I had used Obsidian for my Read/Episode notes and Roam for my daily brain dump for a long time. But at some point I couldn’t get over the monthly charge of Roam when Obsidian made it so freaking easy to host my own vault on whatever “cloud” I wanted. I used iCloud but even with Tailscale that wasn’t even necessary. That simplicity made the Roam fees feel pointless.

It wasn’t until about 2 months ago that I realized that with a handful of plugins and some customizing the UI that I could make Obsidian behave like Roam, that I finally went full Obsidian.

I still don’t like the back links view quite as much as Roam, but I’ve since changed a bit on how I use it to get around it.

If I had to do it over, I would’ve wished that Roam had a REST API and I could easily host my own vault like Obsidian and I would’ve moved that direction. But as it stands, the value of Obsidian due to both of these, plus many other smaller features and plugins, makes it the better option for my setup.