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Two price tags on the same product, one small sticker price and one much larger metered total, showing that a seat price hides the real cost of AI credits

Tana Alternatives: 7 Options Ranked by What They Actually Bill You For

ComparaisonSep 22, 2026

Tana's Pro price is an early-bird rate against a $30 regular price, and AI is billed in credits on top of the seat. Seven alternatives compared on the axis that decides your bill, with every price taken from the vendor's own page.

Several different measuring instruments side by side, showing that seats, credits, daily budgets and metered spend are not the same unit of billing

The real reason people leave Tana

The price on Tana's pricing page is not the price you are agreeing to keep. Pro is listed at $20 per user per month as an early bird rate against a regular price of $30, and Max is $80 early bird against $120 regular. That is a 50 percent increase already printed on the page you are buying from.

The second thing that decides your bill is easier to miss: Tana charges on two axes at once. The seat is one. AI is the other. The free plan is capped at 50 AI queries, 5 hosted meetings a month and 1 connected calendar. Pro is described as 20 times more AI than free, Max as 5 times more AI than Pro, and the page invites you to top up AI credits with custom amounts whenever you need them. So the question is not "what does a seat cost", it is "how many credits does my week burn, and what does the top-up cost when it runs dry". A team of five on Max at the regular rate is $600 a month in seats before a single credit top-up.

Two more things push people out, and neither shows up in the usual comparison tables. Capture is desktop-bound: system audio capture runs on the Mac and Windows apps and is not available on Linux, and an external meeting capture and an in-app Tana call cannot run at the same time on the same device. And your graph lives in Tana's cloud. Tana stores data in Google Cloud with encryption at rest and in transit, and commits to a perpetual ability to export, but there is no self-hosted or on-premise option.

If none of that bothers you, stay. Tana's supertag model is genuinely good and very few products copy it well. If one of them does bother you, the right replacement depends on which one.

How I picked these

Three rules, applied before anything got written.

  • Every price, licence and limit in this article comes from the vendor's own site or their own public repository. No review-site roundups, no aggregator pricing pages, no screenshots of numbers from 2023.
  • Each tool has to replace a different part of Tana: the structured object model, the meeting capture, the shared team workspace, or the ownership of the files themselves. Six near-identical outliners would be a useless list.
  • Every entry gets a catch. One real limitation, in plain words, including the one we make ourselves.

Prices were checked in August 2026 and are per user per month in US dollars unless stated otherwise. Where a vendor quotes the annual rate by default, both rates are given.

The short version

  • Capacities if you liked supertags and want objects rather than pages.
  • Notion if the team already has seats and you just want the AI meeting notes to land somewhere shared.
  • Granola if the only part of Tana you actually used was the meeting write-up.
  • Obsidian if you want the notes to be files on your disk, and you want to stop paying per seat.
  • Anytype if local storage and a self-hostable network matter more than AI features.
  • Logseq if you want an outliner with a licence you can actually read.
  • Notis (ours) if what you wanted from Tana was an assistant that acts, in the apps you already message from.

1. Capacities, the closest thing to supertags

Capacities is built on typed objects instead of pages, which is the same instinct behind Tana's supertags: a meeting is a meeting, a person is a person, and the links between them are structural rather than decorative. If the supertag model is why you chose Tana, this is the shortest move.

Pricing is per user, not per credit. Pro is $9.99 a month billed monthly, with roughly 16 percent off if you pay yearly, and a Believer tier starts at $12.49 a month. The free plan is usable but capped on media: 5 GB total, then 100 MB per month afterwards.

The AI meter works differently from Tana's, and the docs are unusually blunt about it: "You get a daily budget for the AI assistant. It is a budget for your Capacities account, not an individual space." The budget is dynamically adjusted rather than published as a fixed number, and if you hit it you can plug in your own API key and carry on at your own cost.

The catch: the AI assistant requires Pro, and the daily budget is not a published figure, so heavy days can hit a wall you cannot forecast in advance. There is also no meeting bot and no system-audio capture.

2. Notion, the one your team already pays for

Notion is the boring answer and often the correct one, because the seats already exist. Plus is $10 per member per month and Business is $20, with the page offering up to 20 percent off when billed yearly.

What matters for Tana refugees is where the AI sits. Free and Plus get a trial of Notion AI only. The Notion Agent, AI Meeting Notes, Enterprise Search and Research Mode are Business-tier features, which means the whole workspace has to be on $20 seats before anyone gets the meeting capture. And custom agents are metered in credits on top of the seat: $10 per 1,000 monthly credits once the trial allowance is gone. Enterprise adds zero data retention with the LLM providers.

The catch: you pay for AI twice, once in the seat upgrade for everyone and again in agent credits, and Notion's database model is looser than supertags, so the structure you carefully built in Tana will arrive flatter than you left it.

A microphone on a desk beside a closed empty filing cabinet, arguing that meeting capture alone is not a knowledge system

3. Granola, if it was really only the meeting notes

A lot of people describe Tana as "the thing that writes up my calls". If that is the honest version of your usage, a knowledge graph is a very expensive way to buy a transcript.

Granola records system audio on your own machine rather than sending a bot into the call, and it runs on macOS, Windows, iOS, Android and Apple Watch. Meeting notes are free and unlimited, with one hard edge: you can work with notes from the past 30 days for nothing, and older notes require an upgrade. Business is $14 per user per month and includes unlimited history, integrations with Notion, Slack and HubSpot, plus API and MCP access. Enterprise is $35 per user per month with SSO and admin controls.

The catch: it is a notepad, not a workspace. There is no object model, no tasks system worth the name and no place for the 90 percent of your knowledge that did not happen in a meeting. If you leave the free plan on and forget, your history quietly ages out of reach at 30 days.

4. Obsidian, files you own, and the licence changed

Most Tana-alternative lists still say you need a $50 commercial licence to use Obsidian at work. That is out of date, and it is the single most useful thing on this page if you are deciding for a team. Obsidian's own licence page now states plainly that it is "free for all purposes, including personal, commercial, and non-profit use", and describes the Commercial License as optional support rather than a compliance requirement.

So the base cost of moving a five-person team off Tana seats and into Obsidian is zero. The paid parts are add-ons you choose: Sync at $4 per user per month billed annually or $5 billed monthly, and Publish at $8 per site per month billed annually or $10 monthly. Notes are Markdown files in a folder on your disk, which is the whole argument.

The catch: nothing in that folder writes your meeting summary for you. AI, capture and automation are all community plugins with their own keys, their own quality and their own maintenance risk, and the first month feels like assembling furniture.

5. Anytype, local-first and encrypted, but read the licence

Anytype is the choice when the objection to Tana is "my graph is in someone else's cloud". The team's position is explicit: Anytype as a tool will always be free when used with your own resources, meaning local storage and a local or self-hosted network. What you pay for is the hosted network, not the software.

The free Explorer membership includes 1 GB of network storage and up to three editors per shared space. Builder is $99 a year with 128 GB, and Co-Creator is $299 for three years with 256 GB. Contributors and students get 50 percent off, and self-hosters manage their own viewer and editor limits.

The catch: only the underlying protocols, any-sync and any-block, are MIT. The applications themselves ship under the Any Source Available License, which grants personal, academic, scientific and research use but requires consent from the Any Association for commercial use, so "open source" is not quite the right word for what you install. It is also the least AI-native product here: you are trading meeting agents for sovereignty, not getting both.

6. Logseq, the AGPL outliner

Logseq is the outliner for people who want to read the licence before they migrate. It is released under AGPL-3.0, describes itself as a privacy-first, open-source knowledge base and a local-first outliner notebook, and the team's own commitment is that it will always remain free for personal use. There is no seat, no credit and no AI budget to model.

The catch: sync is the weak point and it has been for years. As of the May 2026 update, sync testing is open to Open Collective sponsors only rather than generally available, and Markdown Mirror, the feature that writes a plain markdown projection of your blocks to a folder on disk, is one way: the two-way version is on a feature branch and not yet shipped. There is no meeting capture and no agent story at all.

7. Notis, ours, and it is not a workspace

Disclosure: Notis is our product. It is last because it is the least like Tana on this list, and because ranking your own tool first is how a comparison article stops being worth reading.

Notis is a personal assistant you message from WhatsApp, iMessage, Telegram, Slack or email, and reach from your own coding agent over MCP. It is not a place you go to organise a graph. It is something you tell to do things: file the note, book the thing, run the automation, search the connected tools.

The billing axis is different from every other tool here, and that is the honest reason to consider it. Plans are $20, $59 and $149 a month, and the meter is dollars of actual model usage rather than seats, credits or task counts: the included allowance matches the plan price, and Notis publishes the averages it bills against, roughly 9 cents for an everyday task. There is a permanently free plan, but it is the CLI only, inside Claude Code, Codex or Cursor.

The catch: plenty. Notis has no mobile app of its own, by design, since it lives in the apps already on your phone. It is managed cloud only, with no open source and no self-hosting, so it fails the test Anytype and Logseq pass. It does not build a structured knowledge graph the way Tana does, and it does not sit in your meetings as a participant. If you leave Tana because you want a better workspace, Notis is the wrong shape. If you leave because you want the assistant without the workspace, it is the right one.

A fork in a garden path with four distinct routes, standing for choosing an alternative by what you actually did in the tool

Which one should you choose

Answer one question honestly: what were you doing in Tana at 4pm on a Tuesday?

  • Structuring objects and querying them: Capacities.
  • Writing up calls and sending the actions to other people: Granola, or Notion if the team is already on Business seats.
  • Keeping a permanent personal archive: Obsidian for files, Anytype if it also has to be local-first and self-hostable, Logseq if the licence is the point.
  • Asking something to go and do the work: Notis.

Budget check for a five-person team, at list prices and before any AI top-ups: Tana Max at the regular rate is $600 a month, Notion Business is $100, Granola Business is $70, Capacities Pro is about $50, Obsidian with Sync is $20, and Obsidian without Sync is nothing.

My verdict

For most people leaving Tana, Capacities is the smallest jump and Obsidian is the cheapest destination now that the licence question is settled. If the meeting write-up was the whole job, Granola does it for a third of Tana's regular Max price and stops pretending to be a second brain.

The thing worth carrying out of this comparison is the pricing vocabulary. Seats, credits, daily budgets, retention windows and metered model spend are five different bills wearing the same $20 sticker. Tana charges seats and credits. Notion charges seats and credits. Capacities charges seats against an unpublished daily budget. Granola charges seats and gates your history at 30 days. Obsidian and Logseq charge nothing and hand you the maintenance instead. Notis charges the model spend. Pick the axis you can predict, then pick the product.

Sources and research notes

Everything above was verified in August 2026 against first-party pages only. Aggregator and review-site pricing was excluded on purpose, because it is the single biggest source of stale numbers in this category.

is the founder of Mind the Flo, an Agentic Studio specialized into messaging and voice agents.

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