New Tool: Tana — nodes + data model on top

Sure, but neither does it list ClickUp or Monday or Asana or Coda or Airtable, etc… It’s targeting a different kind of user/tool market. With the exception of Confluence and Slack, the other options are all arguably note-taking specifically, and individually-focused tools *first and foremost. Notion can be used in teams and often is, but its greater user numbers are individual, and they are quite open about this being their target even now. Related discussion on this in the Lack of Work Management features in Fibery (Reminders, Dependencies, Notifications, My Work, etc.) thread recently (i.e. what is Fibery’s market positioning).

But speaking of Tana, the more I learn about it, the more fascinating I find it how much people want to build order from chaos in these incremental ways, and how this approach seems to be firing people’s imaginations. I say this because… there is very little I see Tana doing that cannot already (and for a long time) be done by Fibery. The biggest missing piece (aside from the more ad-hoc structure capabilities) is in-line Views (tables, etc.). The “live searches” in Tana are basically just Databases, at least in effect. And the things people seem to be getting most excited about are when they can impose structure on otherwise less ordered data, get contextual backlinks, etc, etc. Basically all stuff you can already do in Fibery. It’s partly a result of people not seeing Fibery as a “note taking” tool (which it totally can be!), and partly that Fibery doesn’t have the kind of Roam-like “ad-hoc structure from manipulation of formatting”, i.e. bullets and indenting = hierarchy. Fibery doesn’t do that (in fact it does not have good hierarchy support at all). So there are some notable differences, and Tana does have advantages (the way templates and inheritance work is pretty slick), and yet… again the things people are getting most excited about seem to be database-like. :smile:

I find it particularly interesting because I am currently building what I think will end up being a pretty sophisticated PKM system in Fibery, and one which mirrors a lot of what people are doing in Tana. Except I find it way easier and less abstract to setup a DB in Fibery and I get a lot of other benefits, like more rich text/page formatting, charts, data integrations, etc.

Tana does seem to be the right approach for the Roam/outliner-loving crowd, bringing much-needed structured data features to that whole concept. And I think it will be extremely powerful, etc. But for my needs I think Fibery will be a better fit, at least for a while. If nothing else, I hate being limited to just outlines. (not certain that will remain a limitation in Tana but it appears to be so now)

2 Likes