Better than Notion? A fast-evolving visual note-taking app-Heptabase
Heptabase is the first and the only note-taking app I’m paying for, and let me tell you why:
- Basically, Heptabase is an app that allows you to put something like Pages in Notion (which are known as Note-Cards in Heptabase) onto Whiteboards.
- In addition to Note-Cards, it allows you to drop PDF files onto the whiteboard as a type of Card. Furthermore, the highlights on PDF can be dragged onto the whiteboard as well, making it a perfect tool for organizing and studying information stored in PDFs.
- It has a very good community on Discord that really listen to all the user’s feedback! Also, their in-app support is always straight to the point and solves my problem like an engineer instead of a customer service.
- They state that even if you terminate the subscription at some point, you can still access all of your notes in the app. The only difference is that you may not edit or create new content.
Disclosure: Links to Heptabase in this post are affiliate links.
Whiteboard
A whiteboard is the space where you may throw things onto it. It can be as organized as what has been shown on the Heptabase official website. But, to be honest, I’m a messy person, and most of the time, my whiteboard is kind of a mess at the early stage of acquiring information. For instance, in this whiteboard, I’m just throwing some information about DIY circuits like some catalogs of oscilloscopes that I’d like to compare and purchase. It is such a whiteboard, just like a desk, that I can put things onto and gradually organize them:
Cards
The cards are the blocks you saw on the above screenshot of the whiteboard. You may create various types of cards in Heptabase. Especially, the Note-type Cards work like Pages in Notion. If you have ever used Notion, you’ll know what I mean. Here is a quick demonstration of Note Cards:
You may also see a few cards like PDF documents. Those are another type of Cards: “PDF-Cards.” These PDF cards allow you to make highlights and drag those highlights onto the whiteboard, which also has a backlink so that you can jump to the highlighted place in the original PDF, as demonstrated in this video:
Tags
Tag is another extremely useful feature. After adding a Tag to a Card, you can add various properties associated with this tag and create a table view or a Kanban view. For example, I can have a tag called “IC-Datasheet” and have properties associated with this tag like “ModelNumber,” “URL,” and “Status,” …… After that, I can create a Kanban view showing “Status” in various values (Pending, Reviewing, Purchased, ……) as columns. The table view and Kanban view look like this:
Other Functions
There are other functions like Journal, Mindmap, Web Clipper Chrome Extension, and Readwise-Integration…. Also, recently, they introduced a feature that allows you to import a Podcast or YouTube as a type of Card, and you can generate transcripts with AI. There are also mobile versions available on iOS or Android.
Afterword
Currently, I feel every single function in Heptabase is like 80% polished. But the integration of all of them into a single app makes it such a unique tool and makes it just good enough to solve the problem I’m facing — Learning a complex subject and organizing all kinds of fragmented information. It’s not perfect, but it's good enough to convince me to keep paying its subscription fee since February 2023 till now.
I would suggest just downloading it for a free 7-day trial or even subscribing for a month, and you can tell if it is the right tool for you!
Finally, if you are interested in learning more about the long-term roadmap or the design rationale behind Heptabase, I highly recommend an article written by a co-founder of Heptabase — Alan Chan — My Vision: The Roadmap
