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Working prototype · private beta coming

A knowledge graph that lives on your own machine.

Vellum puts a Tana-style outliner and a Bear-style prose editor in one canvas. Your whole graph is a plain file on your disk. Private by default, and yours to keep.

Keep me posted

A look inside

A daily note in Vellum with a collapsible sidebar, an open-tasks card, and a conversations card.
Your day, in one view A date-navigable journal with a collapsible, draggable sidebar. The Tasks card gathers every open task, and Conversations shows the threads from that day. Everything links back to everything.
A single node zoomed in, with breadcrumb navigation above it.
Zoom into any node Infinite outlining with breadcrumb navigation. Drill into a single branch when you need focus, then step back out. Tagged nodes carry their properties with them.
An outline where tagged nodes are expanded to show typed property fields like status, priority, due date, and participants.
Typed fields, right in the outline Supertags give nodes real structure. Expand any tagged node to edit its properties without leaving the page. The small number on the right is a live backlink count.
A library view showing topics as tag pills, books as cover cards, and people as contact cards.
Every supertag gets a view Topics as tags, books as cover cards, people as contacts, all driven by each supertag's own field schema. The same graph, browsed the way each kind of thing wants to be browsed.
An AI conversation rendered as a node in the graph, linked to the day it happened.
AI conversations live in the graph Each conversation is a real node, linked to the day it happened, searchable and connected like everything else. Capture now, make sense of it later.
Starting an AI chat from a note, with the note's content shown as context.
Start a chat from any note Launch a conversation from a node and that node, with all of its ancestry, becomes the context. The AI starts where your thinking already is.
An expanded two-pane AI chat workspace, with the latest response on the left and the full thread on the right.
Room to think An expanded chat workspace, because no one should have to compose long-form thinking in a cramped box at the bottom of the screen. A rethink of how longer sessions should feel.

What it is

A quiet, opinionated place to think.

Local-first and private

Your graph is a SQLite file on your own disk. No account required, and nothing leaves your machine unless you decide it should.

Single-player by design

Built for one person thinking clearly, not a team workspace. No collaborators, no notifications, no noise.

Prose as a first-class citizen

Most outliners treat long-form writing as an afterthought. Vellum gives prose the same weight as the outline, on the same canvas.

Typed nodes and code

Supertags turn notes into typed data with real field schemas. Dates, references, and code blocks are all first-class.

Why we made it

Built by a small team, for our own daily use.

Vellum grew out of a simple wish: a single-player, private place to think, where a powerful outliner and a real prose editor finally live on the same canvas, and where code and typed fields feel right at home. We wanted it for ourselves first.

It is an homage to the tools that blazed this trail, Tana and Roam and iA Writer among them, and not an attempt to replace any of them. It has been a daily driver for months, holding around 1,500 notes without a hiccup. We are building it slowly, by hand, and with a lot of love.

Get on the list.

Vellum is a working prototype we use every day. There's no public download yet, but a beta is coming. Leave your email and we'll tell you the moment you can try it.