Is Brain a Tana alternative?

They solve different halves. Tana structures your meetings and chats into a knowledge graph; Brain is the governance-and-proof spine that makes a company's knowledge permission-aware, agent-queryable and provable. Plenty of teams could structure in one and govern through the other.

Does Brain build a knowledge graph too?

Brain has a bi-temporal knowledge graph, so as-of questions are answerable, but its centre of gravity is governance and proof rather than Tana's self-structuring capture, which is Tana's core strength.

Can AI agents query the knowledge through Brain?

Yes. Brain exposes an MCP endpoint, so agents read under the same rules as people, with limits, human-in-the-loop and a kill switch, and every access is recorded content-blind.

Compare

Brain vs Tana

A tool that builds a self-structuring knowledge graph, and the spine that makes it permission-aware, provable and agent-queryable.

Tana is an AI-first workspace whose supertags and graph structure themselves out of your meetings and chats, turning messy input into something queryable. Brain is the spine that makes a company's knowledge permission-aware, provable and queryable by AI agents. Tana builds the graph. Brain governs who may see it and proves who did, across the whole company rather than one workspace.

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Why teams compare them

Answers that show their working
A structured graph makes retrieval smarter. Brain makes it accountable: every claim in an answer carries the source behind it, and every source was checked against the person asking.
The same question, two answers
Structure decides how knowledge is arranged. Governance decides who gets which part of it, and can hold back one field instead of a whole node.
Where Tana is the better fit
If you want meetings and chats turned into structured, queryable knowledge with as little manual organising as possible, Tana is a strong and original product, and Brain does not replace that.

The questions people actually ask about Tana

The graph builds itself already. What is left to do?

Structuring is the hard half of retrieval, and Tana does it well, largely as a by-product of working.

What structure does not decide is who is allowed to reach which node, and that question arrives the moment the graph stops belonging to one person. Brain answers it per requester, whether the requester is a colleague or an agent.

Fine, but we would still know who looked at what.

Inside one workspace, roughly. Across a company, and for agents that read hundreds of nodes an hour, not really.

Brain writes every read to an append-only, content-blind record: who asked, what was reached, what was withheld. It proves the access without keeping the material, which is what makes it safe to keep forever.

Alright. But everything worth structuring is already in Tana.

What gets captured is, and a tool that structures capture well tends to get plenty of it.

The rest of the company keeps producing knowledge in the places it always has: repositories, drives, chat threads, ticket queues. Brain reads those in place and governs them identically, so an answer does not stop at the boundary of one workspace.

And the nodes that shouldn't be readable at all?

Usually they are not whole nodes. They are a number, a name, a clause inside something the team otherwise needs.

Brain withholds the field and serves the rest, and marks that it did, so nobody is left wondering whether the answer they got was the whole of it.

At a glance

Brain compared with Tana, attribute by attribute.
Attribute	Brain	Tana
What it is	A governance-and-proof spine over company knowledge	An AI workspace that structures a knowledge graph from what you capture
Structuring	A bi-temporal knowledge graph, with permissions and proof over it	Supertags and a graph that structure themselves, which is a genuine strength
Access control	YesPermission-aware per person and per agent, plus field-level redaction	PartlyWorkspace-level sharing rather than per-person governed retrieval
Agent access	YesAn MCP endpoint, governed like a person, with limits, human-in-the-loop and a kill switch	PartlyAI-native capture and structuring inside the workspace
Audit and proof	YesContent-blind, tamper-evident record of every read, with an optional on-chain anchor	NoNot an independently verifiable access record
Sources	Slack, GitHub, Drive, Box, Confluence, Salesforce, Telegram, with permissions intact	Meetings, chats, and whatever you capture into the workspace

Compared against publicly available information, last checked 20 September 2026. Products change. Tell us if something here is out of date: hello@heybrain.io

Who each one is for

Choose Brain if

Companies that need knowledge governed per person, not only structured
Permission-aware answers with field-level redaction across every source
A content-blind record of every read, optionally anchored on-chain
Letting AI agents query company knowledge over MCP, governed like people

Choose Tana if

Turning meetings and chats into a typed knowledge graph automatically
AI-native capture with supertags and self-organising structure
Teams that want the graph built for them as they work

We are not rebuilding the graph somewhere else.

Nobody is asking you to. Brain does not want to be where your team captures things.

It reads the sources the company already keeps, in place, and adds the part a graph does not have: who may reach which piece of it, and a record of who did.

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Questions, answered

Is Brain a Tana alternative?: They solve different halves. Tana structures your meetings and chats into a knowledge graph; Brain is the governance-and-proof spine that makes a company's knowledge permission-aware, agent-queryable and provable. Plenty of teams could structure in one and govern through the other.
Does Brain build a knowledge graph too?: Brain has a bi-temporal knowledge graph, so as-of questions are answerable, but its centre of gravity is governance and proof rather than Tana's self-structuring capture, which is Tana's core strength.
Can AI agents query the knowledge through Brain?: Yes. Brain exposes an MCP endpoint, so agents read under the same rules as people, with limits, human-in-the-loop and a kill switch, and every access is recorded content-blind.