Nobody sells you anything in Logseq, which is also the risk

81 puts Logseq in our Strong band, second in this category behind Obsidian at 83 and level with Joplin. Generosity is 92 and freedom is 95, both near the top of anything we score, for the obvious reason: AGPL-3.0, files on your own disk in Markdown or Org-mode, no account, no branding and no quota anyone can switch off.

Feature depth at 78 is where it gives ground, and the comparison is to its own category rather than to paid software. Obsidian and SiYuan both do more for the same nothing: no canvas here, no PDF annotation, no flashcards, and a much smaller plugin library.

Sentiment sits at exactly 50, and that is not a lukewarm review. We hold no G2, Trustpilot or Capterra score for Logseq at all. It was one of the tools our 24 July 2026 reputation pass left out, so there is nothing on file about free users or about the product generally, and a pillar worth 20% of the total sits at the middle when we have nothing to read. The real free plan is better than 81 suggests, and we are not going to inflate a number to say so.

No feature is behind a paywall, so these are limits of a different kind (as of July 2026).

Sync is the big one. Official Logseq Sync is still in beta and gated to Open Collective backers and sponsors. We hold no first-party price for it, so we describe it as a backer perk rather than quoting a figure we cannot verify. The free routes are iCloud Drive, Dropbox, Syncthing or the built-in Git integration, all of which work and all of which produce conflicts on mobile often enough to be a known rough edge.

Mobile is noticeably rougher than desktop, especially on large graphs, and large graphs (tens of thousands of blocks) get sluggish on startup even on desktop.

The outliner model is opinionated. Everything is a bullet block. If you write long-form prose, fighting the bullet structure gets old within a week, and this is a fit question rather than a limitation you can plug your way around.

The rewrite to a database backend has been in progress a long time, and during it the file-based version has seen little visible feature work. This is the honest concern about Logseq in 2026, and it is worth naming precisely: the risk is not that a company reprices you, it is that development stalls. Because your notes are local Markdown or Org-mode files, the damage if that happened is limited to needing a different editor, which is exactly the protection the licence and the file format were meant to give you.

There is no pricing page, no plan comparison and no upgrade prompt. Logseq is funded by donations through Open Collective, and giving money does not unlock features. The one thing it touches is early access to the beta Logseq Sync service, offered to backers and sponsors.

We deliberately do not publish a figure for that. Third-party sources quote a monthly price for backers, and nothing first-party supports it, so per our sourcing rule the number stays out rather than getting borrowed from a roundup. If official Sync is the reason you are considering backing the project, check Logseq's own Open Collective page for the current terms.

The absence of a ladder is worth reading in both directions. Nothing can be taken away from you at renewal, and nobody is metering your note count to nudge you toward a plan. Equally, a project with no revenue from users has no revenue obligation to them, and pace is set by volunteer time. Obsidian charges for Sync and ships steadily. Logseq charges for nothing and has been rewriting itself for a long while. Those two facts are related.

Yes. Every feature, every platform, no account, no quota, no branding, under a licence that means it stays that way. On the narrow question this page asks, Logseq has one of the cleanest answers on the site.

Who this suits: daily-journal note-takers who capture first and organise later, researchers and students who want block-level references and queries, anyone running a fully offline setup with no cloud account anywhere, and anyone for whom the app being open source is a requirement rather than a nice-to-have. Who should look elsewhere: people who write long-form prose, because the outliner will fight you, and anyone who needs frictionless mobile sync out of the box, because that is the one thing here that is genuinely unfinished.

Two comparisons worth making. Obsidian's free plan is the closest tool with a bigger plugin ecosystem and a paid sync service that works, at the cost of being closed source. SiYuan's free plan is the other open source option, deeper on features and with sync as a one-time purchase. Free Notion alternatives and best free note-taking and docs tools rank the whole category.