Is Hanji for you?
A tool that claims to be right for everyone is lying to someone. Here is the honest version.
Hanji fits you well if
- Your team already keeps things in git, and your agents already read code from it.
- You want people to read and write without ever learning git.
- You want to bring your own agent, and you refuse to pay by the token for the privilege.
- You have folders that must stay private, and you need that lock honored everywhere, including by the agents.
- You want to be able to walk away with everything, because it was always just your files.
That is the center of the target. A 10-to-200-person team, engineering-led, agent-heavy, already paying for a knowledge base its agents cannot read. If that is you, the rest of this handbook is written for you.
You will be happier somewhere else if
Honesty about limits is one of our Principles, so here it is turned on ourselves. If your need is in the left column, the tool in the middle will serve you better today, and we would rather point you to it.
| If you want | A better fit today | Why it wins there |
|---|---|---|
| One app for docs, tasks, databases, and a bundled AI | Notion | It plays the all-in-one game well. You trade portability for it, and often that trade is worth making. |
| A polished hosted wiki, and git or agents do not matter to you | Docmost, Outline | Excellent open-source wikis with a real team layer today. Hanji only pays off if the git-native part matters. |
| Personal notes on your own machine, just you | Obsidian | Hard to beat, and free for exactly that. Hanji is built for a team with a shared repo and a permission line down the middle. |
| To publish external product documentation | GitBook, Mintlify | Shaped for published docs, with the site polish and the SEO Hanji does not chase. |
| Enterprise SSO, audit, and a filled-in procurement checklist today | Confluence, or Hanji's paid tier later | Hanji is early. Those parts live on the paid tier, and some are still ahead of us. See Where we are. |
| Git and agents, but no human front and no permissions | The agent-first newcomers | They move fast in that space. Hanji exists because we wanted the human front and the lock too. |
The short version
Hanji is the tool built to hold four things at once: git-backed storage, agent-native access, a polished human front, and real permissions. Need all four, and as of today nothing else does the whole set. Need only one or two, and one of the tools above will serve you better, and we would rather tell you that now than sell you the wrong thing.
No bundled model. No credits, ever. See Why Hanji is different for the longer argument.