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
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. […]