Fractal Note vs Logseq

Fractal Note is a free, MIT-licensed note environment inside VS Code. It combines a WYSIWYG Markdown editor with outliner, database, mindmap, and file-manager views. Notes remain plain Markdown and JSON files organized through a virtual folder and file tree. Full-text search covers outlines, Markdown pages, and PDF, Word, Excel, and PowerPoint attachments. A built-in viewer handles Office documents, PDFs, HTML, images, and text or code files. The Chrome extension clips web pages into an outliner or Markdown and writes them to disk through the File System Access API. Backlinks, collapse and expand controls, subtree scoping, filtering, and PDF or Markdown export support navigation and sharing. Bidirectional S3 sync and Amazon Translate require AWS credentials; HTTP(S) proxy connections for those services are not supported. Published AI skills support note searching, reading, and writing in named AI IDEs.

Logseq is a free, open-source platform for knowledge management and collaboration, with tools for notes, tasks, and PDF annotation. It supports Markdown and Org-mode files, and connects information through block references, backlinks, linked references, and queries. Logseq supports note sharing and real-time collaboration, and lists Zotero as an integration. The product says users keep their data locally and can work fully on-device; offline access is listed. It is available on web, Windows, macOS, Linux, iOS, and Android. A plugin and theme ecosystem extends the app, with the homepage listing more than 150 plugins and at least 30 themes. Logseq Sync provides encrypted file syncing across devices. Its public-beta Sync service does not support multiple people using the same graph at once, and the maker warns that data loss can occur. The database version is in beta, while the new mobile app and real-time collaboration features are in alpha; the maker also warns of possible data loss for these. Personal use is free forever. Sync Backer costs $5 a month and Sync Sponsor costs $15 a month, each described as a monthly recurring donation.