What is Foam used for?

Foam is a notes and knowledge-sharing system that lives in VS Code and GitHub, with wikilinks, a link graph and optional web publishing. It is a good fit for a Zettelkasten-style note system in VS Code, research notes stored in Git and publishing a digital garden from Markdown.

Yes. Foam is open source under a custom licence. Its source code is on GitHub at foambubble/foam and is written mainly in TypeScript.

Yes. Foam is open source, so the software itself is free to use under the terms of its own licence.

Can I self-host Foam?

Yes. Foam can be self-hosted on your own server or infrastructure; there is no official hosted version.

What is Foam an alternative to?

Foam is an open-source alternative to Roam Research, Obsidian and Reflect. Other open-source alternatives to Roam Research include Logseq, Inkstone and Tangent.

Is Foam actively maintained?

Yes. The most recent commit to Foam was on 30 September 2026. The project has 17k stars on GitHub.

Foam: open-source alternative to Roam Research, Obsidian

About Foam

Foam is a personal knowledge management system that lives inside Visual Studio Code and GitHub. It is intended for organizing research, keeping notes you can rediscover, writing long-form content and, if you want, publishing it to the web. The notes are plain Markdown files you own, so you can share and collaborate on them with anyone.

Its features center on linking notes together. A graph visualization shows how notes connect, link autocompletion helps create connections and placeholders, and links are updated automatically when a file is renamed. Foam supports files with the same name in different folders by using the shortest identifier needed, and it helps find and fix ambiguous wikilinks. Link preview, go to definition and peek references let you see where a note is mentioned. Topics include Zettelkasten and PKM workflows.

Foam is a free, open-source VS Code extension written in TypeScript, and its license is listed as 'Other' on GitHub. It requires VS Code, so it suits developers and technical writers already comfortable in that editor who want a notes workflow built on files and Git instead of a separate app.

Key features

Graph visualization of linked notes
Autocompletion for wikilinks and placeholders
Automatic link updates on file rename
Link preview and peek references
Markdown files in a Git repository
Optional publishing to the web

Good fit for

→A Zettelkasten-style note system in VS Code
→Research notes stored in Git
→Publishing a digital garden from Markdown

Built with: TypeScript
Tags: note-taking; pkm; vscode; markdown; zettelkasten; knowledge-graph; wikilinks; typescript

Foam: questions and answers

What is Foam used for?: Foam is a notes and knowledge-sharing system that lives in VS Code and GitHub, with wikilinks, a link graph and optional web publishing. It is a good fit for a Zettelkasten-style note system in VS Code, research notes stored in Git and publishing a digital garden from Markdown.
Is Foam open source?: Yes. Foam is open source under a custom licence. Its source code is on GitHub at foambubble/foam and is written mainly in TypeScript.
Is Foam free?: Yes. Foam is open source, so the software itself is free to use under the terms of its own licence.
Can I self-host Foam?: Yes. Foam can be self-hosted on your own server or infrastructure; there is no official hosted version.
What is Foam an alternative to?: Foam is an open-source alternative to Roam Research, Obsidian and Reflect. Other open-source alternatives to Roam Research include Logseq, Inkstone and Tangent.
Is Foam actively maintained?: Yes. The most recent commit to Foam was on 30 September 2026. The project has 17k stars on GitHub.