Roam Research
The original networked-thought notebook — bi-directional links that turn notes into a knowledge graph.
About
Roam Research is the app that started the bidirectional-linking era. Founded by Conor White-Sullivan (with Joshua Brown, per The Hustle's profile), it launched in late 2019 and raised a $9 million seed round at a $200 million valuation in 2020 from backers including Patrick and John Collison, True Ventures and Lux Capital — an extraordinary valuation for an 11-person team, reported by The Information. Its core insight: notes shouldn't live in folders, they should link to each other, and backlinks make every page a map of everything connected to it.
The daily-notes workflow, block references and query system built a devoted #RoamCult of power users who shared templates and workflows publicly, and the company claimed to be profitable as early as 2020. Pricing sits at $15 per month. Roam remains the reference implementation for networked thought — even as open-source alternatives like Logseq and polished rivals like Obsidian have taken much of the mindshare, and its own update cadence has been quieter since the 2020 peak.
What it can do
- Bi-directional linking between any blocks and pages
- Daily notes with automatic backlinking
- Block references and embeds across the graph
- Powerful query system over the knowledge base
- Templates and community-shared workflows
- Collaboration with shared graphs
- Offline-capable web app
Setup
Sign up in the browser, open today's daily note, and start writing — link any phrase with double brackets to create or connect pages.
Prerequisites
Paid subscription ($15/month); account signup required.
Use cases
Works with
Trust score — 7/10
Scored 7/10 (TIER verified, metrics-v1). Evidence: $9M seed at $200M valuation (2020, The Information via Techmeme) and founder details corroborated by The Hustle; bidirectional-linking primacy is broadly attested. Strengths: pioneered the category everyone copied, genuinely powerful block-level linking, profitable-by-2020 claim suggests real paying base. Docked for: (1) quieter development momentum since 2020 while Obsidian and Logseq advanced; (2) $15/month is premium pricing with a crowded field of cheaper or free alternatives; (3) closed source with limited API story. License: proprietary SaaS; $15/month subscription.
How the trust score is built
Full methodology →- Adoption · stars/downloads, log-scaled vs peers
- 8.0/10
- Maintenance · recency, releases, issue load
- 6.0/10
- Openness · license + docs
- 3.0/10
- Manual review · sanity read + red-flag check
- 8.0/10
- · Founded by Conor White-Sullivan (with Joshua Brown); launched late 2019
- · $9M seed at $200M valuation (2020, The Information); backers incl. Collison brothers, True Ventures, Lux
- · Pioneered bi-directional linking; #RoamCult community of power users
- · Claimed profitability by 2020
- · Daily notes, block references and embeds, query system, shared graphs
Sources
Every fact above was checked against these sources. Where a claim comes from the provider and couldn't be independently verified, the text says so.