Tana is an interesting productivity tool that you may have overlooked, with useful features such as Supertags and AI meeting transcriptions. I spent some time with the company’s desktop and mobile apps, discovering some nifty functionality and exploring whether it would make a good Notion replacement.
However, despite the factors in favor of Tana, I’m still sticking with Notion due to a variety of reasons…
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4
Tana’s onboarding process soured my experience
You have to give up too much personal information
Tana’s sign-up process includes multiple drawbacks that impacted my overall impression of the platform. First off, you can’t sign up with a simple email address and a unique password. You have to sign up with a Google, Apple, GitHub, or Microsoft account. I’m not a big fan of using pre-existing accounts to sign up to new platforms, since this can expose your credentials in the case of a breach.
Tana also forces you to engage in a free trial of its premium Plus plan. Since I don’t plan on adding yet another subscription to my bills, I would’ve preferred using the free plan from the start.
I could have overlooked the forced trial period, but to initiate the compulsory trial, you must provide credit card details and approve a transaction for $0 through your bank. This means there’s no way to use Tana without providing financial information.
I linked my Google Calendar with Tana to try out its calendar feature. However, the app also requested access to my account’s contacts so that it could load profiles on the app. While the company promises it won’t share this information or use it for marketing purposes, I refused to grant access to my contacts. This somewhat reduces some of the app’s functionality, but I prefer that to sharing contact information without permission.
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3
Notion’s free plan feels more robust
Tana strips back its features after the free trial
Tana’s cheapest plan is $8 per month when you opt for a yearly subscription. The cheapest monthly subscription plan is $10 per month. This price isn’t far off from Notion’s premium options. If you add AI to your Notion plan, it costs $8 per month. The Plus plan (without AI) costs $10-$12 per month, while the Business plan costs $15-$18 per month.
Tana does have a free plan, but it looks bare when compared to Notion. With Tana’s free plan, you get up to 20,000 nodes, five installed templates, two workspaces, published pages, up to 0.5GB of file storage, and 5MB file size upload.
When you downgrade from a paid plan on Tana, you will no longer be able to use AI in Tana. However, you will also lose access to Google Calendar syncing, and your integrations will no longer pull in data. By using the free plan, you essentially lose access to many core functionalities.
I am currently on the Notion free plan, which allows me to sync with Gmail and Google Calendar. It also supports a number of integrations. And since I am the only user in my Notion workspace, I have unlimited blocks and pages. This means I can install numerous templates — I currently have seven installed. Templates are one of the ways that I make Notion less overwhelming, so they’re an important feature for me.
On the free plan, I still have access to Notion’s AI chat feature, but with limited usage. I can use this chat to ask questions and generate simple templates and pages to add to my Notion workspace. Overall, the Notion free plan feels significantly more robust compared to Tana.
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Tana has cool AI features, but ones I seldom use
The features wouldn’t justify the price for me
I’m not a big fan of generative AI due to the hallucinations and inaccuracies the technology often produces. As an experienced writer and editor, I also find that the results are nowhere close to what I could produce. So Tana’s focus on AI features isn’t a big selling point for me.
However, it does have some genuinely useful AI features, especially when it comes to voice transcription. You can use the mobile app to record voice notes that are then transcribed. You can also use the AI meeting agent to transcribe meetings.
But features like the AI chat don’t make me feel that I’d be willing to pay for access to them. For example, I used the AI chat feature in Tana to try to get it to use the article ideas stored in my Ideas Supertag to generate more possible ideas. However, it generated very generic ideas that had nothing to do with what I write about.
I was impressed by the meeting agent’s transcription, which was pretty accurate and was able to identify who was speaking at different times. But any meeting where I need to take extensive notes, like an interview, I take manual notes anyway and use open-source software like OBS to record the meeting so that I don’t miss anything.
Tana also relies on various AI models like Gemini, Claude, and ChatGPT that you can use with free plans.
1
Tana still feels unfinished in some ways
Supertags are great, but the platform needs more
In contrast to how useful its Supertags feature is, other parts of Tana feel unfinished. While you can install templates if you have a link from another Tana user, there’s no central template store that you can use to browse and install templates.
While you can view your tag items as a table, there is no built-in feature to create tables or spreadsheets in Tana. This is a major drawback compared to Notion if you want to use the platform to track expenses.
The Supertags feature is great and gives you a way to view different page categories on a central dashboard. I edited my Ideas Supertag to include fields like the site the article idea was for, its status, and what the article is about. However, this requires a significant amount of setup to utilize the feature in a meaningful way.
I was underwhelmed by the Today view, which is the default place your notes and captured items go when you don’t assign them to a Supertag. And while I enjoy the voice transcription feature, I think it could go further and recognize commands or when you’re mentioning Supertags.
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Tana is an interesting app, but not a full Notion replacement
Tana definitely has a few strengths that could draw users to its various plans. I will be following the platform’s development to see what new features it introduces, and I look forward to the introduction of a central place to find templates. But in its current iteration, it hasn’t been able to draw me away from Notion’s free plan.
