LogSeq is a personal knowledge management system application that assists those interested in working with lots of networked information.
Discovering LogSeq
What is this software?
LogSeq is suited for knowledge workers. It’s the perfect tool for students, academics, writers, project managers, and developers (among other professions) to manage, store, and retrieve notes that they create.
LogSeq is provided under the AGPL-3.0 License.
You can read more about how to use this software here.
Who maintains this software?
LogSeq is open-source software with a relatively healthy community.
At the time of writing, the last commit was from 2 weeks ago, with over 1,524 open issues and 53 open pull requests.
Who created this software?
The project was started by Tienson Qin (@tiensonqin) four years ago on May 23rd, 2020. Qin (and four others) went on to create the privately funded LogSeq, Inc..
LogSeq, Inc. raised $4.1M in May 2022, with some very notable investors:
- Patrick Collision (Stripe CEO)
- Nat Friedman (former CEO of GitHub)
- Tobias Lütke, Founder of Shopify
- Sriram Krishnan, GP at A16Z
- Charlie Cheever, Founder of Expo/Quora
- Dave Winer, the forefather of outliners, scripting, weblogs, RSS, podcasting, etc.
Where do you go to download new releases?
LogSeq provides a number of built binaries for different platforms on their downloads page.
What is this software powered by?
According to the breakdown on GitHub, LogSeq is written with the following languages:
- Clojure 59.3%
- TypeScript 20.5%
- CSS 13.4%
- JavaScript 4.7%
- HTML 0.9%
- Swift 0.5%
- Other 0.7%
Logseq is also made possible by the following projects:
- Clojure & ClojureScript - A dynamic, functional, general-purpose programming language
- DataScript - An immutable database and Datalog query-engine for Clojure,
ClojureScript and JS - OCaml & Angstrom, for the document parser mldoc
- isomorphic-git - A pure JavaScript implementation of Git for NodeJS and web browsers
- SCI - A Small Clojure Interpreter
Reception
LogSeq itself has been well-received, although it hasn’t reached the same levels of market utilization as similar PKMS giant Obsidian.
The good news, is that LogSeq has a pretty decent following with 30K+ followers on Twitter and 30k+ stars on GitHub at the time of writing.
What’s it do well?
This probably has a lot to do with LogSeq’s primary philosophy diverging from known tools:
Logseq is challenging legacy knowledge management systems that are based on skeuomorphic design (which mimics the systems used for storing physical papers, files, and folders). Why? Because humans don’t think linearly in pages and folders, but rather link inter-connected concepts together non-linearly. Logseq is designed to capture this type of non-linear, thinking creating intuitive and interconnected data, and allowing users to unlock their maximum potential.
The pure emphasis on backlinking and graph discoverability for ones notes is a novel idea and takes some getting used to for people who are purely familiar with traditional notetaking applications (eg. physical notebooks and their similar digital counterparts).
For users who get past this hurdle, they tend to love it!
What can it improve?
LogSeq is technically early access - there isn’t a version 1.0.0 available yet. The maintainers themselves maintain a roadmap of what they need to do to get there. One particular sticking point is performance of large “graphs” and the lack of real-time collaboration, which they talk about here.
Any competitors on the market?
There are plenty of similar competitors currently on the market:
Further resources
These resources may be valuable: