Logseq vs Roam Research

The best free Roam Research alternative

There’s no doubt that Roam Research has been leading the way of the new wave of note-taking apps, inspiring others to adopt their features and writing experience. One of these is Logseq, a privacy-first open-sourced outliner. As much as I enjoy using Roam, there is always the risk of confidential data being compromised on an online service. Logseq has been on my radar for quite some time and with their release of a desktop app, files can truly be local-first, similar to Obsidian. After trying to replicate my Roam workflow in Logseq, I have to say I am incredibly impressed. The summary is this, if you are after the best Roam alternative, Logseq is it. And the best part? It’s 100% free.

What makes Roam great is how composable blocks are, allowing you to quickly gain context from a previous note. The features that enable this in Roam for my workflow are:

• Daily notes
• Block references/embeds
• Backlinks filtering
• Slash (/) commands
• Checklists for task management
• Sidebar
• Queries
• Graph view

All of these have been emulated in Logseq, but how well do they stack up?

User Interface and Experience

Both are outliners and opening the app will start you off on the daily notes page. I usually do most…