Roam and Notion aren’t major competitors.

Roam is a programming language for ideas, geared towards individuals.

Notion bundles project management, corporate communications and knowledge management, and it’s geared towards teams.

To see the differences, look at their pricing strategies.

Roam wants to make a lot of money from a small number of loyal users.

Notion wants to make a little bit of money from a lot of users. It’s free to invite co-workers, but they make you pay for enterprise-grade features.

Roam is built for obsessives, Notion is built for everyday people.

Roam is built for individuals, Notion works better with teams.

Roam is better for ideas, Notion is better for tasks.

Roam is designed to be powerful, Notion is designed to be clean and beautiful.

The cleanliness of Notion makes it great for group knowledge management, but suboptimal for personal knowledge management — which benefits from a certain kind of messiness, which is where Roam excels.

Note-taking systems should create serendipity. https://twitter.com/david_perell/status/1303121645360611331?s=20