Roam Research vs Tana: Where Roam users went (2026)

Roam's contribution is permanent. Bidirectional linking, the addressable block, and the daily-notes habit that half this category copied all came out of Roam, and any bullet can be referenced, embedded, and queried without being duplicated. Recent work has shipped too: faster background search and semantic search.

Tana takes the outline and adds a schema. A supertag gives a node fields, templates, and views, so structure stops being something you maintain by hand. This is a genuine advance on Roam's model rather than a reskin of it, and it is the specific thing that pulled ex-Roam users across. The price sits on Tana's own weakness list: a steep learning curve for the node and supertag model, described there as widely reported.

If your Roam graph is held together by block references, understand what leaving costs. Roam's exports are Markdown, JSON, or EDN, and block references are pointers to Roam block IDs. In a different app those IDs mean nothing, so a note assembled from twelve referenced bullets arrives as a note with twelve dangling pointers.

Tana's nodes are addressable in their own way, so the concept survives even though the specific references do not. Rebuilding is the real work of this migration and nobody's importer removes it. Plan on rewriting the notes that lean hardest on block-level assembly, and treat the export as raw material rather than as a finished vault.

Roam's community has described development as stagnant since around 2021, founder communication as infrequent, and long-term viability as an open question. A documented exodus toward Obsidian and Tana followed. The users who stayed are dedicated and the group is smaller than it was.

Tana's development is visibly active. Desktop offline support arrived in late 2025 and the AI features keep expanding. It is also a young company with a proprietary format and a pricing structure its own users have criticised, so its momentum is a reason to try it rather than a guarantee about 2032. Nobody in this comparison can promise you a decade.

Roam is a web app. The macOS and Windows builds are wrappers around it, there are no native mobile apps, and offline is unsupported. Mobile means a browser on a phone, which is exactly as pleasant as it sounds.

Tana added desktop offline support in late 2025, and its mobile app can capture offline but cannot display content you already have. Neither app puts a full copy of your notes on your own machine in a format you could read without them. Tana's position is better on both counts, and it is better rather than solved.

Roam is $15 a month with no free tier, or $500 for five years on the Believer plan. Five years at the monthly rate is roughly $900, and $500 up front is the cheaper route if you are certain about the next five years, which is a bet on the momentum question above.

Tana is free to roughly 20,000 nodes, then $8-10 a month for Plus and $20 for Pro. The jump from free to Plus is a criticism its users make out loud. For most single users Tana is between half and two-thirds of Roam's price, and the free tier alone will carry a year of ordinary note-taking before it stops.

Roam is $15 a month with no free tier, or $500 for five years on Believer, so five years is $500 to $900. Tana is free to roughly 20,000 nodes, then $8-10 a month for Plus or $20 for Pro, putting five years between $480 and $1,200 depending on tier. Valutorio is a paid Mac App Store app and its Mac-to-Mac sync is a separate optional subscription, so it is not the cheap option; the difference is what stops when you stop paying. Roam's price includes hosting a graph that runs in any browser, and Tana's includes AI that would otherwise be a separate subscription. Cancel either of those and you are down to an export file. Cancel Valutorio's sync and you still have the folder.