# org-roam

10 Hacker News commenters recommended org-roam and 3 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 7 of 13 months. It meets the Hacker Approved badge rule.

**Verdict:** Emacs package that links plain-text Org notes into a knowledge base; people call it stable and finished. Critics mention slow indexing on large note collections.

## Why people recommend it

- Stable, complete, trouble-free (4 comments): "very small and stable codebase, worth reading on its own simply for education" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46572990)) "Its a beautiful piece of software, its feature complete and finished." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46347445)) "I've been using org-roam for a while without too much trouble" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48016837))
- Organizes and links notes well (3 comments): "now I have an agent that set it up and it’s also recording, organizing, and referencing everything." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48586283)) "Org roam is unbeatable even with the preponderance of wiki style knowledge base apps." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46054491)) "Org-roam helps this problem for me in two levels." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50031948))

## What people warn about

- Slow indexing on large vaults (2 comments): "if it's taking too long, whatever you're doing is too complicated" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46489932)) "vanilla Org-Roam indexing became a bottleneck" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47982949))
- Notes sprawl into unused clutter (2 comments): "built-up complex nested trees of tasks and org-roam notes that I haven't looked at in years" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46678135)) "it had become just, a locally indexed wikipedia" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46489957))

## Alternatives hackers recommend

- [Obsidian](https://hackerapproved.com/p/obsidian.md): 447 recommend
- [Org mode](https://hackerapproved.com/p/org-mode.md): 175 recommend
- [Notion](https://hackerapproved.com/p/notion.md): 91 recommend
- [Logseq](https://hackerapproved.com/p/logseq.md): 52 recommend
- [Apple Notes](https://hackerapproved.com/p/apple-notes.md): 39 recommend

## Cite as

Hacker Approved, "org-roam", https://hackerapproved.com/p/org-roam/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).