Zettrl Vs Obsidian

There is a war inside of me just now. A battle rages within my mind between the holy light of #open-source software and the evil temptation masked by convenience. I am, of course, talking about deciding on my note taking application of choice! I’ve been a long time user of Obsidian but, when discovering that there was an open-source alternative, I just had to give Zettlr a try!

I suppose the tl;dr of this is that I’m sticking with #Obsidian but this was a hard call to make. So, let me go over a few of the reasons.

Zettlr

Zettlr is an open-source #markdown editor that aims to ‘redefine what writing means’. A friend and I were searching for ‘portable’ markdown editors that could be used as a Personal Knowledge Management (PKM) tool and Zettlr popped up. After finding out that it was both portable and open-source I downloaded it and committed to trying it out for at least a week to see how it felt.

It offers a lot of what Obsidian does (my markdown editor/PKM tool of choice) with connected knowledge links, tagging and working with existing markdown files, rather than storing notes in a database (like Joplin, another excellent and portable note-taking application).

It also seemed to offer a lot more in terms of citation base features, including integration with Zotero. In the past I’ve tried using Zotero but the work that I do doesn’t really involve much in the way of formal citations.

I used Zettlr for a week both at work and at home which meant using two different note ‘vaults’ (the Obsidian terminology stuck with me). I continued to use the usual note link and tagging system that I have (Personal Knowledge Management System and, to its credit, Zettlr worked great with no real differences in work flow.

Zettlr also provides some interesting statistics and, similar to Obsidian, a graph view. A few of these are shown below.

(daily statistics)

(graph view)

(calender view)

(calender view legend)

So, a few pros and cons.

Pros

• Open source. This point cannot be overstated, I strive to use as much open source software as possible and, for such a fundamental part of my daily life, I’d love to use an open source note taking application.
• The Pomodoro timer included is an excellent feature. I love this technique and use a similar system frequently during work and study.
• The citation integration is amazing as well. Being able to have a citation library so readily available is incredibly useful, especially when using Zettlr for linked note taking. It’s a powerful combo.
• The built in table editor is also great, especially for someone that often makes a small syntax error in markdown that causes an issue with tables, causing a disruption to my flow!
• The statistics section has some really cool information displayed (even if you exclude the graph).

Cons

• Can’t easily write in raw markdown and I am one of those strange people that much prefer writing whilst seeing formatting notation shown. Yes, even in Outlook (have to use this for work).
• The workspace window is a little clunky, things like dragging and dropping files around doesn’t work how you might expect.
• The application adds .ztr-directory files throughout my files which I didn’t like. I understand what the files are used for, but I don’t like anything going in or out of my notes folders unless I’ve done it.
• A few small bugs or glitches cause some unexpected things to happen. For example, I found that changing a list item to a task sometimes caused the note to scroll to a different location.
• There aren’t many variables to choose from in creating new files or in setting up some of the code snippets.

Summary

Now, most of these pros, whilst cool and useful features, aren’t actually something that I’d use day-to-day. Things like citation and statistics are excellent additions, but aren’t high enough on my priorities or use case to be able to change my opinion either way. Obviously being open source is different, but that’s the only pro in the list above that really influenced my decision.

However, just as most of the pros didn’t have a big impact the decision, most of the cons didn’t either. The main one would be not finding an option to work in raw markdown (and might just have been me missing something!), the rest are likely development issues that might be fixed or improvements made over time.

From what I’ve seen Zettlr seems to be much more in sync with all things Zettelkasten (kinda lines up with the name!) and for more academic or creative writing based systems. My use is for a second brain / personal knowledge management and, sadly, I’m not sure that it’s as suited for how I work.

As fond as I am of Obsidian, I want to have as much of my application suite as possible to be open source so I was really rooting for Zettlr to win out, but Obsidian has worked its way into my workflow so perfectly that I just couldn’t justify making the change.