Alternative to Obsidian

Happy Monday, makers. X, formally Twitter, is having a sale of Twitter memorabilia. Some expected stuff like giant hashtags and Twitter birds is for sale, and there are more unusual things like an indoor barn from Montana. 

One thing we tell makers in our community is that being hunted by your biggest fans can be a big win. Our friends at Notion embraced this attitude, and look where they are now.

Heptabase caught our eye for the same reason.

Early users love it: The visual note-taking tool already has over a thousand followers on Product Hunt, a five-star rating, and took Product of the Day, despite the fact that the company hadn’t originally planned on launching until September, notes co-founder Alan Chan.

“Heptabase is more than just a way to capture and organize your thoughts for retrieval later, it actually helps you develop your thinking and visualize connections between your ideas in a super intuitive way,” writes Matt Gelgota who hunted the product.

Designed to expand your thinking: “There are hundreds of note-taking apps on the market but really there are only three or four workflows to them. Heptabase is categorized based on the different stages of your thinking process,” Chan told Meet Global.

Heptabase focuses on visualization through nested whiteboards, mind maps, and sections. It promotes organization with tags, properties, and relational databases that support kanbans and tables. There’s a Readwise integration, and the makers have thought of ways to support your notes as well as to-dos, math, and code with a drag & drop interface.

“The level of detail and understanding of human-computer interaction that went into this product is insane,” commented community member Glenn Gregor. “One example of this is the sidebar of Heptabase, which contains tabs instead of a hierarchy of notes, as most other apps do.”

A crowded market? TechCrunch’s writers said they “see a big market” for Heptabase in their review of YC’s Winter 2022 Demos.

Of course, that market is crowded, and it would be easy to skip over Heptabase if you’ve already tried the likes of Notion and Obsidian. One thing those teams do well is listen to their users, and reviewers are praising the new Taiwan-based startup for being extremely responsive to their needs.

Since we subscribe to the idea that competition makes you better, we’re excited to see where this goes.

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