Not a "we're better" page. Mimir is young — one serving daemon, one seeded compartment, zero embedded chunks — sitting next to tools that have shipped for years to millions of people. The honest comparison is a capability matrix: what each system does, what it does not, and where Mimir is still behind rather than ahead. Where Mimir is genuinely ahead, that's stated too, and it's usually the governance row, not the polish rows.
second-brain/research/ — the eighteen-school PKM field survey and its tools-and-stacks catalog — or to Mimir's own docs in second-brain/mimir/docs/. The one exception is the Rewind/Limitless column: that product category was not in the eighteen-school survey, so its cells are grounded only in well-known public product claims, hedged accordingly, and marked partial rather than a confident yes wherever the underlying architecture isn't independently documented here. Nothing below is a fabricated statistic — where the research didn't cover a claim precisely, the cell says — or partial instead of guessing a yes.
| Capability | Mimir | Obsidian | Notion | Mem | Rewind / Limitless | NotebookLM | Roam / Logseq | MS GraphRAG stacks |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Capture (text / voice / file) | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | partial | ✓ | — |
| Semantic + lexical retrieval | partial | partial | partial | partial | partial | ✓ | partial | ✓ |
| Provenance / citations | ✓ | — | — | — | partial | ✓ | partial | partial |
| Knowledge graph | partial | partial | — | — | — | — | ✓ | ✓ |
| Governance / compulsory lenses | ✓ | — | — | — | — | — | — | — |
| Agent-native API / memory | partial | partial | partial | — | — | — | partial | partial |
| Push / resurfacing | partial | — | — | partial | — | — | — | — |
| Tagging / facets | ✓ | partial | ✓ | partial | — | — | partial | — |
| Privacy tiers | partial | partial | partial | — | partial | — | — | — |
| Self-hosting | ✓ | ✓ | — | — | — | — | partial | ✓ |
| Versioned docs | ✓ | — | — | — | — | — | — | — |
| Transcription-aware glossary planned | planned | — | — | — | — | — | — | — |
| Federated sources planned | planned | partial | partial | — | — | — | — | partial |
Click a system's name to read the half-page version: what it is, what it's genuinely great at, where Mimir overlaps, what Mimir adds, and — stated as plainly as everything else on this site — what that system still does better than Mimir today.