A combination of Obsidian and Logseq is powerful

Let’s look at how to use Obsidian and Logseq together to make best use of capabilities offered by these two wonderful note taking apps.

Out of all the note-taking apps I have used [[ Obsidian MD ]] has remained to be my favourite. It is super portable, available for free, it has a strong community to support and cheer its development and a whopping number of plugins to shape it into anything that you want it to be. The Obsidian graph view is one of most beautiful thing you can see as a Zettelkasten or Second Brain affectionado.

Being a local first markdown app makes it the fastest app out there and that was the original reason why I migrated from notion to Obsidian. A quick note has to be quick, [[ Notion ]] makes me wait for creating quick note

I got hooked on Obsidian thereafter because of its simply gorgeous graph view. Watching that graph grow became the reward and motivation for me to take more notes. Obsidian does the job 99.9999% of the time for me and it can in fact function on its own as a comprehensive, Zettelkasten cum Reference cum Project Management Tool.

But it was not Obsidian that helped me understand the beauty of Zettelkasten as a thinking system. I needed [[ Roam Research ]] to see the full extend of what a Zettelkasten can do, especially for my use case that is centred around a daily note. 30 days of free trial in Roam helped me set the goal for creating my own [[ personal knowledge management system ]]s.

Since [[ Roam Research ]] is too expensive and I don’t need the multiplayer function, discovering Logseq was the next breakthrough for me. Logseq worked like Roam but keeps the file locally and uses markdown. It soon gave me the idea of using it in parallel with [[ Obsidian MD ]].

Suffix to say I got the best of both worlds from this combination.

Obsidian lets me visualise my notes, and help write long-form articles based on my existing notes. I use it to think, manage my digital garden (permanent notes) and emulate a physical zettelkasten on how I chain the notes using the graph as a reference to look at my existing connections.

I use Logseq for everything else. The outliner function makes it easy to just keep writing without being too hung up on how to organise the writing. Logseq simplifies the process more than Obsidian as you don’t need to create new files every time to represent a new idea or thought. Having the daily notes feature is also a lifesaver for me.

Another advantage I have started making use of very recently is the Logseq web app that runs from my local directory. Since it runs on a browser I get to use Grammarly inside logseq, greatly reducing the time I need to process each note. They have stopped shipping in the browser version of logseq

Expect for outlining, daily notes and the web client, Obsidian can pretty much do everything that logseq can and it is faster. But why chose one over the other when you can have both? Revisiting this on October 10, 2022: Over the span of an year Logseq’s developer team has worked hard on refining the product a lot more. A lot of the bugs and quirks in Logseq has been taken care of. Even though Obsidian is still faster and better at finding notes through search, Logseq is not trailing too far behind in speed. I think for most use cases, Logseq is fast, reliable and works seemlessly.

The plugin ecosystem is thriving, more themes have arrived and Logseq is only getting better with each update. I still love the roam like daily notes feature. In fact, I now have switched my journaling practise completely to Logseq. I store the journal vault in my icloud account so that it’s accesible from both my laptop and mobile app (ios app is dope btw).

The trade-in for most people is that you can’t enforce a folder structure for Obsidian when you are using it in conjunction with Logseq.

Re-thinking this strategy

I wrote this around a year back thinking of ways to create a single interface for all my note taking and journaling activities. But now I am moving towards a more segmented approach, using multiple apps to streamline the organisation of information based on how I use it. Ever since Logseq community plugins have rolled out, navigating through tags has become easier (similar to how it is in obsidian) and there is not clear answer to why I should use Obsidian with Logseq; even the graphs feature of Logseq has seen imrpovements. All the features that I love about Obsidian has come to logseq in one way or the other. So I really need to explore more, to figure out whether there is any inherent advantage in using Obsidian and Logseq from the same vault.

Having said that I must share the fact that, I depend on Obsidian, Logseq and Notion now to organise information. As you may have noticed in the How this site works note, this entire [[ Digital Garden ]] is a collection of markdown files, that I edit and organise using Obsidian. Logseq serves a powerful journal with specific templates and hash tags systems to reflect and revisit past and random ideas I generate during my ever day morning writing sessions. Finally, Notion is the hierachial database, where I keep the more commericially viable, frequently used set of information that I need to use on a daily basis when we enagage with our clients at Dreamflakes.

I will be writing about this is detail soon enough. But perhaps a strong case for using Obsidian along with Logseq might be related to the [[ Data View plugin ]] in obsidian and [[ queries in logseq ]]. Both Data View and Queries have a strong userbase in the community especially among power users. I have not really tried using the two as I try to keep my systems simple with minimum moving parts. But, I do wish to learn more about the two features to see if there I ways I can use it.

How to use Obsidan and Logseq from the same vault

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