SiYuan vs Logseq: which open-source PKM app in 2026?

Outliner vs block documents — two shapes of thinking

Logseq is an outliner to its core: every line is a bullet, every note is a tree, and the day’s journal page is where everything starts. That shape is superb for interstitial notes, meeting fragments and thinking-in-progress — you indent instead of organizing, and block references let any bullet be quoted anywhere. The cost is that long-form prose always feels like it is being written inside a list, because it is.

SiYuan’s unit is the document: real pages with headings and paragraphs in a WYSIWYG editor, where every paragraph is still an addressable block you can reference and embed. On top sit Notion-style database and attribute views, built-in flashcards and PDF annotation. The same meeting note that lives as nested bullets under today’s journal in Logseq becomes, in SiYuan, a page with headings — and, if you want, a row in a meetings database. Neither shape is more powerful; they match different heads. (If your real comparison is with Markdown files, we’ve compared SiYuan against Obsidian too — and against Anytype, the other privacy-first, self-hostable app.)

Project health in 2026 — the section this audience checks first

Both projects are AGPL-3.0, similarly starred (Logseq ~44,000, SiYuan ~45,000 on GitHub), and both saw commits this week. The difference is shipping shape. As of August 2026:

• Logseq spent years rewriting itself around a local database, and the classic Markdown app slowed to three releases in the sixteen months before December 2025. The rewrite finally landed: Logseq 2.0.1 — the database version — shipped July 13, 2026. It’s a real release, but explicitly beta: the team recommends automated backups against possible data loss, the new sync (real-time collaboration) is alpha, and the new mobile app is alpha too.
• SiYuan ships continuously: four stable releases between June 30 and July 21, 2026 (v3.7.0–v3.7.3), v3.8.0 on August 12, beta builds most days since, and an issue tracker kept in the low hundreds. No transition, no fork in the road — the app you install today is the one being developed.

Read that as: SiYuan’s health is unambiguous, while Logseq is finally moving again after a long quiet stretch — but choosing Logseq in 2026 means betting on the database version maturing, or parking on a classic app that is no longer where the attention goes.

Sync and self-hosting

Neither app requires a subscription to be useful, and both can sync without one — with very different amounts of assembly:

• Logseq: classic Markdown graphs sync end-to-end encrypted via Logseq Sync, or free with DIY setups (git, Syncthing, iCloud) since the graph is just files. The database version’s sync is the alpha real-time system — early access currently runs through backing the project (from $5/month on OpenCollective). There’s no official self-hosted server; self-hosting Logseq means hosting your own file sync.
• SiYuan: a one-time $64 PRO purchase unlocks encrypted sync and backup to your own S3 or WebDAV storage; the official cloud (8 GB) is $148/year. And uniquely in this pair, the entire app self-hosts in Docker — your notes served from your own machine, editable from any browser. For the r/selfhosted crowd, that’s the whole argument.

Performance with large graphs

Logseq’s best-known weakness has been performance at scale: classic Markdown graphs get sluggish as they grow into the thousands of pages — it’s the most consistent complaint in the community, and a large part of why the database rewrite exists. The DB version is much snappier by design, but it carries the beta caveats above.

SiYuan was built database-first from the start — blocks live in SQLite — and it comfortably handles workspaces that would make classic Logseq crawl. Its own trade-off is interface density rather than speed: the app stays fast, but the screen is busy. If you’re arriving with years of notes, this section plus the health snapshot above is most of the decision.

SiYuan review, in brief — what living in it is like

For the Logseq user asking “is SiYuan actually good?”: yes, with a specific texture. It is fast and feature-complete out of the box — you will not spend the first week installing plugins — and the block model, database views and flashcards feel native rather than layered on. The interface is dense: lots of panels, lots of icons, settings that go deep; people coming from Logseq’s spare journal page either enjoy the power or find it busy. Documentation and the plugin bazaar are usable in English but read as translated, and much of the community conversation happens in Chinese. Mobile is functional, not polished. What it never does is feel unmaintained or fragile — and after a long stretch of Logseq waiting, that alone is why some outliner people switch.

Export and lock-in

What’s actually on disk? Classic Logseq: plain Markdown (or Org-mode) files — the cleanest exit in this comparison, copy the folder and leave. The database version moves your graph into SQLite, with export back to Markdown — a fair trade, but the “my notes are just files” era of Logseq ends there. SiYuan stores blocks as JSON in its own local format, and exports documents or whole notebooks to Markdown and PDF; block references and database views flatten on the way out.

Migrating mid-switch: SiYuan imports a classic Logseq graph as Markdown — bullets, text and images come through cleanly, while Logseq-specific syntax travels as literal text: ((block refs)), key:: properties, queries and TODO keywords all need cleanup. The reverse trip (SiYuan → Markdown export → Logseq) works the same way, minus database views. Both directions are an afternoon of link checking, not a one-click move — run a trial import on a copy first.