Why I chose Obsidian over Roam (as a Roam investor)

The decisive reason for switching from Roam to Obsidian is simple: notes should live where the user can control them—offline, in plain text, and without dependence on a vendor’s servers. Roam stores notes on its own servers, meaning access requires an internet connection and a Roam login. That arrangement can be fine until something goes wrong; the creator points to early data-loss issues and says losing hours of work would be unacceptable. Even Roam’s offline option is framed as a paid workaround: the $500 Believer plan stores notes only in the local browser cache, so clearing it can erase the content. The “own your data” test comes when migration is needed. When migrating off Roam, PDFs and images weren’t simply sitting in the notes—they were saved via Roam’s Google Firebase backend. The migration required a custom Python script to extract Firebase URLs, download the assets, and rebuild an Obsidian vault.

Obsidian’s approach is presented as future-proof and durable: everything is stored as local files in markdown, which remains accessible and searchable years later. The creator emphasizes that long-term usefulness is the real requirement for a note system, because memory fades and today’s notes must still be usable a decade from now. Plain text is the anchor here—if Obsidian disappeared, the files would still be on the laptop exactly where they were left. The workflow is also positioned as flexible across tools: Obsidian notes can be opened in editors like VS Code (and even Atom), and they integrate with GitHub repositories for work documentation. That portability contrasts with Roam’s “Roam-flavored” markdown, where proprietary formatting can make notes harder to reuse elsewhere; after migration, Roam notes still required substantial reformatting to become broadly useful.

Beyond ownership and longevity, the switch is tied to how people learn and share. Learning in public is easier with Obsidian because it supports both bullet lists and prose, making notes more readable to others. Roam’s graph exposure is described as slow and hard to understand, and its formatting is portrayed as optimized for personal internal organization rather than outward communication. Obsidian Publish is cited as a straightforward way to publish a vault online, and the creator notes that the underlying markdown files can also be pushed through static site generators like Hugo.

Performance and publishing priorities further tilt the decision. Roam’s “everything is a bullet point” model is said to treat each bullet as a database entry, enabling advanced block referencing and embedding—but at a cost. Benchmarks from a personal-knowledge-management testing site are referenced to claim Obsidian is dramatically faster (described as 100 times better than the competition).

Finally, the choice includes community and ethics. The creator criticizes Roam’s culture—using “Roam cult” language from onboarding, plus claims of bans and instances of elitism from Roam leadership, including founder Conor White[-Sullivan]. Obsidian’s community is described as more inclusive, with two developers actively engaging on Discord and community-led events like Obsidian Community Talks.

A “deal breaker” bonus is pricing. Roam is presented as expensive because it hosts notes: $15/month (or $13.75 annually), and $500 for five years on the Believer plan. Obsidian is free for personal use, with paid Catalyst and Commercial tiers for support or business needs, plus optional add-ons like Obsidian Publish and Obsidian Sync. The overall conclusion is not that one tool is universally best, but that Obsidian fits the creator’s needs across data control, portability, sharing, speed, community, and cost—despite prior heavy investment in Roam.