Skip Freeman  · eonrspoSdt8656904u6a1ht12a1979t5t2c5511lg699alg0l292600a521l  · Shared with Members of Evernote CommunityHEPTABASE - I started evaluating Evernote alternatives back in late Summer. I have fallen in love with Heptabase. No trial & not cheap. Here is who it is & is not for:FOR: Someone who needs to pull together complex topics from multiple sources & make sense of them all. Cards are created for information and can contain as much or as little info as appropriate. Each card consists of "blocks" so, information can be connected and/or extracted. Tags can be used too. Putting it all together on a WHITEBOARD is the ULTIMATE MAGIC where everything is visual and connected.Additionally, you can create tables & Kanban boards (it's a database).Students, academia, someone working on complex projects (but note, it is NOT PM software), someone doing research (I sure wish I had had this when I was working on my Master's thesis), are all going to love Heptabase.I will provide an example. I am a student of Chris Voss' negotiation techniques as presented in his book "Never Split the Difference." (Tactical Empathy is the overarching term he uses).As I read the book on Kindle, I made many highlights. My highlights go into Readwise, and I have Readwise connected to Heptabase, so all of my notes from Kindle are visible.Next, I also have many notes I have taken from listening to Voss on podcasts, YouTubes, plus papers, and blogs.Trying to organize and make sense of everything is daunting and complex.In parallel, I am a professional executive recruiter. I am working on figuring out how to use Voss' concepts of tactical empathy to improve hiring processes for companies. Trying to do it with traditional notes and folders is impossible.Laying everything out on a Heptabase whiteboard and being able to connect things, move things around, and more, I began to see the overarching methodology and how I could apply tactical empathy in recruiting, thus helping companies hire better. I am working on a book now and would have never gotten this far this fast with other applications.While I have certainly not tried them all, I have tried Mem.AI, Rome Research, MyMind, Notion, continued to use Evernote, OneNote, and I know there are a couple more in there that I can't remember the name of at the moment. WHO HEPTABASE IS NOT FOR: If one is looking for a to-do app, just general note-taking without the need for figuring out how all of the concepts fit together, or to just have an inexpensive depository for things which can be searched on (and I WOULD recommend MyMind for that), then Heptabase is not for you. They do not have a trial, and the subscription is $13 a month. Since it is a little more complicated, the psychology, at least for me, was that I had to make good use of my $13 and learn how to work the software. It's a little more complicated than most, but in the end, it is the best I've ever used.Help is available within 12 to 24 hours. I've developed a nice relationship with PJ in China They are bringing out an improvement almost weekly and the upgrades are quick and easy. You do not have to worry about losing data. Also, a history of all of your cards are kept so if somehow one gets messed up, you can go back to a previous version and retrieve everything.I've gotten carried away sharing my enthusiasm for Heptabase and made this into a much longer post than I intended, but I do hope my analysis helps someone.

Heptabase is not designed to do anything useful with 100, much less 5000, .pdfs thrown in all at once. And that's the first big difference with say Obsidian, it doesn't really try to pretend it is good at large volume collecting, it wants a curated set of Topic Notes as input. Of course it can collect, but that is not the speciality.What Heptabase does focus on is converting Topic Notes into quality Zettles, Contexts, MOCs and Permanent Notes. That is stages (3) and (4).

I’m in the early days yet in Obsidian but was really taken with the workflow that Heptabase affords for research and synthesis of new information. Nothing else I’ve seen is as clean in terms of the workflow to extract bits of information to manipulate and digest on a whiteboard. Very strongly inclined to include it to be my research and learning ground, while Obsidian serves as my polished topic notes repository. I’d been looking for a direct comparison of the two and hadn’t yet found anything out there.