Why I Left Roam Research After 5 Years (And Switched to Obsidian)

I paid $500 for a 5-year Roam Research subscription.

I even invested $1,000 in the company.

Then AI changed everything—and I switched to Obsidian.

This isn’t a tool comparison article. It’s the story of an 80-year idea, a personal journey, and a hard lesson about why note format matters more than the tool.

Part 1: Why Roam Research Was Revolutionary

The Problem Everyone Faces

Before Roam, I organized notes the way most people do: folders and file names.

The result? Folder hell.

A book about “habit formation” and “goal setting”—should it go under Books, Habits, or Goals? A podcast episode about an entrepreneur’s time management—Podcasts, Entrepreneurship, or Productivity?

Every time I tried to file a note, I spent more time deciding where it belonged than actually taking the note. Most of the time, I just gave up.

Then I discovered Roam Research. And everything changed.

The 80-Year Idea Behind Roam

Roam didn’t invent linked notes. The idea goes back 80 years.

1945: The Vision

Vannevar Bush, an American scientist, published “As We May Think” in The Atlantic. He imagined a machine called Memex—a device that could store everything you read and let you create “trails” between pieces of information.

Sound familiar? That’s the original vision for linked notes. In 1945.

1968: The Technology

Bush’s idea inspired Doug Engelbart, who gave “The Mother of All Demos” in San Francisco. He invented the mouse, hyperlinks, windows, and video conferencing—all to “augment human intellect.”

These technologies existed in research labs in 1968, but it took until the 1984 Apple Macintosh for regular people to actually use them.

Hyperlinks became the World Wide Web. The mouse is on your desk right now.

1950s-1998: The Method

While American engineers built tools, a German sociologist named Niklas Luhmann was doing something that looked boring:

He took notes on index cards.

But his method was different:

One idea per card (atomic notes)
Every card links to other cards
No categories, only connections

He did this from the 1950s until his death in 1998.

The result? 90,000 cards. 70 books. 400+ academic papers.

He called it Zettelkasten—German for “slip box.”

Luhmann once said: “I don’t think everything. The slip box does it for me.”

His card box wasn’t just storage. It was a conversation partner.

2017: The Book

Luhmann’s method was legendary in academia but inaccessible to regular people.

Then Sönke Ahrens published How to Take Smart Notes. He made Zettelkasten systematic, practical, and actionable.

Suddenly, everyone could learn the method.

2019-2020: The Tools

Then two things happened at once:

Roam Research (2019) brought bidirectional links to mainstream note-taking. Traditional notes: A links to B, but B doesn’t know A exists. Bidirectional links: A links to B, and B automatically shows “A linked to me.”

This made Luhmann’s “link-first” philosophy finally possible in digital tools.

In 2020, Roam raised $9 million at a $200 million valuation. “Note-taking apps” became a hot investment category.

Obsidian (2020) launched the same year with a different philosophy: local-first. Your notes are plain Markdown files on your computer. No cloud dependency.

Two approaches to the same 80-year-old idea.

Part 2: My 5-Year Roam Journey

2020: Going All-In

July 4, 2020. Saturday.

I was waiting outside a department store while my wife tried on clothes. Bored, I opened a podcast.

The hosts were talking about a note-taking tool called Roam Research. They said it was designed for “networked thought”—you could create links between paragraphs without worrying about folders.

I stood in that hallway, completely hooked.

The first time I used Roam, I couldn’t go back. Notes could be connected? No more folders? Just write and link?

How much did I believe in Roam?

I bought a 5-year subscription for $500.

And when Roam was raising money, I invested $1,000.

I was all in. (Probably as much as I love Claude Code now.)

At the same time, Obsidian was also available. I tried it, but:

Too much freedom, didn’t know where to start
Interface wasn’t as intuitive as Roam
Both had bidirectional links, so why not stick with Roam?

So I went with Roam.

2020-2022: Building the System

Over the next two years, I optimized my “knowledge input” workflow:

Instapaper: Save web articles with full-text archive
Kindle: Highlight ebooks
Readwise: Auto-sync all highlights to Roam
MyMind: Handle images and videos (things Roam couldn’t do well)

I genuinely believed this was the “ultimate knowledge management solution.”

The system worked. I accumulated notes. Unexpected connections emerged occasionally.

2025: AI Changed Everything

In late 2025, I started seriously integrating AI into my workflow.

That’s when I realized I had a big problem:

Data locked in the cloud — AI tools couldn’t access it. My notes were trapped on Roam’s servers. Claude couldn’t touch them.
Not native Markdown — I could export, but doing it manually every time was painfully inefficient.

The result: I couldn’t let AI help me organize notes, find connections, or draft articles.

My 5-year Roam subscription was expiring anyway.

So I took another look at Obsidian.

Part 3: Why I Switched to Obsidian

This time, I saw Obsidian’s true value:

Pure Markdown files — AI can read and process them directly
Local-first — I control my data, not the platform
Open ecosystem — Countless plugins, including AI integrations

Most importantly: Markdown is the format AI understands best.

My New Workflow: Director + AI Team

My workflow is completely different now:

I decide what topic to research — AI digs up information and organizes context
I review the material — decide what to keep, what to explore deeper
I direct AI to create note cards — stored in Obsidian with [[bidirectional links]]
When writing, I choose the story angle — AI finds relevant cards from my knowledge base and drafts
I give feedback and make decisions — AI executes

I’m the director. AI is the production team. (I’ve integrated this into my AI-powered goal management system.)

Ideas, judgment, personal experience—those are mine. AI handles the tedious research, organization, and first drafts.

This lets me spend time on what actually matters: thinking and deciding.

If my notes were still locked in Roam, none of this would be possible.

Markdown + local files + AI = the ultimate combination for knowledge work.

The Lesson

From Bush’s 1945 Memex vision, to Luhmann’s 90,000 index cards, to the 2020 tool explosion, to the AI era.

80 years of evolution. I happened to catch this moment.

For me, notes are no longer just files for myself. They’re knowledge assets I can collaborate on with AI. Every card might be read, linked, and combined by AI into something unexpected.

The more notes, the greater the compound effect.

The tool will change. The format is what matters.

That’s probably my biggest takeaway from 5 years with Roam Research.

Related reading:

AI Goal Management System — How I integrate AI with 12 Week Year, Daily Brief, and my note system
From Obsidian to Claude Code: Building a Programmable Life — The origin and core principles of this system

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