Second Brain vs Tana
Honest comparison for 2026

When to choose Second Brain over Tana

• You consume multimedia content — videos, social media, podcasts
• You want auto-organization without building custom structures
• You want Visual Boards for spatial knowledge mapping
• You want multiple AI models in one subscription
• You prefer zero learning curve over deep customization

When Tana might be the better choice

• You want a structured knowledge graph with supertags
• You follow GTD, PARA, or Zettelkasten methods
• You need voice chat and meeting transcription
• You enjoy building custom data structures and workflows

A day in the life: Tana vs Second Brain

A product manager captures user feedback from multiple channels — YouTube user reviews, TikTok comments about their product, LinkedIn posts from industry analysts, a PDF research report, and Slack messages saved as notes. In Tana, they'd use supertags to structure everything — #feedback, #source, #priority — building a queryable database of insights. Powerful, but the TikToks and YouTube videos would need manual transcription first.

In Second Brain, they paste the video links directly. AI reads the content, auto-organizes it, and they can immediately ask "What are the most common complaints across all my feedback?" — with the AI pulling insights from videos, documents, and social posts equally.

Then they open a Visual Board to map out the feedback landscape. It's an infinite canvas where they place all their feedback sources — the YouTube reviews, TikTok comments, LinkedIn posts, and the PDF report — as visual nodes. They spin up multiple AI chat nodes: one identifying recurring themes, another categorizing by sentiment, a third prioritizing action items. They add Notion-like pages directly on the board to draft the product roadmap. Everything is visible at once: the raw feedback, AI analysis threads, and the plan taking shape — all in one spatial workspace. Tana gives you structured queries with supertags. Visual Boards give you a multi-threaded thinking canvas where content, AI conversations, and your working documents live side by side.

Tana gives you more structural control. Second Brain gives you broader content coverage, faster time-to-insight, and a spatial workspace to think with it all.

Pricing at a glance

Tana offers a free plan with core features. Tana Pro pricing varies. Second Brain starts at $6/mo with all AI models included — Claude Opus, GPT, Grok, and Gemini. The key pricing difference: Second Brain includes full AI capability in its base plan.

Both tools offer enough on free tiers to evaluate. For paid plans, Second Brain focuses on AI breadth (multiple models, more content types) while Tana focuses on structural depth (supertags, knowledge graph).

Who switches from Tana to Second Brain — and why

Power users who loved Tana's structured approach but found themselves needing to process more multimedia content than Tana supports. Also people who found supertags powerful in theory but time-consuming to maintain in practice. Second Brain's auto-organization appeals to those who want the knowledge to be structured for them.

What you give up: Tana's knowledge graph, supertag system, voice transcription, and GTD/PARA workflow templates. If you thrive on structured data models and enjoy building systems, Tana's depth is genuinely impressive.

Frequently Asked Questions