The last time this comparison ran, Logseq's long-promised database rewrite was still "coming soon" and the honest read was that Obsidian had pulled decisively ahead on development momentum. That specific part of the story has changed enough to be worth a real update, even though the core recommendation mostly hasn't moved.
What Actually Changed
Logseq shipped version 2.0 as a public beta, a genuine jump from the 0.10.x releases that had been iterating for years. This is the database-backed rewrite the community had been waiting on, and it's now something you can actually install and use rather than a roadmap promise. Release activity on Logseq's GitHub has been frequent through mid-2026, and the project now sits at over 44,000 GitHub stars, up substantially from where it stood a year ago. The "slow drift away from Logseq" narrative needs qualifying: the project is shipping, not stalling. It's still labeled beta, and migrating an existing file-based graph to the new database format is not yet a trivial one-click process, so this is progress worth noting rather than a finished turnaround.
Obsidian, for its part, hasn't slowed down either. The plugin ecosystem has continued growing past 1,000 community plugins, and the core app remains free with the same local-first, plain-Markdown architecture that's been its selling point since launch.
Pricing, Verified Against the Actual Pages
The pricing details in older comparisons of these two tools are frequently wrong in one direction or another, so it's worth being precise. Obsidian's official pricing page lists two Sync tiers: the base tier runs $4/month billed annually (1 synced vault, 1GB storage) or $5/month billed monthly, while Sync Plus runs $8/month billed annually (10 synced vaults, 10GB storage, marked as the popular option) or $10/month billed monthly. Publish, Obsidian's tool for turning a vault into a public website, is a separate product at $8/month billed annually or $10/month billed monthly.
Commercial use is priced at $50 per user per year, and Obsidian's own FAQ is direct about it: you are not strictly required to pay for commercial use, but the company encourages it if you're using Obsidian for work inside an organization, framed as keeping the company independent and user-supported rather than as a licensing mandate with enforcement behind it.
Logseq remains free across the board, core app included, with sync and collaboration still described as in development rather than a shipped, supported product. If free sync matters more than a finished roadmap, that's still Logseq's position: no cost, but no firm timeline either.
The Plugin Ecosystem Gap Hasn't Closed
This claim from the original comparison holds up under a fresh look. Obsidian's plugin count, sitting above 1,000, continues to dwarf Logseq's smaller and less consistently maintained plugin catalog. Dataview, Templater, Canvas, and Excalidraw remain the kind of well-maintained, frequently updated extensions that let power users build a genuinely customized system on top of Obsidian. Logseq's plugin API has changed enough over its lifetime that older plugins routinely break, and the 2.0 rewrite introduces fresh compatibility questions for a plugin ecosystem that was already the smaller of the two.
For someone using either tool with just the built-in features, this gap doesn't matter. For anyone planning to extend the tool meaningfully, it still favors Obsidian by a wide margin.
Daily Notes and the Outliner Case Still Favor Logseq
Nothing has changed here, and it's worth re-stating because it's the strongest reason to pick Logseq over Obsidian regardless of the development-momentum question. Logseq's daily notes workflow, where every entry is automatically tagged, linked, and surfaced in relevant pages, remains genuinely better out of the box than Obsidian's daily notes, which require either manual discipline or the Periodic Notes plugin to reach the same level of automatic cross-referencing. If your primary use case is a daily journal or meeting-notes practice built around bullet-point thinking, that advantage is unchanged by anything in the DB rewrite.
Performance on Large Vaults
Obsidian's speed advantage on large note collections remains real. It reads flat Markdown files directly, which keeps search and indexing fast even past several thousand notes. Logseq's new database version is explicitly aimed at fixing the performance complaints that plagued the file-based version on large graphs, and early reports suggest real improvement, but it's too early in the beta cycle to call this fully resolved. For anyone with a genuinely large existing vault, Obsidian remains the safer bet today; Logseq 2.0 is the one to watch rather than the one to bet a 5,000-note migration on immediately.
Open Source Still Favors Logseq
This hasn't changed and won't: Logseq is fully open source under AGPL, and Obsidian is free but closed source. If digital sovereignty and the ability to fork a tool if the company behind it disappears matter to you on principle, that calculus is exactly where it was. Most users treat this as a theoretical concern rather than a practical one, since both tools store notes as local files regardless of license, but it's a real and legitimate reason some people pick Logseq over Obsidian even accepting every other tradeoff.
Migrating an Existing Graph
Anyone with a mature Logseq file-based graph considering the 2.0 beta should treat the migration as a real decision, not a routine update. The database format is a genuine architectural change from the Markdown-file storage the original version relied on, and while Logseq provides an import path, backing up the existing graph before converting is the kind of precaution worth taking with years of notes. Running the beta on a copy of your graph first, rather than your only copy, costs an afternoon and removes the entire risk.
Obsidian users don't face an equivalent decision, since the app has stayed on the same plain-Markdown file format since launch. That stability is itself a feature: a five-year-old Obsidian vault opens today exactly as it did when it was created, with no format migration ever required. For anyone weighing "actively developed" against "hasn't needed to change its storage format," both framings describe something real, and which one matters more depends on whether you value forward motion or stability more highly in a tool you're trusting with years of personal notes.
The Updated Recommendation
Start with Obsidian if you're new to local-first note-taking and don't already have a strong outliner habit. The plugin ecosystem, performance on large vaults, and the (still free) core app make it the lower-risk default, and the $4/month Sync tier is cheap enough that cost isn't really a factor for most individual users.
Choose Logseq if your workflow is genuinely daily-notes-first, you think in outlines rather than long-form pages, or open source matters to you as a real requirement rather than a preference. The 2.0 beta is worth trying now specifically because the performance and stability concerns that were the strongest argument against Logseq a year ago are actively being addressed, not just promised.
The honest update to the original verdict: Obsidian is still the better default for most people, but "Logseq is stagnating" is no longer an accurate reason to rule it out. If you tried Logseq last year and bounced off the performance, it's worth another look now that 2.0 exists. For the broader Notion-versus-local-first question these tools both sit inside, the Notion vs Obsidian comparison covers that adjacent decision, and the best self-hosted note-taking roundup covers where both fit against Trilium and AppFlowy for anyone still comparison shopping.