Capacities vs Logseq: pricing, features and which to choose

Capacities is a personal knowledge-management and note-taking app made by Capacities Labs GmbH in Germany. Steffen Bleher and Michael von Hohnhorst started the company in 2020, and the product entered public beta in 2022. It runs on the web, Windows, macOS, Linux, iOS and Android. The company describes itself as bootstrapped with no outside investors, while CB Insights records a different funding history involving Media Lab Bayern. Capacities reports more than 50,000 active knowledge workers and a six-person remote European team. Its defining choice is to treat notes as typed objects, such as people, books, projects and meetings, rather than as unstructured pages.

A typical workflow starts in daily notes, imported material, or captured media. Users turn that material into typed objects, add properties, connect entries with backlinks, then retrieve information through full-text search, smart queries, related content and the graph view. Tasks, whiteboards and calendar integration extend the workspace beyond notes. The in-app assistant can use selected notes or search context, and saved conversations become searchable objects. AI Chat Connectors use MCP, allowing supported clients such as ChatGPT, Claude and Cursor to search, read, create and update objects, append content and work with media. Capacities recommends searching or listing first instead of asking an external client to read an entire workspace.

Capacities is cloud-only, lacks end-to-end encryption, and does not offer team accounts or realtime collaboration. Its object model can take time to learn, while regular AI use requires Plus or additional top-ups. Notion offers broader shared workspaces, pages and databases. Obsidian stores local Markdown files and supports plugins, while Capacities provides hosted sync and structured objects. Anytype takes a local-first, open-source-oriented approach, unlike Capacities' hosted service. Tana focuses on structured outliner workflows and team use, whereas Capacities is more explicitly personal. Pick Capacities if you want an individual knowledge base built around typed objects, linked notes and optional AI.

Logseq began in 2020 as an open-source project and grew into one of the best-known privacy-first alternatives to Roam Research and Obsidian. Its GitHub repository has more than 45,000 stars, and its code is licensed under the AGPL. A small core team, about four people according to its forum, builds the app with community contributors, and it is funded partly through Open Collective sponsorships. Logseq attracts students, academics, writers, researchers and software developers who think in outlines and want notes that link together without handing their data to a cloud service. It runs on Windows, Mac, Linux, iOS, Android and the web.

Everything in Logseq is a block in an outline. You write in a daily journal by default, then link ideas with [[page]] references or #tags, and backlinks show where every page is mentioned. Blocks can be embedded or referenced elsewhere, so one idea can appear in many contexts. Built-in features include tasks with TODO and NOW states and scheduled dates, queries that pull blocks matching conditions, a graph view, whiteboards for spatial thinking, flashcards with spaced repetition and PDF annotation that links highlights back into notes. The original version stores pages as Markdown or Org-mode files in a folder you choose, so other tools can read them.

Logseq's strengths are its open-source license, local-first storage, powerful block references and queries, built-in journals, flashcards and PDF annotation, and a path to AI through MCP and plugins. Its weaknesses are a long transition to the DB version, beta-quality features, a slower release pace than commercial apps and a learning curve for queries. Obsidian has a larger plugin library and file-based notes, but is not open source. Roam Research pioneered the block outliner as a paid service. Tana and Capacities add structured objects and built-in AI. Notion suits team wikis. Choose Logseq if you want a free, open-source outliner that keeps notes on your own device.