Fabric vs. Heptabase

Last updated April 2026

Heptabase helps you organise ideas on whiteboards. Fabric helps you understand everything you've saved. Both products care about the same problem: making sense of complex information. Heptabase approaches it through cards and spatial layout. Fabric approaches it through AI that reads, indexes, and connects your content automatically. One asks you to arrange your thinking visually. The other does the connecting for you and lets you think on top of it.

Comparison table

What is Heptabase?

Heptabase is a visual knowledge management tool built for learning and research. You create cards (notes) and arrange them on whiteboards to see connections between ideas. Bidirectional links connect cards across whiteboards. You can annotate PDFs, highlight text, and pull highlights onto cards. The AI Tutor explains sources you bring in and can research topics with citations. Daily journals capture ongoing thoughts. The product is offline-first and fast. Pro is $8.99/month annual. Premium at $17.99/month unlocks unlimited AI credits and advanced PDF features. There's no free plan. Heptabase has a dedicated following among researchers, students, and academics who think visually. It was built by a single developer and has grown to around 216,000 monthly users.

What is Fabric?

Fabric is an AI workspace that combines file storage, note-taking, search, tasks, collaboration, and publishing. The Fabric Memory Engine automatically extracts, enriches, and maps relationships between everything you save. Fabric also has a spatial canvas for visual thinking. Where Heptabase asks you to build understanding through manual arrangement, Fabric builds understanding automatically and lets you work with the result.

Key differences

Manual connections vs automatic understanding

Heptabase's model is: you read something, you create a card, you place it on a whiteboard, you link it to other cards. Over time, the whiteboard reveals structure. The understanding comes from the act of arranging. This works well for people who learn by spatially organising ideas. But every connection exists because you made it. If you forget to link something, the system doesn't know it's related.

Fabric's model is: you save something, the Memory Engine extracts it, indexes it, and maps relationships to everything else you've saved. Understanding is automatic. You can still arrange things spatially on the canvas, but the AI has already done the connecting work. You can ask questions across your entire library and get answers that draw from content you never explicitly linked. Heptabase rewards manual effort. Fabric compounds automatically.

AI

Both products have AI. The scope is different.

Heptabase's AI Tutor explains sources, researches topics with citations, and helps you understand material you bring in. It works on individual cards and sources. On Pro, AI credits are limited. Premium ($17.99/month) unlocks unlimited usage. The AI is a study assistant.

Fabric's AI works across your entire library. It answers questions that span everything you've saved, summarises documents, transcribes audio and video, maps relationships between content, and takes actions inside the app. It's not limited to explaining individual sources. It connects them. The AI is included at every tier without credit limits.

Content types and handling

Heptabase handles cards (notes), PDFs, YouTube videos, audio, and images. PDF annotation is a strong point: highlight text, pull highlights onto cards, build understanding from source material. But the range of supported content is narrower than Fabric's.

Fabric handles PDFs, images, video, audio, documents, slides, spreadsheets, ePubs, links, emails, and more. Everything is automatically extracted, enriched, and searchable. If your research involves slide decks, design files, meeting recordings, or saved web articles alongside PDFs and notes, Fabric covers the full range.

Search

Heptabase has fast full-text search across cards. Reportedly handles 10,000+ notes in under a second. For finding text you've written, it's quick.

Fabric searches by meaning. Semantic search finds content even when you describe it differently from how it was written. Visual search finds similar images. Colour search finds assets by palette. In-document search goes to the page, slide, or timestamp. Cross-platform search pulls from Google Drive, Notion, and Dropbox alongside your Fabric library. Heptabase finds your words. Fabric finds your meaning.

The canvas

Both products have spatial canvases. Heptabase's whiteboards are central to the experience. You arrange cards, draw connections, build mind maps, switch between table and kanban views. The whiteboard is the thinking tool.

Fabric's canvas is one feature inside a larger workspace. You can place any content from your library onto it and collaborate in real time. The canvas connects to Fabric's AI, search, file storage, and publishing. Heptabase's canvas is where you build understanding manually. Fabric's canvas is where you explore understanding the AI has already built.

Collaboration

Heptabase offers real-time whiteboard collaboration, free for invited collaborators. No annotations on media, no chat, no shared drives.

Fabric supports real-time co-editing on documents and canvases, pinned annotations on any content type, threaded comments, in-context chat, and shared drives. For research groups and teams, Fabric has broader collaboration tools.

Publishing

Heptabase has no publishing features.

Fabric lets you publish or share anything with one click. Built-in analytics, password protection, stakeholder-specific links.

Offline access

Heptabase is offline-first. Everything works without an internet connection. For researchers working in libraries, on planes, or in areas with unreliable connectivity, this matters.

Fabric's desktop app supports local folder sync, but AI and search features require connectivity. If full offline access is essential, Heptabase's architecture handles that.

Integrations

Heptabase integrates with Readwise. No API. No other integrations. If your content lives across multiple services, you bring it into Heptabase manually.

Fabric connects to Google Drive, Notion, Dropbox, Gmail, GitHub, and more via API, MCP, CLI, Zapier, and direct integrations. Cross-platform search means Fabric can find content across all connected services from one place.

When to use each

Use Fabric if you want your content understood and connected automatically. You work with diverse file types beyond notes and PDFs. You want AI that spans your entire library, not just individual sources. You need collaboration beyond shared whiteboards, publishing with analytics, or cross-platform search. You want understanding that compounds without manual arrangement.

Use Heptabase if you learn best by spatially arranging ideas on whiteboards and building connections by hand. You're a student or researcher whose workflow centres on reading PDFs, creating cards from highlights, and mapping concepts visually. You need full offline access. You prefer the act of manual connection as part of your thinking process, not as overhead.

Why people move from Heptabase to Fabric

Connections didn't build themselves. Every link in Heptabase is one you created manually. People with large, growing libraries found that the manual effort didn't scale. Fabric maps relationships automatically.

They had more than PDFs and notes. Meeting recordings, design files, slide decks, saved web articles, video references. Heptabase's content range is narrower. Fabric handles everything.

They wanted AI across their library. Heptabase's AI Tutor explains individual sources. Fabric's AI connects them. Asking a question that spans everything you've saved is a different experience from asking about one card at a time.

They needed to share and publish. Heptabase has no publishing. Fabric's one-click publishing with analytics matters for anyone sharing research, proposals, or deliverables externally.

AI credits ran out. Heptabase's Pro plan limits AI usage. Upgrading to Premium for unlimited AI costs $17.99/month. Fabric includes AI at every tier.

FAQs

Does Fabric have whiteboards like Heptabase?

Fabric has a spatial canvas for visual thinking and moodboarding with real-time multiplayer. It's not a card-based whiteboard system with mind maps and bidirectional links the way Heptabase is. The approaches are different: Heptabase's whiteboard is the primary thinking tool. Fabric's canvas is one feature connected to AI, search, and a broader workspace.

Does Fabric support PDF annotation like Heptabase?

Fabric extracts and indexes PDF content automatically, making it searchable to the page and available to the AI. Fabric supports annotations on PDFs. Heptabase's highlight-to-card workflow for building notes from PDF sources is more specialised for that specific reading workflow.

Is Fabric free?

Fabric has a free tier with limited storage and AI. Heptabase has no free plan. A 7-day trial is available.

Does Heptabase have an API?

No.

Which is better for academic research?

Heptabase is purpose-built for the read-annotate-connect workflow that many researchers use. If your research is primarily PDF-based reading with manual concept mapping, Heptabase is focused on that. If your research involves diverse content types, collaboration, publishing, and you want AI that connects material automatically across your entire library, Fabric covers more ground.

Can Heptabase search inside video?

Heptabase can transcribe audio and video. Fabric's search goes further with semantic search inside video by transcript timestamp, plus visual and colour search across all content types.