Heptabase
Visual whiteboard canvas + nested cards + bidirectional links + journal. AI chat with cited sources inside whiteboards; supports OpenAI / Gemini / Anthropic backends.
Active · Verified 2026-10-22 · fresh as of 2026-10-22 · 38 cited facts, 6 with a third-party source · 1 recorded change · Suggest a correction
At a glance
- Tier
- T2
- Created
- 2021 (YC W22) third-party fix
- Latest release
- not applicable — not OSS fix
- License
- not applicable — not OSS fix
- GitHub
- not applicable — no GitHub repo fix
- Funding
- $1.7M seed (HOF Capital, YC, Kleiner Perkins, Moving Capital, Taiwan Tonic Fund) third-party fix
- Freshness
- 2026-10-22 fix
- Layer
- agent-infra repo fix
- Licensing
- commercial vendor fix
Memory 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
Alternatives to Heptabase → live options ranked by shared design, licence, hosting and MCP support
Similar systems
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Sources (37 cited facts, 6 third-party)
Each fact links to the page it came from; the badge says who published it (how to read sources).
- What it is Visual whiteboard + cards + AI chat with citations vendor
- What it does & what's distinct Visual whiteboard canvas + nested cards + bidirectional links + journal. AI chat with ci… vendor
- Claims / benefits Pro $8.99/mo (annual); Premium $17.99/mo (annual) with unlimited PDF OCR + full AI. vendor
- Modalities text vendor
- Created 2021 (YC W22) third-party
- Mindshare 6 HN stories; Hepta Platforms, Inc.; small team (~10) per public job listings third-party
- Funding $1.7M seed (HOF Capital, YC, Kleiner Perkins, Moving Capital, Taiwan Tonic Fund) third-party
- Pricing Pro $8.99/mo; Premium $17.99/mo; Premium+ $53.99/mo (yearly billing saves 25%) vendor
- Compliance no formal certifications listed; AWS-hosted; AES-256 at rest; SSL/TLS in transit vendor
- Data handling Never trains AI models on user content; third-party AI providers bound by data protectio… vendor
- Deployment Managed-only vendor
- HQ TW (Taiwan; US-incorporated via YC) third-party
- Founders / pedigree Yu-An (Alan) Chan (CEO; co-founder; NTU + Minerva University) third-party
- Memory volume / scale no scale claim vendor
- Backend storage custom (local SQLite + sync) vendor
- Multi-tenancy hard-isolation vendor
- Encryption at-rest + in-transit vendor
- Embedding model locked vendor
- Versioning snapshots vendor
- Tombstoning hard-delete supported vendor
- Schema evolution schema with migration vendor
- Namespace primitives hierarchical vendor
- Contradiction handling always overwrite (last-write-wins) vendor
- Forgetting policy user-controlled forget vendor
- Validated verticals consumer / individual (knowledge workers, students, researchers) vendor
- Time to running <10min (hosted SaaS sign-up or app download) vendor
- Anti-fit not for enterprise / programmatic use; not for compliance-regulated workloads vendor
- Optimised for personal-knowledge-management UX + AI-augmented note-taking vendor
- Adjacent infrastructure self-contained app; some require iCloud / Google Drive vendor
- Pros Whiteboard-first PKM with strong visual mental-model construction; memory is spatial as … vendor
- Cons Visual-first paradigm doesn't suit all workflows; smaller community than Obsidian / Noti… vendor
- Project & sources heptabase.com vendor
- adoption-accelerator yc-w22 third-party
- architecture-deployment-locus cloud vendor
- licensing-bucket commercial vendor
- positioning-platform-vs-product product vendor
- taxonomy-three-layer-rollup agent-infra repo
What changed
Changes to this record's lifecycle, licence, release, pricing and hosting facts, from the catalog's git history. Subscribe (Atom)