Synap vs Heptabase

Visual thinking meets structured knowledge.

Heptabase is a beautiful tool for spatial thinkers. But cards on a canvas are only one way to see your knowledge. Synap gives you the whiteboard and the table and the board and the graph — all over the same structured records.

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Synap and Heptabase, side by side

Synap compared with Heptabase
Topic	Heptabase	Synap
Data model	Cards are untyped — no entity model	Typed records with properties
Views	The canvas	Whiteboard, table, board, calendar, graph and more
Organizing	You place and connect cards	Metadata and links proposed for you
Hosting	No self-hosting option	Self-hostable, or a managed pod you own
Developers	No open protocol or public API	Open Hub Protocol and a full API

Structuring on capture is part of Pod + AI (€100/month). On the Pod plan (€20/month), the agent you connect does the structuring through Synap's tools. Either way, changes arrive as proposals you review.

Where Heptabase is strong

Excellent visual canvas
Great for spatial thinking

Where they differ

Cards vs. records

Heptabase's cards are flexible, but they're all the same kind of thing. A research-paper card looks identical to a task card or a person card. There are no typed properties and no schema, so software can't tell what a card represents.

In Synap, records have profiles: a paper has authors, a publication date, and citations. A task has a status, priority, and assignee. A contact has an email and a company. That structure is what lets an agent help: it can reason about your data because it knows what things are and how they relate.

One canvas vs. every view

Heptabase's strength is its canvas. But what if you want your tasks on a board? Your events on a calendar? Your knowledge as a network graph? Heptabase gives you one paradigm.

Synap gives you interchangeable views over the same records: table, board, calendar, gallery, whiteboard, and more. Switch views instantly without reorganizing anything.

Organizing done for you

In Heptabase, the organizing is still on you: you drag cards, create whiteboards, and arrange layouts by hand. In Synap, your agent understands the graph. Drop in a research paper and it extracts the metadata, links related topics, identifies key authors, and suggests connections to what you already know — all as reviewable proposals.

Open and sovereign

Heptabase is a closed SaaS product with no self-hosting and a limited API. Synap is built on an open protocol with a full tRPC API, a developer SDK, and the option to self-host your Data Pod. Your knowledge infrastructure should be as portable as your knowledge.

Common questions

How is Synap different from Heptabase?

Heptabase is built around visual whiteboards and cards — great for spatial thinking, but the cards are untyped text. Synap has whiteboards too, but everything on them is a typed record with properties and relationships. Synap also organizes your captures for you, while Heptabase relies on manual card placement.

Does Synap have a whiteboard like Heptabase?

Yes. Synap includes a whiteboard view where records can be arranged spatially and connected visually. Unlike Heptabase's text cards, Synap's whiteboard cards are live records — edit a task on the whiteboard and it updates everywhere.

Is Heptabase or Synap better for research?

Both support visual research, but Synap adds connection detection and typed records. Capture a paper and Synap extracts the author, topic, and institution and links them to your other records. Heptabase relies on you to draw those connections by hand.

Think visually. Work structurally.

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