acreom vs Obsidian
One of the most frequent questions new users coming to acreom ask, is how does acreom differ from Obsidian.
We wish someone else would write such comparison for transparency, though we figured it's better to have some comparison than nothing at all. If you are exploring what tool might work better for you, here's a quick guide.
Finally, it's important for us to mention that we used Obsidian before building acreom and there's a lot to love about the tool and their approach to building software. Our core values around the full data ownership and privacy are strongly inspired by Obsidian.
How is acreom different from Obsidian?
At first sight, acreom and Obsidian might feel very similar. Both are local-first markdown knowledge bases at their core. Though, the deeper one dives in the more different will these tools feel.
The first significant difference is the degree of flexibility you are looking for in your second brain. If you are looking for endless customization and organisation options, Obsidian will be a better fit for you. On the other hand, acreom is opinionated and works out of the box where you can just get started right away.
When it comes to the user experience, Obsidian is more of a swiss knife outsorcing most of its features to the community in the form of plugins for nearly every user need. Contrary, acreom is specifically designed for developers and focuses on building a great user experience in house specifically for devs. In this regard, it is built more as an integrated workflow tool than an extensible knowledge base. When it comes to the specific features supporting the dev workflow, the user experience is superior compared to the UX of the community plugins.
Specifically these are:
Daily documents with task management out of the box
Actionable pages with statuses and views for tracking progress
Deep Integrations with Jira, Github and Linear
Timeline view syncable with Google, Apple and .ics Calendars.
Quick capture allowing you to capture notes and tasks anywhere without switching context.
Web access & free E2EE sync
The bottom line is that Obisidan will work better for users who want everything from advanced table operations to kanban boards. Though, if you are a developer, acreom is specifically designed to make your life easy by bringing all the relevant context in one interface you will love using. Inspired by the strenghts and shortcomings of Obsidian, we have built it to offer a better user experience for the developer's workflow.
We hope this brief guide is helpful when making a decision. However since both tools are local-first, interoperable and have no vendor lock-in, we advice to simply try both and see what works better.
If you have any questions, feel free to reach out on our Discord.
