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 its official hosted MCP lets external assistants search, read, create, and edit cards and journal entries.
Why look for an alternative
The reasons to look elsewhere are usually not about quality. They are about shape. Heptabase combines a visual card workflow with external MCP access. Hjarni uses Markdown notes in nested folders with per-folder guidance. Either can supply maintained context to connected assistants; the decision is the organization and sharing model you prefer.
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 an official 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 notes as Markdown and includes backup data, but whiteboard layouts, relationships, and metadata may not map into another app. Test a sample before using Hjarni’s Markdown ZIP importer.
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. You can use a second tool for selected notes if useful, but Heptabase’s own hosted MCP already lets assistants search and edit its content. It also supports sharing cards and whiteboards, including a limited invited-collaborator free plan.