Zettelkasten Comparison between NOTION, ROAM Research, OBSIDIAN and REMNOTE
Yesterday, 31st Dec 2020, I was asked about my New Year’s Resolution for 2021. Well, I thought about usual things like losing a few kilo grams and increasing sports activities. But today after scanning Twitter for “Luhmann” I have discovered that I missed a trend in 2020: “Digital Zettelkasten”, innovative personal productivity note taking tools with rich feature sets like Wikipedia. I am a strong believer that writing is substantial to our thinking processes. I also have a lot of writing projects and blogs currently running – and more to be revealed over the next weeks. When using note taking tools of my daily life like OneNote, Evernote or Salesforce Notes I really miss the ease of linking between Notes and get serendipity experiences using a Graph. I also want to improve the speed of my writing and thinking processs – and Niklas Luhmann is my role model here as a super productive book author.
First Blogpost which got me hooked was about tool called “Roam Research”, written by Ivo Velitchkov / Strategic Structures Blog
I checked out many YouTube Tutorials and was convinced about quality, USP and features – but not about price of 15 USD/month. So I looked further and found this video gem which compares Obsidioan, Roam, RemNote and Notion
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Now it was clear to me that RemNote is tool of my choice. Roam was out of scope because of their pricing. RemNote has released finally a Desktop and Mobile App in December, see this video
Graph is also available for RemNote using this GitHub Code
Update 2nd of Jan 2020: I have moved to Obsidian
I thought a bit longer about adanced graph visualisations and how to store my notes future proof without preventing a lock-in into a cloud system. So I decided to move from RemNote to Obsidian because files are stored on my local machine in an established and open .md format. Obsidion offers Graph by default but I was literally overwhelmed when looking deeper into 3rd party plugins, especially in the Neo4j Community #BeautifulData .
more helpful resources around Obsidian:
- Search Operators and Syntax (by Reto Eugster)
- 5 ideas how to use Obsidian with iPhone
- Obsidian App for Android: Markor
- Task Management in Obsidian
- Embedding of Notes (German by Reto Eugster)
EDIT: Now we are writing Jan 1st 2021 and I am still using Obsidian. Read more about my experiences in the last 365 days here
[…] Ragnar Heil mit einem Vergleich verschiedener Tools um einen Zettelkasten abzubilden: Luhmann Zettelkasten: My New Year’s Resolution […]
[…] 365 days – one year – ago I started using Obsidian App as a kind of substitution of a Niklas Luhmann Style Zettelkasten which I never had. I was using OneNote and Evernote as well as Salesforce Notes (and still using every day it for other use cases) only to take notes. My New Year`s resolution at January 1st 2021 started with the discovery and usage of Obsidian Notes App and since this point I am using it every single day. […]