Logseq vs. Obsidian: first impressions

I played with Logseq a bit as an alternative to Obsidian, or complement for it.

Logseq seems like a simplified version of Obsidian that does less. For many people that will be a plus. Fewer options equals fewer things to fiddle with and potentially break.

Logseq is an extreme outliner. It wants everything you do to be an outline. Obsidian supports outlining, but Logseq is more opinionated and more powerful as an outliner. That’s a minus for me; I do use outlines but mainly I just write prose.

Logseq wants you to limit yourself to store everything in just four folders, and organize all your data using links instead. My brain doesn’t work that way. I make heavy use of folders.

Logseq is open source, which makes it—possibly—more futureproof and secure than Obsidian.

I don’t think I’m going to stay with Logseq. It doesn’t seem to be different enough from Obsidian to be worth the hassle of switching.

Still, Logseq seems to be a great app for people who are looking for an extremely powerful outliner. And I may come back to it.

And playing with Logseq gave me some ideas for doing a better job of organizing and using my Obsidian vault. I need to use the Daily Note more, and move blocks of text between notes using the Text Transporter plugin

Update: Elsewhere, someone suggests using Logseq for transitory notes and Obsidian as a more permanent archive. That seems intriguing. My Obsidian vault is a mess, a hodgepodge of transitory notes, important documents, and notes for completed projects, some of which are for former employers and therefore extra-dead.

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I also tried it for a while, but two things I disliked were that there is no normal way to link to headings in another note (maybe that has been changed) and it adds all kinds of data to the source of your document (which is used for example to store data if a certain block is folded or not). Obsidian doesn’t add unwanted text/data to your files and therefore your files are more future proof and can be used by other editors.

Edit: the third one was that the language of their equivalent to Dataview is hard to master.

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Moved from Knowledge Management to Share & Showcase.

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Logseq’s datalog queries are quite complex to master. Understand datoms, the logseq data schema, datalog, and some Clojure. I also don’t like the way it creates an empty page for all #tags. That said, there are lots of things to like but I wouldn’t go back. I’m too addicted to excalibrain.

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I want to move away from folders since they require too much organization so this sounds like a feature to me. I do understand its more intuitive to have folders for some though.

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I still use logseq as my main driver…
Maybe because I don’t do a lot of long-form and i love the journal and outliner function of logseq
i still checking out obsidian from time to time to see if its better with the daily notes and how well outlining works

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I feel the strongest side of Logseq is the PDF-markup-feature, which is really amazing for reading and summarizing PDFs. The ease with which you can mark a passage and reference it is really great. For almost everything else, I am way more happy with obsidian.