Heptabase
Visual whiteboard canvas + nested cards + bidirectional links + journal. AI chat with cited sources inside whiteboards; supports OpenAI / Gemini / Anthropic backends.
At a glance
- Type
- Visual whiteboard + cards + AI chat with citations
- Tier
- T2
- Created
- 2021 (YC W22)
- Latest release
- not applicable — not OSS
- License
- not applicable — not OSS
- GitHub
- not applicable — no GitHub repo
- Pricing
- Pro $8.99/mo (annual); Premium $17.99/mo (annual) — from product claims row
- Funding
- $1.7M seed (HOF Capital, YC, Kleiner Perkins, Moving Capital, Taiwan Tonic Fund)
Taxonomy
- storage
- graph
- retrieval
- similarity
- persistence
- long-term
- update
- overwrite
- unit
- document
- governance
- user-controllable
- conflict
- overwrite
When to use
Optimised for: personal-knowledge-management UX + AI-augmented note-taking
Anti-fit: not for enterprise / programmatic use; not for compliance-regulated workloads
Pros & cons
Pros
Whiteboard-first PKM with strong visual mental-model construction; memory is spatial as well as textual.
Cons
Visual-first paradigm doesn't suit all workflows; smaller community than Obsidian / Notion.
Claims & capabilities
Pro $8.99/mo (annual); Premium $17.99/mo (annual) with unlimited PDF OCR + full AI.
Technical surface
- API surface
- not applicable — consumer PKM app
- Backend storage
- custom (local SQLite + sync)
- Deployment
- Managed-only
- Embedding model
- locked
- Multi-tenancy
- hard-isolation
- MCP
- searched not found
- A2A
- searched not found
- OpenTelemetry
- searched not found
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