What Heptabase is great at
Heptabase is a visual knowledge tool. You lay cards out on whiteboards, connect them spatially, and think with the canvas. For research synthesis and seeing how ideas relate, that spatial model is genuinely excellent, and Heptabase has added an MCP integration around its cards and whiteboards.
Why look for an alternative
The reasons to look elsewhere are usually not about quality. They are about shape. A whiteboard is for thinking visually; it is less suited to being a plain-text memory layer your assistant reads and writes across every conversation. If your day runs through ChatGPT and Claude and you want one durable, text-first knowledge base they share, a canvas is the wrong tool for that specific job.
A text-first knowledge base for AI
Hjarni is built for that job: Markdown notes in folders, wiki-links that form a graph your AI can traverse, and a built-in MCP server so Claude and ChatGPT read and write the same notes. It is not a whiteboard, and it does not try to be. Heptabase exports to Markdown, so if you move, you can import the ZIP and keep your content.
Heptabase is where you think on a canvas. Hjarni is the text memory your AI reads and writes.
When to stay on Heptabase
If spatial thinking is how you work and the whiteboard is the point, keep Heptabase. A common setup is to synthesize ideas on a Heptabase canvas and keep the durable, AI-readable notes in a text-first knowledge base, so each tool does what it is best at.