TheBrain v. Obsidian as of May 2021

Posted by moritz
May 5, 2021 at 05:24 PM

Seconding the notion - I tried Roam Research and Obsidian, now firmly back in the TheBrain camp (using the fairly stable v12 beta).

Numerous advantages of the decades of development work - e.g. there is no scalability and performance limitation (a “brain” will never grow too big); to-do’s are aggregated automatically and elegantly in a side pane (which has full edit capabilities); iOS apps could be better but do the job; import/export sufficiently mature to use TB as a graph database: E.g. I imported the full APQC capability model as a graph, including KPIs translating into text, which is now available for cross-referencing in any value realization thoughts that I am adding.
If need be (corporate compliance) TheBrain works flawlessly in full offline mode (unlike Roam), while offering stable online sync where data is less sensitive.

I am gladly paying for my annual subscription to get both the cloud sync as well as steady stream of meaningful improvements (even TB12 beta has by now shipped 52 releases!).
Innovation is not small - Markdown is much improved, the automatic aggregation of related (not yet linked) topics mimics to some degree a key feature of Roam, etc. etc.

While I will not stop using the gazillion other tools (CRIMP), at least Roam and Obsidian will not be considered in the near future, based on my current success with Brain for a number of my use cases.

TempusFugit wrote:
I may have been unduly harsh on TB12.
> >Having road tested more this night, I can see where Harlan is going.
> >It is a material improvement.
> >If I could have edited the prior comment - would have.
> >Hereby amended. -TF