it starts to hang, and search works very badly. Recently the guys released Sync (like Obsidian) for beta testing — I tried it, nothing special. But I like Logseq because it has a simple query language (not for complex ones, there’s datalog for them, but they rarely need it) and it’s very convenient to write documents.
Mem.
I’m sure many people have not even heard of this system. Let me tell you this, this system is the future. They are releasing a new version with AI soon. I really like the fact that you can work with search in a different way. You just write your question into the search, and Mem gives you a document that answers your question. And that’s incredibly cool. Think about it, you and I, when we search for documents, we’re actually looking for the answer to our question, not documents. And that’s a whole new level of working with knowledge bases.
Conclusions.
Over the last few years, a huge number of all sorts of platforms have started to appear. And most of all, they are trying to bring something new (not all, of course, but most). Information is the most important resource the world has. And the way we know how to work with this information determines the success of our business. And it doesn’t matter whether we’re talking about business or personal life.
