Logseq has been appearing a lot in my Mastodon feed lately as a Personal Knowledge Management solution. Many sing its praises over Obsidian so with a slow afternoon at work yesterday I thought to take a look.
My first impression is that Logseq is the offline version of Roam Research; the tool I used before migrating to Obsidian. The biggest issue I had with Roam was the storage of everything online via the browser. I never felt that I had full control over my information, and even less for any files that I uploaded. Logseq solves that.
The big question is “Do I move from Obsidian to Logseq?” and the answer is “No”. I have too much investment in Obsidian to move.
- 3789 pages and files
- Multiple Dataview queries set up to collate information
- Maps of Content already set up.
- Images for books, movies, tv shows and games automatically linking into content
- My whole GTD system at work
The benefit I would get from Logseq’s block-level writing over Obsidian’s page-level writing isn’t there for me at the moment. I would also need to seriously change how I think about content from individual files to content that’s linked as a block somewhere else ie. writing this post as a separate page in Obsidian but as a block within my Journals page in Logseq (BTW, I am writing this post initially in Logseq to get the feel of it.)
There may be benefits in me transferring my GTD system at work into Logseq. I can see benefit in taking notes from client meetings etc on a single day rather than having to link via backlinks. And I did have GTD running successfully in Roam Research beforehand. I still need to follow my rules of How to Trial Software Before you Buy even if Logseq is free. It is likely I’ll do some kind of limited trial at least to move forward even if I chose not to “convert” my whole Obsidian vault across.
My personal use doesn’t yet justify the effort required to transfer my data into Logseq compliant file structuring (I use folders for high-level organisation in Obsidian eg. keep my personal journal files separate) and to replace the queries. At least both use standalone files so there is a future path forward.
I’m also capturing more into Obsidian than I write. Transferring to another tool is only going to take writing time away for negligible immediate benefit.
The decision is made. For my personal digital garden at least, and likely work as well, I will be staying with Obsidian and not progressing further with Logseq.
I put down my first observations in writing earlier today.
Any database, and my collection of Obsidian pages is one of those, is only as good as the answers to the questions you ask of it. I don’t think I can get Logseq to provide those answers due to subtle changes in the data structure. The effort involved far outweighs the benefits.
Logseq is a great applications. It doesn’t do what I need. Onward Obsidian!