Heptabase
Summary
Most note-taking tools collapse under the weight of real research — highlights scatter, PDFs live in one app, notes in another, and the connections you needed to think with never form. Heptabase is a visual knowledge base built to keep those pieces together.
The core workflow is whiteboard-plus-card: you drag notes, PDFs, YouTube transcripts, and highlights onto an infinite canvas and draw the connections your thinking actually requires. Bi-directional links, a block-based editor, Readwise and Zotero integrations, and a web clipper mean most of your existing capture habits plug in without a migration project. The AI Tutor feature, described by the vendor as generating structured, personalized learning sessions with lesson plans and tracked progress, extends this into active study rather than passive filing. The ceiling appears when your workflow needs programmatic access — no API is available, and there is no self-hosted option, so teams with data-residency requirements or custom pipeline needs hit a wall immediately. Power users working around the AI credit limits on lower tiers report switching to Notion AI or Obsidian with plugins for anything that requires bulk AI operations.
Bottom line: Pick Heptabase if you are a researcher or student who thinks spatially and wants AI-assisted learning built into the same canvas where your sources live — but plan a different stack if your team needs an API, self-hosting, or AI at volume without credit caps.
Pricing Plans
SubscriptionLast verified 2 weeks ago- Price
- $8.99/month
Pro
For anyone building a lifelong knowledge base.
- Unlimited notes, whiteboards, and tags
- Unlimited image uploads
- Unlimited collaborator invites
- PDF highlights, YouTube transcripts, etc.
- AI chat
- 100 AI credits/month
Premium
For learners and researchers who need extra AI credits at a lower cost.
- Everything in Pro
- Unlimited PDF uploads
- Unlimited PDF parsing (OCR)
- Unlimited usage of basic AI chats after hitting credit limit
- Premium AI models from OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic
- AI tutor
- 1,800 AI credits/month
Premium+
For power users who want AI credits at the best discounted price.
- Everything in Premium
- 33% discount for AI credits
- 8,100 AI credits/month
View full pricing on heptabase.com →
Pricing may have changed since last verified. Check the official site for current plans.
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Pros
Sign in to edit- Whiteboard-plus-card canvas keeps PDFs, highlights, web clips, and notes on the same surface, so you stop losing the connection between a source and the thought it triggered.
- AI Tutor generates structured syllabi and tracks lesson progress across sessions, which means you get a guided curriculum from your own imported material instead of starting each study session from scratch.
- Bi-directional links combined with Readwise and Zotero integrations mean your existing capture workflows feed directly into the knowledge base without rebuilding your habits.
- PDF annotation and web clipper are native rather than third-party add-ons, so highlights stay attached to the original source when you move it onto a whiteboard.
- CLI compatibility with Claude Code and Codex, as described by the vendor, lets technically inclined users script against their local knowledge base — covering the gap for users who want some automation without a full API.
Cons
Sign in to edit- No API is available. Any team that needs to pull notes into an external pipeline, sync with a custom CRM, or trigger Heptabase actions from another system cannot do it — they build a manual export workflow or move to Notion, which exposes a full REST API.
- No self-hosted option exists. Researchers handling sensitive data — clinical notes, proprietary findings, anything governed by institutional data policy — have no path to keep data off vendor infrastructure. That condition alone eliminates Heptabase for most enterprise and academic compliance contexts.
- AI credits are capped on lower tiers. Users running the AI Tutor through dense research sessions report hitting limits before the week is out, at which point the core differentiating feature stops working until the cycle resets or they upgrade — a paid-only resolution.
- The visual canvas model that makes spatial thinking possible also has a ceiling for very large knowledge bases: community reports describe navigation and search becoming unwieldy once card counts grow into the thousands, at which point users add a parallel tagging or folder system to compensate, effectively maintaining two organizational schemes.
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About
- Platforms
- Mac, Windows, Linux, iOS, Android
- API Available
- No
- Self-Hosted
- No
- Last Updated
- 2026-06-21T13:41:42.451Z
Best For
Who it's for
- Students and researchers
- Lifelong learners managing complex information
- Users needing visual whiteboards with AI support
What it does well
- Building lifelong personal knowledge bases
- Research note organization with AI assistance
- Student study material management and summarization
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Frequently Asked Questions
- Is Heptabase free?
- Heptabase has a permanent free tier alongside paid upgrades (paid plans from $8.99/month). You can keep using a baseline version indefinitely without paying.
- Is Heptabase open source?
- No — Heptabase is a closed-source tool. Source code is not publicly available.
- What platforms does Heptabase support?
- Heptabase is available on: Mac, Windows, Linux, iOS, Android.
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Curated lists that include this category
Most knowledge tools force a choice between a structured database and a freeform scratchpad. Heptabase sidesteps that split by organizing everything — PDFs, web clips, YouTube notes, journal entries, highlights — as cards that live on infinite whiteboards. You read, annotate, and connect inside the same surface where you think, which means the spatial layout of a whiteboard becomes part of the knowledge itself rather than a presentation layer bolted on afterward. The vendor describes this as building a connected knowledge base where sources, notes, highlights, and discussions coexist.
The AI Tutor is the clearest differentiator. Rather than a generic chat window over your notes, the vendor describes it as an agent that generates structured course syllabi, tracks lesson progress across sessions, and continues exactly where a prior session ended — the demo shows it picking up a Western Philosophy course at the correct topic without prompting. Citations are tied back to sources you imported, which addresses the specific failure mode where AI responses drift from the material you actually care about.
Heptabase fits individual researchers, graduate students, and lifelong learners who accumulate material across months or years and need to navigate it spatially. It does not fit teams that need to share a knowledge base programmatically — no API is available. Organizations with data-residency requirements have no self-hosted path. And users who want to run AI operations at scale without hitting credit ceilings will find the freemium credit model a recurring constraint rather than a one-time onboarding hurdle.
On the integration side, the vendor page lists Readwise, Zotero, a web clipper, PDF annotation, daily journals, and a CLI described as compatible with Claude Code and Codex for agent-based workflows — though that last capability is positioned as a separate agent download rather than a core feature of the main product.