SumizAI vs Heptabase

What Heptabase is

What Heptabase is

Heptabase is a visual note-taking tool combining interactive whiteboards, mind maps, and classic notes in one workspace. The basic unit is a card — a small note with full Markdown formatting — and the basic canvas is a whiteboard, an infinite 2D space where you spatially arrange cards to think through a problem or plan a project.

Key features

Unlike typical whiteboard tools like Miro, Heptabase's cards are real notes with full Markdown editing, backlinks, tags, and search — not just visual sticky notes. The same card can appear on multiple whiteboards at once, and smooth zooming lets you see your entire knowledge base from a bird's-eye view or in the finest detail.

Who it's for

Heptabase appeals to researchers, students, and people running complex projects who want to think spatially, laying out related concepts on a shared whiteboard instead of keeping them in a flat list of documents.

Use cases

In practice, Heptabase works well for organizing extensive research material from many sources on one whiteboard, planning a complex project with stages laid out on cards, and studying, where visual connections between concepts help retention better than linear notes.

Pricing and business model

The Starter plan is free and includes basic whiteboards, mind maps, and note creation. The Pro plan costs $6.99 to $11.99 a month depending on source and billing option, adding more storage, premium whiteboard templates, offline sync, and a monthly pool of AI credits. The Team plan costs $25 per user per month.

Limitations and what to watch for

The visual, spatial organizing model requires a different mindset than a traditional linear notebook, so the learning curve can be steep at first. Advanced features, like more storage and AI credits, are reserved for the paid plan.

AI notes as cards on the whiteboard

Heptabase doesn't integrate directly with an external chat model beyond its own AI credits, but pasting an assistant's answer as an ai notes entry and placing it as a card on the whiteboard lets you immediately backlink it to related material. Such an ai notes entry becomes part of the visual network, not an isolated file.

Cards as a bridge between a note and a diagram

The decision to make cards simultaneously real Markdown notes and elements of a visual diagram sets Heptabase apart from classic whiteboard tools — the user doesn't have to choose between deep content and spatial layout, they get both at once.

What's worth checking before choosing

Before choosing Heptabase, check whether the Pro plan's monthly AI credit pool is enough for your typical use, and whether the spatial whiteboard model actually fits how you work.

Bottom line

Heptabase is a powerful visual tool combining notes and diagrams in one space, at the cost of a steep learning curve and free-plan limits. Anyone who wants ai notes from AI conversations to land automatically in an organized archive without manually arranging cards will find a better-fitting tool elsewhere.

Comparison with SumizAI

Heptabase and SumizAI differ in organizing model. Heptabase builds a visual network of cards laid out on whiteboards, written by hand by the user. SumizAI generates these notes directly from a conversation with an AI model — question, answer, Markdown file in the vault with a title and place in the table of contents assigned automatically, on your own API key to one of seven providers. Anyone who wants spatial, visual thinking over their own notes will pick Heptabase; anyone who wants these notes from AI conversations to be created automatically will find SumizAI the better-fitting tool.

What SumizAI is

A note-taking application built around a conversation with an AI model. You ask a question, the answer streams back, and the answers worth keeping become Markdown notes — filed into a vault that is a folder on your own disk.

A vault is a directory holding base.md, a generated table of contents up to six levels deep, and a notes/ folder with one .md file per note. Before a note is written it is checked against the ones already there, so the fourth note about the same idea gets merged instead of added. Links between notes are ordinary Markdown links to files that exist.

The model is never ours: you bring your own API key to one of seven providers — Anthropic, OpenAI, Gemini, Groq, OpenRouter, a local Ollama or your own server — and pay that provider directly. A question sends the table of contents plus at most five relevant notes within a 24,000-character budget, and the app shows you which five it used.

Every answer kept this way becomes one of these ai notes, ready to search again months later without hunting back through old chats.

Side by side

Where they differ

• AlternativeTo's description of Heptabase does not mention an AI model. That is the whole starting point in SumizAI: you have a conversation with a model on your own API key, and the answers worth keeping become notes without you filing them.
• Heptabase is paid software. Compare the two numbers directly: SumizAI is one dollar a month, one plan, and your AI provider bills you separately for the model you chose.
• AlternativeTo's description of Heptabase does not mention Markdown, so check what format your notes end up in before you fill it up. SumizAI writes standard .md files to a folder you picked, and an unpaid account can still export all of them.

Which one to pick