Move your team from Heptabase to Tana.
Each person gets a short interview, then a personalized step-by-step guide showing exactly where their saved work, prompts, and projects land in Tana — and the few things that need a manual step, walked through. You send one invite; nobody becomes the help desk, and nothing in Heptabase is changed or cancelled. Want to see where you’re paying for both first? Run the free audit.
Both tools offer AI that chats over your personal notes. In Heptabase, open the 'Chat' panel on a whiteboard and use '+' or '@' to scope the AI to specific cards, PDFs, or whiteboards; citations link back to exact paragraph blocks or video timestamps. In Tana, invoke AI chat from any node to synthesize across your notes, or use supertag-based AI autofill to populate structured fields automatically. When moving from Heptabase to Tana: export your key research cards as Markdown, import into Tana nodes, then use Tana's AI chat to re-run queries against the imported content. When moving from Tana to Heptabase: paste Tana node exports as cards, add them to a whiteboard, and scope Heptabase's Chat to that whiteboard to reproduce the research session.
- Warning: Heptabase's AI is credit-gated by plan (100 credits/month on Pro, 1,800 on Premium, 8,100 on Premium+) and supports multiple providers (OpenAI, Google, Anthropic); Tana AI credits differ (500 free, 2,000 Plus, 5,000 Pro) and confirmed provider options are less clearly documented on current marketing pages.
- Warning: Heptabase provides citation links pointing to specific paragraph blocks or YouTube timestamps; Tana's AI chat does not currently offer the same granular source citation, making it harder to verify AI answers against the original text.
- Warning: Heptabase's 'AI Tutor' agent is a Premium-only feature with no equivalent in Tana's current offering.
Heptabase builds a knowledge graph by placing cards on whiteboards and connecting them via '@' mentions (bidirectional backlinks); the same card can appear on multiple whiteboards, making it a multi-context graph node. Tana builds the graph via supertags and typed references between nodes so relationships carry semantic meaning (e.g. #person 'responsible for' #project). To move from Heptabase to Tana: export cards as Markdown, import as Tana nodes, then recreate inter-card links as Tana node references and add supertags to encode relationship types that were implicit in Heptabase's spatial layout. To move from Tana to Heptabase: export nodes, paste as cards, then rebuild link topology using '@' mentions and whiteboard groupings — the spatial canvas gives visual structure that replaces Tana's typed-edge model.
- Warning: Heptabase's graph is spatially represented on whiteboards (visual clusters, proximity); Tana's graph is queried via search nodes and rendered as table/cards/calendar — the spatial metaphor is absent in Tana.
- Warning: Tana's typed relationships (e.g. 'responsible for', 'depends on') have no named-edge equivalent in Heptabase; relationship semantics must be encoded as card text or tag names rather than as first-class edge types.
Both tools treat every piece of content as an atomic unit (Heptabase: card; Tana: node). To move from Heptabase to Tana: export cards via Heptabase's 'Export to Markdown' (Settings > Export), then paste or import the Markdown text into Tana's daily note or any node, one card per bullet. On the Tana side, use '/' to create sub-bullets for nested content; you can then promote key bullets to full pages by zooming in. To move from Tana to Heptabase: copy node text out of Tana (there is no bulk export yet), paste into Heptabase's card editor, and drag the card onto a whiteboard. Re-establish any bidirectional links manually in both directions using '@' mentions in Heptabase or Tana's reference syntax.
- Warning: Tana has no bulk export; data portability out of Tana requires manual copy-paste or the Tana API, which adds friction when migrating large note collections to Heptabase.
- Warning: Heptabase cards are spatially arranged on whiteboards; Tana's infinite outliner is strictly hierarchical, so the visual layout of a Heptabase whiteboard has no equivalent and must be reconstructed as a nested outline structure.
- Warning: Heptabase's free plan limits cards and whiteboards; Tana's free plan offers unlimited nodes, so users moving from Tana to Heptabase may hit plan limits sooner.
Heptabase's global search surfaces cards by keyword and tag across the Card Library; users also filter whiteboards by tag to narrow the visible card set. Tana's search nodes are live queries that find and display matching nodes across the entire workspace and auto-update; results render as outline, table, cards, calendar, or list views with filtering and sorting. To move a recurring Heptabase search to Tana: identify the tags or keywords you filter by, create a Tana search node with equivalent filter criteria (supertag type + field conditions), and save it as a pinned node for quick access. To replicate Tana's live views in Heptabase: use tag-filtered whiteboard sections or pin a tag card to a whiteboard and group related cards beneath it — Heptabase lacks auto-updating live queries, so the parity is approximate.
- Warning: Tana search nodes update automatically whenever the workspace changes; Heptabase has no equivalent 'live query' — searches are ad-hoc and results are not saved as reusable views.
- Warning: Tana's multi-view rendering (table, calendar, cards) allows the same data set to be visualized in different ways from one search node; Heptabase renders cards as spatial items on a whiteboard and has no table or calendar view of the card set.
Heptabase uses tags and backlink mentions to associate cards with topics; Tana uses supertags to turn nodes into typed objects with typed fields (text, date, number, URL, options). To migrate structure from Heptabase to Tana: identify recurring tags in Heptabase (e.g. #book, #project, #person), create matching supertags in Tana with equivalent fields, then paste exported card content as nodes and apply the supertags manually. To migrate from Tana to Heptabase: identify supertag field values you rely on, add those as tag cards in Heptabase (one tag per concept), and re-establish connections via '@' mentions and whiteboard grouping. Supertag field types like 'date' and 'options' map to Heptabase's block types (dates, toggles) but require re-entry.
- Warning: Tana supertags are a database-like schema applied per node; Heptabase tags are flat labels with no enforced fields, so structured field values from Tana (priority, assignee, due date on a supertag) have no direct equivalent and must be encoded as block content in Heptabase cards.
- Warning: Tana's supertag-based collections (filter, sort, view as table) do not export to a format Heptabase can import natively; the table view must be rebuilt as whiteboard groupings.