Just wanted to share that Tana Inc’s launched yesterday!
It’s an AI-native workspace designed to streamline productivity by turning notes into actionable items like tasks, projects, and more. The app offers features such as Supertags for instant note transformation, custom feeds to stay on top of various agendas, and voice memos that convert speech into comprehensible summaries. 
I’ve started messing with it and am impressed with how it integrates AI to enhance workflow efficiency. The first time i have seen an app use AI in a really cleaver way!
Is anyone else here using Tana? Would love to hear your experiences and tips!
Data is local, but sync and other services (e.g. AI) require your data to be sent to Tana servers. The only way to keep data purely local is to restrict Tana to one device and keep that device offline.
If you’re into the “files-over-app” philosophy, then apps like Obsidian and Noteplan are your best bet. They let you keep full control over your files.
Tana, on the other hand, is more like Notion (as far as I know), everything is stored on their servers.
Security is never “done” – it’s an ongoing commitment
We follow industry standard practices, e.g. we use Dependabot to keep track of vulnerable dependencies, we have a content security policy (CSP) for the app, and we store data in Google Cloud, where data is encrypted both at rest and in transit. This also means Google does not have access to your data.
Yes, you can use the desktop app and airgap it from the internet to keep data locally, but the bulk of the product features, especially the complex AI features and sync with the mobile apps, is not available then.
this is so misleading. encryption at rest means google CAN access your data because the data needs to be decrypted on the same server in order for the server to perform any operations on the data.
end to end encryption would mean that only the client can access the data as the data would be encrypted client side, before it’s sent to that server.
There are a few Tana users on the forum. Tana is fun. I like outliners and designing attribute columns and databases. (This is where the reader smiles knowingly and thinks, “ah, he must not be doing any actual work.”)
I was also a Google Wave fan; if you use a workspace multiplayer, you can see the Google Wave influence (some of Tana’s cofounders were on the Wave team.)
Also, they’re a neat group to watch work. They show their personalities, they invest in their community, and they’re not afraid to take those Nordic breaks from work to swim in fjords or ride elk or whatever.
A few of my uses:
Freelance hours tracking and billing by client and rate, tracking what’s been billed and been paid. Each client has generated tables on their node that paste fine for the format I email out. It’s no Freshbooks, but I ditched clients that needed that kind of tracking and scrutiny years ago.
Work journal. If tagged, updates flow to the weekly/monthly/semi-annual review lists and 1:1 discussions. Otherwise, it’s just outlined notes. I also sync a work calendar to it.
Funny family quotes. I could keep these anywhere, but it’s fun to tag by kid and pull them up from time to time. For the most part, I don’t try to track my life in Tana, but that’s one that’s fit and stuck.
Things that aren’t so good:
Like many low code apps, complex query building isn’t easy. You need a head for data modeling to fully use Tana anyway, so I wish they’d just expose a text interface for raw graph queries.
The export format, a JSON representation of graph data, isn’t useful for most people. I wrote something to recursively parse and spit out markdown docs. It was fun, but that’s too much to ask of users.
The mobile app is worse than it should be. I’m sympathetic as to why, but most users won’t be. They need to make significant progress in feature parity and editing UI in 2025.
