Roam's graph is made of text. Pages link to pages. Blocks reference blocks. The connections are powerful for thought exploration, but they carry no type information. A link between a person and a project looks the same as a link between two random notes. You can't query "all contacts at Company X" because contacts don't exist as a concept — they're just pages with a name.

Synap's graph is made of typed entities. A contact entity has an email, phone, and company. A deal entity has a stage, value, and close date. Relationships between entities are typed too: a contact "works at" a company, a task "belongs to" a project. This structure makes the graph queryable, viewable, and meaningful at scale.

Roam has essentially one view: the daily page with an outline and bi-directional links. There's a graph visualization, but it's more decorative than functional — at scale, it becomes an unreadable hairball.

Synap has 12+ view types, each designed for different tasks. Need to manage a pipeline? Kanban view. Planning your week? Calendar view. Analyzing data? Table view. Exploring connections? Graph view — but one that's meaningful because the nodes are typed entities, not anonymous text blobs. The same data, rendered in whatever shape matches how you need to think right now.

Roam was revolutionary in 2020. But development has slowed significantly. The AI revolution arrived, and Roam didn't adapt. There's no AI-powered organization, no model choice, no structured entity system, and no meaningful new features in the pipeline. Meanwhile, the price remains $15/month (or $500 for the "Believer" plan), with no self-hosting option.

Synap is built for the AI era from the ground up. AI structures your data. The proposal system keeps AI transparent. Any model works through OpenRouter. Your data lives on a dedicated PostgreSQL pod you own. And the development pace is measured in weekly releases, not yearly blog posts.