Heptabase vs Notabe

Heptabase is a visual knowledge base for students, researchers, and lifelong learners. Whiteboards and cards support visual thinking, while a block-based editor, bidirectional links, PDF annotation, daily journals, and a web clipper help organize material. Its AI can explain sources, take notes, and organize a knowledge base from PDFs, YouTube, notes, and journals. Heptabase supports web, Windows, macOS, Linux, iOS, Android, and a Chrome extension, and lists integrations with Readwise and Zotero. The free plan is available through collaboration, allowing edits to shared whiteboards and cards but excluding personal libraries, journals, tag databases, tasks, highlights, and AI features. The desktop app stores data locally, and notes and files are accessible offline. For AWS cloud storage, the company describes encryption in transit and at rest, but not end-to-end encryption. After a subscription or trial ends, users can access and export content indefinitely; creating or editing notes requires renewal. Paid plans start at $8.99/user/mo (annual), with a 7-day trial.

Notabe is an iOS, voice-first notes app for capturing spoken or typed thoughts and finding them by meaning. Apple’s on-device speech recognition transcribes voice notes on iPhone or iPad, and the audio is never uploaded. Notabe can automatically title and tag notes, with suggestions that users may edit or ignore. Notes can be spoken, typed, or shared from another app through the iOS share sheet. No sign-up is required; notes sync between Apple devices through iCloud and CloudKit. The Free plan is billed Free forever at free and includes voice and text capture, on-device transcription, automatic titles and tags, five AI summaries per month, and iCloud sync. Pro costs $9.99 a month and adds semantic search, unlimited summaries, a graph of connected notes, collection suggestions, similar notes, tag normalization, asking questions about notes, and daily resurfacing. Users can disable AI processing. Notabe says it has no ads or third-party trackers, does not sell data, and does not use notes or embeddings to train AI models.