Org-roam

Spec sheet

Purpose

Org-roam is a plain-text personal knowledge management system for non-hierarchical note-taking and networked thought.Read 8 Oct 2026 · orgroam.com

Audience

The manual says Org-roam may feel unfriendly to people unfamiliar with Emacs and Org-mode and assumes basic familiarity with both.Read 8 Oct 2026 · orgroam.com

Support

The project points users to Discourse and Slack for community help and to GitHub issues for bugs and feature suggestions.Read 8 Oct 2026 · github.com

Backlinks and graph

The built-in Org-roam buffer shows backlinks, reference links, and unlinked references, and Org-roam can visualize connections with a graph.Read 8 Oct 2026 · orgroam.com

Citations

Org-roam caches citations from built-in Org citations and org-ref, and supports reference links to cited notes.Read 8 Oct 2026 · orgroam.com

Daily notes

The org-roam-dailies extension provides journaling and commands to create or find notes by date.Read 8 Oct 2026 · orgroam.com

Dependencies

The project lists Org, emacsql, and magit-section as dependencies for manual source installation.Read 8 Oct 2026 · orgroam.com

Encryption

Users can create encrypted notes by using Emacs GPG support and a .gpg file extension in capture templates.Read 8 Oct 2026 · orgroam.com

Installation

The manual describes installing Org-roam through Emacs package managers or directly from its development repository.Read 8 Oct 2026 · orgroam.com

Note capture

Org-roam provides customizable capture templates for creating notes and pre-filling their content.Read 8 Oct 2026 · orgroam.com

Notes and links

It stores notes as plain-text Org-mode files and uses links to connect notes into a personal knowledge base.Read 8 Oct 2026 · orgroam.com

Offline use

The maker describes Org-roam as operating completely offline, with the personal wiki under the user's control.Read 8 Oct 2026 · orgroam.com

Open source

Org-roam is free and open source under the GNU General Public License version 3 or later.Read 8 Oct 2026 · orgroam.com

Performance limit

Updating the database on save can be slow for large Org files, and the manual describes an option to disable automatic updates.Read 8 Oct 2026 · orgroam.com

Plans and prices

Every Org-roam plan and price →

Where Specifiction places it

• Personal Knowledge Management Software#26 of 327.7