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6th Nov, 2023
Let's explore some alternatives to Obsidian, the PKM and second brain application for organising and managing thoughts, ideas and notes.
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Obsidian is one of those super in-depth apps that helps you organise your thoughts, connect ideas and helps you to learn and personally develop. Lots of people enjoy using Obsidian as a second brain and PKM tool because you can't always remember everything.
There are other PKM tools and second brain applications you can use if you're feeling like moving away from Obsidian and trying something new too.
So, let's dive into the best Obsidian alternatives for organising and managing thoughts, ideas, notes and more.
Before choosing an app like this, know that most of them will require some learning and getting used to, especially the way you link together notes and create bi-directional links. Sometimes this can be done with hashtags, keyboard shortcuts or other features inside the apps.
Logseq is a very in-depth second-brain, personal knowledge application. It uses a block-based structure to organise your notes into blocks that can be nested inside other blocks. This creates your linked web of interconnected ideas.
Logseq uses a graph view that helps you visualise the connected blocks and ideas that link together, this helps users identify links in their knowledge to support ideas and spark inspiration. You can also integrate other tools with Logseq to enhance the experience, it also uses Markdown support for writing detailed notes.
Mem is an AI note-taking tool that also allows you to take notes and organise them into a personal knowledge base.
You can turn notes into documents to share with others and to create more in-depth thought patterns. Mem also removes the need for folders too, another key difference.
Mem's main feature is its AI note-taking ability, and what makes this app a great Obsidian alternative. Mem AI uses natural language to process and analyse your notes over time, from here it can identify and pull up key information to generate summaries and insights.
The use of AI is great for helping users leverage their notes even further, creating more meaningful in-depth connections with ideas.
Reflect Notes is another great alternative to Obsidian for its AI note-taking and second-brain experiences.
Reflect Notes helps you keep all ideas, notes and thoughts connected together to help make sense of your ideas, spark inspiration and really create a meaningful second brain where you can store everything and anything you don't want to forget.
With Reflect you can take web clippings, integrate your calendar and share your writing with others. You can also build a network of the people you have spoken to, like your contacts, to create a database of individuals for work, and future projects.
Roam Research is an app that focuses on networked thoughts and ideas to create a database that can expand and inspire ideas.
The graph allows users to see the connections between their notes to help make more sense of ideas and to create a better understanding of topics. You can also use Roam's powerful search to quickly find and filter notes within the connections.
Like Logseq, Roam uses blocks of text that can be used to build in-depth ideas and linked to other blocks that are of the same subject, idea or thought.
Craft provides a more creative and visual experience as an Obsdisian alternative. Craft is simply a place to create documents to share with your team and others. It allows you to go more in-depth with your notes and create something meaningful.
You can take daily notes inside Craft which might inspire you to create cards and pages to summarise information more in-depth, to then share with your team or anyone who needs to read your information.
Craft uses page cards as a customisable element inside the tool for users to fulfil their creative needs whilst creating a workspace full of informative documents and pages for their own learning and study, or to share within teams.
You really have a ton of creative freedom with Craft, adding in any snippets of information you want. You can also just use Craft as a daily journal to log travels and events.
So, now you have seen five of the best alternatives to Obsidian, which one though?
If you're interested in learning more about what a second brain app is, you can check out our other articles and guides for second brain tools too.
Combine tasks, calendar, meeting booking links & task consolidation into one.
Bring tasks from ClickUp, Notion, Gmail, Todoist & more in Akiflow for organizing in one.
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