This is one of the best descriptions I’ve seen for why Roam is different than the peers it’s often compared to:

Today Roam is a powerful single-player tool that you can think of as a functional reactive coding environment for remixing your own thoughts. Use cases extend from grocery lists all the way to conceptual SQL scripts for your ideas.

Co-founder Conor White-Sullivan has compared Roam to Excel as both are products with “a low floor and a high ceiling.” You don’t have to start using Excel by using pivot tables. It’s the same product no matter how advanced you are as a user. But, like with Excel, you get more power out of Roam as you get better at using it.

With the Roam team currently hard at work on an open API layer, it’s going to be wild to see the diversity of tools people build on top of it.