The Cloud vs Roam Research (2025): Creator Workspace vs Networked Thought Tool
A detailed comparison of The Cloud and Roam Research across features, pricing, workflows, and philosophy. Find out which tool fits your thinking and creating style.
The Cloud and Roam Research sit on opposite ends of the productivity spectrum. Roam Research pioneered bidirectional linking and graph-based thinking, earning a devoted following among researchers and PKM (Personal Knowledge Management) enthusiasts. The Cloud is a creator-first workspace that bundles notes, blog publishing, habit tracking, mood tracking, task management, and AI agents into a desktop-like browser environment.
Both tools help you organize your thoughts, but they have very different opinions about how you should work. This comparison will help you decide which one fits your workflow.
Quick Overview
The Cloud is designed for creators who need to move from idea to published output. It combines notes, a built-in blog, habit and mood tracking, task management, AI agents, and a CLI inside a macOS-like browser interface. The philosophy: reduce tool fragmentation so you can focus on creating.
Roam Research is a tool for thinking. It treats every piece of text as a block that can be referenced from anywhere, building a dense web of interconnected ideas. The philosophy: your brain doesn't think in folders, so your notes shouldn't live in them either.
Different tools, different goals
This isn't a case of one tool being better than the other. Roam is built for deep, associative thinking. The Cloud is built for turning thoughts into tangible output. Your choice depends on whether your bottleneck is thinking or shipping.
Feature Comparison
| Feature | The Cloud | Roam Research |
|---|---|---|
| Built-in Blog Publishing | ||
| Habit Tracking | ||
| Mood Tracking | ||
| AI Agents | ||
| Task Management | ||
| Bidirectional Linking | ||
| Graph View | ||
| Block References | ||
| Daily Notes | ||
| Real-time Collaboration | ||
| Desktop-like Interface | ||
| CLI Access | ||
| Free Tier | ||
| Native Mobile App |
Where The Cloud Stands Out
1. Built-in Blog Publishing
Roam Research is a thinking tool, not a publishing tool. If you want to share your ideas publicly, you need to copy your content out of Roam, reformat it, and publish it through a separate platform like WordPress, Ghost, or Substack. That export-reformat-publish cycle adds friction every time you want to share your work.
The Cloud has native blog publishing with custom domain support baked directly into the workspace. You can go from draft to published post without leaving your environment. For creators who publish regularly, this eliminates an entire category of busywork.
2. Creator Lifecycle Features
The Cloud is built around the full creator workflow: capture ideas in notes, organize them with tasks, build consistent routines with habit tracking, monitor your creative energy with mood tracking, and publish when you're ready. Roam focuses almost exclusively on the note-taking and thinking phase of this cycle.
More than notes
Creators don't just need a place to think. They need a system that supports the entire cycle: ideation, execution, consistency, and publishing. The Cloud handles all four stages in a single workspace.
3. Flat, Predictable Pricing with a Free Tier
The Cloud offers a generous free tier, with Pro at $15/month and Ultra at $40/month. All plans use flat pricing, meaning your cost stays the same regardless of team size. Roam Research has no free tier at all. You're committing financially before you've had a chance to explore whether the tool fits your workflow.
4. Desktop-Like Experience and AI Agents
The Cloud's macOS-inspired interface lets you work with multiple windows, drag and drop between them, and multitask naturally. You can have your notes open alongside your task board, your habit tracker, and your blog editor simultaneously. It also includes AI agents that can help automate parts of your workflow, plus a command-line interface for power users who prefer terminal-based interactions.
Roam's interface is minimal and text-focused, which suits its purpose but limits what you can do beyond writing. There are no built-in AI capabilities, and the outliner-style UI means you're always working within a single pane of content.
Where Roam Research Stands Out
1. Bidirectional Linking and Block References
This is Roam's defining feature and its greatest strength. Every page in Roam automatically tracks what links to it, and any individual block of text can be referenced and embedded elsewhere. This creates a networked knowledge base where ideas surface organically through connections you didn't explicitly create.
If your work involves synthesizing large volumes of research, connecting disparate ideas, or building a personal knowledge graph over months and years, Roam's linking system is genuinely powerful.
Roam's real advantage
Bidirectional linking isn't just a feature. It's a fundamentally different way of organizing information. Instead of deciding where a note "belongs," you let connections emerge naturally. For researchers, academics, and deep thinkers, this can be transformative.
2. Graph View for Knowledge Visualization
Roam's graph view lets you visualize how your notes connect to each other. Over time, clusters emerge that reveal patterns in your thinking. You can zoom into specific nodes, filter by tags, and explore the relationships between ideas visually.
This is especially valuable for researchers working across disciplines, writers building complex narratives, or anyone who wants to see the structure of their knowledge base at a glance. The graph view turns your notes from a static archive into a living map of your intellectual landscape.
3. Daily Notes as a Default Workflow
Roam opens to a fresh daily note every day, encouraging a journal-like capture habit. Over time, these daily notes become a rich, searchable log of your thinking. Combined with bidirectional links, ideas from any daily note can resurface months later in relevant contexts. This frictionless daily capture is one of Roam's most effective design decisions.
4. Deep Thinking and Research Workflows
Roam was built by and for people who think for a living. Academics, researchers, and writers who spend hours reading, annotating, and synthesizing information find that Roam's block-level referencing and query system lets them build arguments and connect evidence in ways that traditional note-taking tools simply cannot match.
Pricing Comparison
| Plan | The Cloud | Roam Research |
|---|---|---|
| Free | Unlimited pages, core features | No free tier |
| Pro | $15/month (flat) | $15/month |
| Premium | $40/month (Ultra, flat) | $500/5 years (Believer) |
| Team pricing | Flat per tier | Per user |
No free tier is a real barrier
Roam Research requires a paid subscription from day one. For many users, this makes it difficult to evaluate whether the tool's unique approach to note-taking fits their workflow before committing financially. The Cloud's free tier lets you explore the full workspace before deciding to upgrade.
Collaboration and Sharing
The Cloud is built for both solo creators and teams, with real-time collaboration across all workspace features. Multiple team members can work in the same workspace simultaneously, whether they're editing notes, managing tasks, or reviewing blog drafts.
Roam added multiplayer functionality more recently, and while it works for shared graphs, collaboration was not part of the tool's original design. Roam's community is small but deeply passionate, mostly composed of researchers, PKM enthusiasts, and people who have built elaborate personal knowledge management systems. The community has produced a rich ecosystem of workflows and tutorials, which partially offsets the steep learning curve.
If your workflow involves collaborating with editors, co-creators, or a team, The Cloud's collaboration features are more mature and integrated. If you work primarily solo and value community-driven knowledge sharing, Roam's community is a genuine asset.
Learning Curve
This is worth addressing directly. Roam Research has a steep learning curve. Its block-based structure, query language, and non-hierarchical organization require a genuine investment of time to learn effectively. Many users take weeks or months before Roam "clicks" for them. Concepts like block references, queries, and page-level metadata are powerful but not intuitive for most people coming from traditional note-taking tools.
Once Roam does click, the payoff can be significant. The ability to write freely and let structure emerge from links rather than folders feels liberating. But the initial friction is real, and the lack of a free tier means you're paying while you're still learning.
The Cloud is designed to feel familiar from the first session. Its desktop-like interface, straightforward note-taking, and conventional task management mean you can be productive within minutes. The more advanced features (AI agents, CLI, blog publishing) layer on top of a foundation that doesn't require rethinking how you organize information.
Consider your patience and goals
If you enjoy learning new systems and want a tool that rewards long-term investment in building a knowledge graph, Roam's learning curve is worth it. If you want to be productive on day one and care more about output than process, The Cloud's gentle onboarding is a better fit.
Who Should Choose The Cloud?
Choose The Cloud if you:
- Create and publish content regularly and want built-in blog publishing
- Need habit tracking and mood tracking alongside your notes and tasks
- Want a single workspace instead of juggling multiple specialized tools
- Prefer a visual, desktop-like working environment
- Want to start for free and upgrade as your needs grow
- Work with a team and need solid real-time collaboration
Who Should Choose Roam Research?
Choose Roam Research if you:
- Do heavy research or academic work that benefits from networked notes
- Want bidirectional linking and block references as core primitives
- Value knowledge graph visualization for discovering connections
- Prefer a text-first, minimal interface focused purely on writing and thinking
- Are willing to invest time learning a unique system for long-term payoff
- Primarily work solo and don't need collaboration features
Platform and Accessibility
Both tools are web-based, and neither offers a native desktop or mobile application at the time of writing. Roam Research is accessible through any modern browser, and The Cloud similarly runs in the browser with its desktop-like windowed interface.
Where they differ is in extensibility. The Cloud offers a CLI that lets power users interact with their workspace from the terminal, which opens up scripting and automation possibilities. Roam relies on its query language and community-built extensions for customization, which is flexible but requires more technical knowledge to set up.
The Bottom Line
The Cloud and Roam Research are built for different people solving different problems. Roam is exceptional at helping you think deeply and build a web of interconnected knowledge over time. If your primary challenge is synthesizing complex ideas and you're willing to invest in learning the system, Roam delivers something no other tool quite replicates.
The Cloud is built for creators who need to go from thinking to doing to publishing. It brings together notes, tasks, habits, mood tracking, blog publishing, AI agents, and a CLI in one cohesive workspace. If your bottleneck isn't thinking but shipping, and you want a single tool that covers your entire workflow, The Cloud is the better fit.
Try The Cloud for free and see if a creator-first workspace changes how you work. If deep networked thinking is what you need most, Roam Research remains a strong choice for that specific purpose.