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Comment by ghoomketu | Hacker News Reader

I really like roam research and its open source alternative obsidian for note taking and research.

But I feel there is still something lacking and there is definitely scope for a lot of improvement to make these type of software more useful. Still love the direction in which this is headed and it feels more in-sync than keeping a folder full of text files.

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"open source alternative obsidian"

Can you share a link to the source? I didn't see a link on obsidian.md

Oh you're right. It's a free alternative not an OSS alternative. For some reason I thought it was OSS. Sorry.

There is Foam that is OSS. I don't know how it compares with Roam, as I have not used it.

https://github.com/foambubble/foam

What would you say is the advantage of roam research over the open source alternative of Obsidian?

I tried both and found the UI to be better in Roam. The WYSIWYG aspect of Roam is real nice, vs having unrendered markdown in one pane and the rendered version on the other side.

Also, the “daily notes” feature in Roam is really useful, it’s a small UI thing but it gives me a nudge to make a daily note when I do any thinking, rather than having to file it manually in Obsidian.

Obsidian has most of the core stuff that Roam does though.

Obsidian also has a daily note extension built in to the app.

Block Level reference is a huge advantage. Obsidian supports page based reference.

They recently added support for it, but with the caveat that it will add an id to the end of the line.

For starters roam is web based and the other one is desktop software. Also don't think there is a mobile app for later iirc. Also I was wrong that it's OSS. it's a free alternative, it's not OSS.

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