Tana has entered beta and I’ve got some invites if anyone in the community is interested.
While not really Apple specific, we spend some time talking about PKM around here. Tana has become my go to tool. The daily journal, block referencing, outline structure, and supertags have won me over and swayed me ( a once adamant local only advocate) to using a web tool.
The app came up a few times here when it first opened up into alpha, but now that it’s entering a beta phase, they’ve given out invites to early adopters.
Tana is $14/mo (annual) or $18/mo (monthly for regularly subscribers, but the invites grant pioneer pricing for $10/mo (annual) or $12/mo (monthly). I have 5 2 invites and would love to share them here.
P.S. - The mobile app is in the works and the devs have confirmed it will be a native iOS app, not React Native. I’ve seen a demo, but no ETA yet. My personal hope is to see mobile this summer. They have also stated they’re working on export tools and offline capability.
Sorry if this sounds like a pitch. I don’t have any interested friends and this community is my favorite. I like it here far better than reddit.
Interesting application - it has been a long time since I last saw where it’s at. An interesting hybrid of Workflowy, Logseq, Notion and possibly Obsidian with some clever use of AI. It’s where Workflowy or Dynalist might have got to if they had greater investment.
I’ve emulated some of that functionality in Obsidian - I have dataviews on pages which collate links, and I always use outlines in my daily notes which are the centre of all data collection. The Tasks plugin manages my todos. I could certainly learn from Tana’s stylish design!
Interesting article here from someone going from Obsidian to Tana - and I feel their pain with the inability in Obsidian to work directly with blocks which adds quite a bit of friction. That’s by far its biggest weakness and why in some ways I preferred Logseq - but it came with its own weaknesses.
I’m with otheres here that Obsian (free rather than subscription and local not web based) provides most of that same functionality without jumping on the AI bandwagon.
I like Logseq a lot, but it does lack features and can be pretty rough around the edges still. I’m hopeful for their database version to really lay some great groundwork and then they can start polishing it up more.
I’d probably still be on Logseq if I hadn’t suffered repeated data loss, even using their own sync product, and various display issues. I too have high hopes for their database version, although I’m possibly too invested in Obsidian to migrate across at this point. It still seems a long way off, by which time I’m not sure PKM will be in the same place.
I found myself trying to replicate Tana in Obsidian after testing it the first time. I dropped Tana for a while and went back to Obsidian for about 6 months. I setup all the dataview pages, simplified my folder use and built out MOCs, simplified my tags, setup quick add and templates. Obsidian is great, and works well for me, but I still felt the draw to Tana.
Now Dynamic views have been on the Obsidian roadmap for a while now, and the Dataview creator has been working on the successor, datacore for a while as well. Depending on how those function, I could be swayed back in the future. Due to my job, I can’t put everything in Tana or use the integrations. I still have my Obsidian vault for work with my private notes that can’t leave my work PC. But for higher level admin type data and personal info (except PII), it goes in Tana.
Bri definitely nails the pull of Tana for me. The database functionality is a huge draw with the ability to interact with source material through references.
There’s a good video of someone recreating Things in Tana that’s pretty cool. I’ve replicated almost everything I need in tasks within Tana.
That’s awful, I’d be jumping ship after data loss too. I found their sync to work well on desktop, but my iOS clients kept dropping the link and needed repair. It wasn’t reliable enough to bank on.
I have more hope for dynamic views and datacore in Obsidian for database like functionality.
I’ve been using Tana for 18+ months. I like it a lot. I did not hesitate to subscribe immediately after Tana Core was announced a few weeks ago.
For anyone trying it out, I advise going slowly and thoughtfully. It’s easy to quickly create supertags, fields, searches, and commands then paint yourself into a corner.
I don’t advise trying to “recreate” another app with Tana. Create something new that achieves the goals you had for using Things or something else, but don’t waste time making Tana look and behave like Things. IMO, you can manage tasks far more effectively than Things, in Tana, so figure out the “Tana way” before mimicking the old way. Definitely don’t expect Tana to behave like Obsidian. Obsidian is local, document based, and heavily dependent on the third party community. Tana is a graph database, where every node potentially “knows” about every other node, web based (the local app is just an emulator), and not yet open broadly to third party plugins.
If you want to get started and don’t want to commit to a Core Tana subscription, a lot of the basic features are free – excluding calendar integration, AI, and other advanced features.
My favorite independent Tana expert, Lukas Kawerau, has a comprehensive video introducing Tana Core’s main features, as well as basic Tana concepts. Worth the time investment.
@KVZ You make a good point about coming in with a beginner’s mind and seeking to learn the Tana way. Replicating existing systems can be enticing to convince newcomers, but I learned the hard way that wasn’t the best system for me in Tana. It’s helpful as a jumping off point, to bridge the gap in models, but not where I expect anyone to stay. You’re absolutely right in suggesting an open mind to Tana.
I made a restaurant database of all the places I’ve been and wanted to go with various filter criteria. I’d created a hierarchy of cities and states, then put default search nodes on each using semantic functions to aggregate the restaurants of that node. While cool, I was just copying data into Tana to build a system for fun, and effectively doing a PoC of features.
While that doesn’t drive my day to day, it was that experiment that helped me learn, not trying to replicate something else.
Great recommendation on Lukas btw, he’s been my favorite resource as well. Maybe it’s his examples, delivery, or because we’re both in IT that he resonates so well with me.
I very much agree with the recommendations to imagine what Tana can do - do not replicate another app.
The best part of all about Tana is that it is the most sophisticated, customizable, deeply thought out app I can ever recall.
The worst part of all about Tana is that it is the most sophisticated, customizable, deeply thought out app I can ever recall.
To some extent Tana reminds me of a web-based Devonthink (not that Tana and Devonthink replace ane another) - it seems deceptively simple at first but in fact is extremely capable and customizable. You can start using it immediately, but it takes quite a bit of thinking to truly determine how to most powerfully use it for your own situation.
You know, we’d already figured out it was a subscription app, so your comment probably wasn’t as helpful as you intended. You may feel the same about this comment!
Tbf, I also kinda roll my eyes every time I see yet another app with an endless subscription claiming to be groundbreaking, transformative, etc., especially when they want $14/18 USD a month for it.
I try to think about it as betting on the future and funding areas of growth. I guarantee I won’t be using Tana in 10 years, but I hope what comes next builds with the best bits of Tana.
Maybe Obsidian 3.0 will absorb enough to tip the scales.
That’s an interesting way to look at it. Do they have an easy and effective way to export your data in a form that’s useable outside Tana and and can be imported by other apps?
I try to have compassion both for developers who have to make a living and users facing subscription burnout.
There are just so many apps in this space! Ed Nico, who put out the Logseq Weekly, then got really into Tana and is currently quite taken with Capacities. Now he puts out the PKM Weekly covering all of those plus Obsidian, RemNote, and Notion. Then there are all the PKM apps he doesn’t cover…
Also, Roam Research! They have delivered an impressive amount of stuff lately. Especially on the mobile side. The IOS app is updated, it’s fast, responsive and incredibly useful.
Not yet, and that’s definitely a concern of mine at the moment. They claim to be working on it, but until it’s in hand there is some worry.
I can totally understand being a bit burned out on PKM of the week excitement. We’ve seen a lot of changes in the last few years. Capacities is pretty cool and I tried it as well. I also saw Dario from CombiningMinds transition from Logseq to Tana. That one was kind of funny. He went from having dreadlocks and long hair, looking like a stereotypical FOSS advocate teaching Logseq to shaving his head and going clean cut, really tuning up his recording space, and making Tana content. I think he still uses both. His videos are really good on both apps.