Tana is a cloud outliner built around supertags, fields, and structured nodes. It's powerful, polished, and beloved by people who think in graphs. Keepance is a local-first Markdown workspace with founder-specific templates. The same indie founder might love either one; they're different shapes for different brains. The honest split: Tana for "I want to build a knowledge graph and query it." Keepance for "I want my strategic content as files I own."
| Feature | Tana | Keepance |
|---|---|---|
| Where data lives | Tana's cloud | Your hard drive (Markdown) |
| Pricing | $10/mo Plus, $14/mo Pro (annual) | $49 once + your AI provider's API |
| 3-year cost (typical) | ~$360-504 | ~$229 |
| Data model | Outliner with supertags, fields, queries | Files with frontmatter, wiki-links |
| AI | Built-in AI commands | BYOK Claude / OpenAI / Gemini / Ollama |
| Founder workflow templates | No (templates exist but generic) | 15 built in + community marketplace |
| Image attachments in AI | Yes | Paste, drag, paperclip per provider |
| PDF chat with native vision | Limited | Drop in, Claude reads it natively |
| PDFs in workspace search | No | Toggle in Memory settings |
| Long-context [Compress] | No | Yes |
| Read aloud (TTS), local | No | Local Piper sidecar |
| Plugin / extension model | No | Sandboxed Web Worker plugins |
| UI languages | English | English, Espanol, Deutsch |
| Try before you install | tana.inc waitlist | Free web demo |
| Wiki-links / backlinks | Yes (deep) | Yes |
| Query language | Powerful structured queries | Full-text search only |
| Mobile | iOS, Android | Read via cloud-sync workaround |
| Multi-device sync | Built-in cloud | BYO via Dropbox / iCloud / Syncthing |
| Offline editing | Limited | Full editing offline |
| Real-time collab | Yes (Pro tier) | No |
| Data export | JSON / Markdown | Already in Markdown |
Tana's data lives in their cloud. Export is available but the working format is theirs. Keepance's data lives on your machine in Markdown. The compounding-archive value over multiple years tilts toward Keepance for founders building a long strategic record.
Tana has templates (it's actually one of its strengths) but they're general-purpose, user-built. Keepance ships 15 templates designed for founder workflows, each running as a guided AI interview that produces a finished doc. Pitch deck, customer interview synthesis, financial projections, weekly review.
Tana's AI is bundled into the subscription. Keepance is BYOK: you bring your own Claude / OpenAI / Gemini key, switch per conversation. Most users pay less in BYOK API tokens than in a Tana Pro subscription.
Tana's outliner-plus-supertags model rewards a specific working style. If you're a pitch-deck-writer more than a knowledge-graph-builder, the data model is overhead. Keepance's flat-Markdown model fits document-shaped work more naturally.
Tana's signature feature is the ability to define a "supertag" (e.g., #person, #project, #meeting) and then query across all instances ("show me all #project where #status = 'active' and #owner = me"). This is a real superpower for users who think in structured data. Keepance has no equivalent; full-text search only.
Tana's UX for outlining, breadcrumbs, indents, transclusion is the most polished in the category. If you're already a Roam/Logseq/Workflowy user, Tana feels like the natural next step.
Tana has native iOS and Android apps. Keepance is desktop-only.
Tana Pro supports multi-user editing. Keepance is single-user.
| Tana Plus | Tana Pro | Keepance + BYOK | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Year 1 | $120 | $168 | $49 + $60-180 BYOK |
| Year 2 | $120 | $168 | $60-180 BYOK |
| Year 3 | $120 | $168 | $60-180 BYOK |
| 3-year total | $360 | $504 | $229-589 |
The biggest adjustment: you lose the structured-query feature. If your Tana workflow depends heavily on supertag queries, Keepance will feel less expressive. If your Tana workflow is mostly outlining + AI assistance, the migration is straightforward and you'll barely notice.
Free download. Pro is $49 one-time. Lifetime is $99. The first 100 buyers get Lifetime at $29.
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