TANA is a note-taking and knowledge management access currently in beta development and testing. It is currently available via a waiting list and is currently free. According to the developers, it will likely cost $10 a month on release. TANA’s latest pricing information can be found here.
I have been using TANA on and off for a few weeks. In this article, I will describe my first impressions of the application and whether I will continue using it in the long term.
TANA is only available as a web application at the time of writing.
What is TANA?
TANA is a personal knowledge management system and note-taking application. It is an outliner. In an Outliner, each thought is contained within a block, and a bullet point represents each block. Thoughts can be indented within each other to show a hierarchy within your flow of thoughts or ideas.
The core note for each day is the note for that day. The idea of having a day note is that it allows you to capture ideas and tasks during the day. Which in itself is helpful. Of course, you could also use it to track when you did something. The daily note, in essence, becomes a daily journal.
What I found strange for an application where the date note is so core was that it didn’t open the note for today’s date on launch.
TANA also supports tags and bi-directional links, two key pieces of functionality that I look for in any Personal Knowledge management (PKM) application.
TANA Super tags
As I mentioned in the section above, TANA supports tags. According to the developers, these tags are super offering the ability to define attributes to the tags.
I have to say I couldn’t get my head around them, and for me, at least, it didn’t really add anything to the experience. After saying all of that, the tags work really well.
Conclusion
Firstly I need to start by reminding myself and you, dear reader, that TANA is still in Beta and, therefore, not finished and still being actively developed and that the application is currently free.
TANA is a good note and knowledge management application with potential, but I don’t think it is there yet. And for that reason, I have no plans to switch from Obsidian.
If you enjoyed this first look at TANA, you might be interested in reading our first look at Logseq.