Over the past 6 ('ish') years, a plethora of note taking tools or 'startups' have launched. Many of them following on the much contested heals of Roam Research. These other companies (much like Roam), ended up taking some form of capital investment and then shipping nothing.
This cumulates into a world of languishing knowledge management applications in 2025. If you have stuck with Roam or Obsidian, then you probably have nothing to change. The likelihood of those applications going anywhere in two to three years is slim. Nonetheless, if you chose something like Logseq, Reflect, or SuperNotes, you maybe looking for a suitable alternative.
Having moved from Roam to Logseq a few years ago, this writer finds themselves squarely in this group of individuals. After spending two to three weeks at the beginning of this year looking at alternatives, I landed on the following:
SilverBullet coupled with Zk turns out to be a spectacular way to manage a plain text Zettelkasten knowledge base. SilverBullet gives the user a modern and hackable front-end interface to Zk created files. Both tools are open source and believe strongly in keeping everything in simple markdown files. This means that all those knowledge pieces will remain accessible where ever they exist in the near (or far) future.
During the move from Logseq to SilverBullet, this writer entirely overhauled their approach to 'block level knowledge atoms'. These concepts are key to a successful text-only Zettelkasten but, can be somewhat tricky to apply in a purely markdown approach.
More on this in the next post! So... Stay tuned?