Heptabase vs Obsidian: pricing, features and which to choose

Heptabase is made by Hepta Platforms, Inc. and is an actively developed visual knowledge-management service. Its focus is research and learning rather than general project management. The product combines reusable cards, PDFs, journals, databases, tags, research imports, AI chat, and agent workflows. Desktop storage has local-first and offline behavior, while optional cloud sync works across unlimited devices. Mobile supports capture and reading. Heptabase is proprietary software, not an open-source project, and its hosted design means cloud processing remains part of the service even when one device holds a local database. The company describes its early-bird offer as ending on August 31, 2023, with version 1.0 launching at that time.

A typical Heptabase workflow starts with PDFs, web or video content, notes, and highlights. Documents can be parsed or processed with OCR, after which selected passages become reusable cards. Users arrange cards on nested whiteboards, connect them with tags, and search the resulting knowledge base. Cards can appear on multiple boards, which suits projects that revisit the same source material. AI Tutor, chat, transcripts, Insight Generator, and voice-note features add assistance around collected material. Users can publish or share selected spaces. PDF extraction creates text for AI, including scanned text through OCR, but it does not automatically create highlight cards. Users must select passages when they want highlight cards.

Heptabase's main tradeoff is cost and service dependence. Premium and Premium+ meter AI work through monthly credits, there is no end-to-end encryption or supported self-hosted Heptabase server, and server-side indexes contain content chunks, metadata, and vectors. Obsidian offers local Markdown and optional Sync, while Heptabase provides a stronger built-in PDF, card, and whiteboard workflow. Scrintal is stronger for real-time collaboration, templates, and tablet ease, while Heptabase is more research-focused. Notion is better for team databases and project management. Logseq offers an open-source, outliner-oriented alternative with stronger local ownership. Pick Heptabase if spatial source synthesis matters more than local ownership or low subscription cost.

Obsidian is a desktop and mobile note-taking app made by Dynalist Inc., a small independent company founded by Shida Li and Erica Xu, and first released in 2020. It runs on Windows, macOS, Linux, iOS and Android. Notes live in a vault, which is a folder of plain Markdown files on your device, so they open in any text editor and outlast the app. Obsidian takes no venture capital and calls itself 100 percent user-supported. In February 2025 it made the commercial license optional, and the company says people at more than 10,000 organizations, including Amazon and Google, use it for work. Version 1.15 shipped in October 2026.

Writing happens in a Markdown editor with live preview. Typing double brackets links one note to another, and every note shows its backlinks, so ideas connect without a fixed folder hierarchy. The graph view draws those links as a network. Canvas gives an infinite board for arranging notes, images and web pages, and Bases, a core plugin added in 2025, turns notes with properties into sortable tables, cards or maps that work like a lightweight database. Daily notes, templates and tags cover journaling and task capture. The 1.15 mobile release added voice Quick Capture with live transcription on iOS 26, and PDF export on mobile.

Obsidian's flexibility is also its main drawback. A new vault is a blank editor, and building a useful system takes time and plugin choices. Real-time collaboration is limited compared with Notion, Microsoft Loop or Google Docs, and community plugins vary in quality and security. Notion suits teams that want shared databases and built-in AI. Logseq, which is open source, offers an outliner model with similar local files. Anytype offers local-first, encrypted notes with object-based structure. Pick Obsidian if you want notes that remain usable files in 20 years and are willing to add AI yourself; pick Notion for team wikis.