Share your thinking, not just your documents, with Tana Publish

What is Tana Publish and how does it work?

Publish is the simplest way to share your Tana content with the outside world. With just a few clicks, you can make a part of your workspace accessible through a public link.

Tana Publish preserves your thought structure in two powerful ways:

• Tana view: Your content exactly as it appears in your workspace, complete with outliner navigation, supertags and fields, tables, lists, and card views. Viewers can expand and collapse bullets to control information density, zoom into any node to read it as a full page, navigate through breadcrumbs to understand context, and follow links to explore the content.
• Article view: A clean, reading-focused layout, perfect for long-form text content like essays, articles or prose. Your nested thoughts become headings, fields transform into formatted sections, and everything flows naturally for readers expecting traditional documents.

Readers don’t need a Tana account — they can open your link in any web browser and explore right away.

Tana view: A new way to interact with content

With the new release of Tana view, your readers can:

• Expand and collapse bullets to see the level of detail they want
• Zoom into a bullet to view it as its own page
• Navigate hierarchies using breadcrumbs
• Explore dynamic structures like tables, lists, and cards
• View embedded Youtube, Vimeo, Spotify or Figma links.

Instead of just reading your notes, people can step into your thinking and working environment. Think of it as inviting someone into a piece of your actual workspace, where they can explore your organizational system and discover insights through the same structures you use daily - while you are in control of what you want them to see.

The sharing paradox

Traditional document sharing forces linear consumption — readers start at the top and scroll down, missing connections and losing context. As digital tools have been evolving through the last 30 years, there's always been an uncomfortable gap between how we organize information for ourselves and how we present it to others. We've accepted a strange reality: our personal knowledge systems look nothing like what we share.

We take our carefully crafted notes, our thoughtfully structured outlines, our interconnected ideas — and then we flatten them into static documents, presentations, or simplified exports that lose all the richness and context that made them valuable to us in the first place.

When building a publish feature for Tana, we faced a unique challenge: Tana is a knowledge graph, not a document store with folders and pages. Every node can be viewed as it's own page, and can reference other nodes, creating a rich web of interconnected information. When you want to share one piece of this graph, where do you draw the line? Share too little, and viewers miss critical context. Share too much, and you might expose information you didn't intend to make public.

Control what you want to share

Tana Publish solves this with the new "Make content visible" button on references in Tana View. This gives you precise control over your knowledge graph boundaries. When you publish a node, referenced content appears as linked titles. Viewers can see the connections, but not the content — until you explicitly choose to reveal it.

Here's how it works: When preparing your published page, you can click "Make visible" on any reference. This shares the content inside that specific node, but maintains privacy for any references within it. It's like opening specific rooms in your house to visitors while keeping other doors closed—you control exactly how deep into your knowledge graph viewers can explore.

What makes Tana Publish different from Google Docs or Notion sharing?

The Knowledge Graph advantage

Tana isn't built on documents or pages — it's built on a knowledge graph where every piece of information connects to others through references and relationships.

Traditional tools sidestep this by forcing you to copy and flatten content into standalone documents. You lose the connections, context, and ability to navigate between related ideas. It's like photocopying one page from a wiki and losing all the hyperlinks.

Tana Publish maintains your knowledge graph structure while giving you surgical precision over what's shared. Viewers see the connections and can explore what you've chosen to share, but your private knowledge remains protected.

When sharing meeting notes, stakeholders can zoom directly into their action items while maintaining visibility of strategic context. Project documentation lets team members drill into technical specifications without losing sight of business objectives. Research findings preserve the web of connections between insights, allowing readers to discover patterns you might not have explicitly documented.

Zero friction for viewers

The biggest barrier to knowledge sharing isn't creating content—it's the friction of access. Tana Publish removes every obstacle:

• No account creation required
• No access requests
• No app downloads
• No permission management

Anyone with the link can immediately explore your content, whether they're a client reviewing a proposal, a community member accessing documentation, or a colleague catching up on project status.

Tana Publish offers the ability to set a password if you want to limit who can view a published page (paid feature, currently supported in Article view, coming soon in Tana view).

How Tana Publish fits your workflow

For knowledge workers: From scattered to structured

Knowledge workers spend a lot of their time searching for information and rebuilding context. Tana can transforms personal knowledge management into team knowledge assets. Your meeting notes and transcripts become referenceable context documents for decisions. Your user interviews becomes actionable tasks or insights. Your plans become living documentation that updates as you refine your thinking.

👉 Try Tana's meeting notetaker to get the full context of your meetings preserved and available to use as context in the future.

For Team leaders/Project managers: Alignment without overload

Be the superhero that keeps your team focused and on track with deliverables, and keeps stakeholders aligned. Tana's interactive format lets you easily share up-to-date information while allowing each team member to explore what's relevant to them.

Leaders can publish strategic plans where the CEO sees metrics and vision, managers explore departmental objectives, and individual contributors drill into specific tasks—all from the same published document.

👉 Build a Tana dashboard that shows progress on your OKRs or projects, share a link to stakeholders. Try Tana's Project or OKR template or see an example of a published project board.

For consultants and creators: Showcase your process and thinking

Your value isn't just in your conclusions—it's in your process and the way you manage clients. Allow lets clients and audiences explore your frameworks, methodologies, and mental models interactively. They discover insights at their own pace, understanding not just what you recommend but why.

This transforms static deliverables into dynamic knowledge products that clients can reference, explore, and build upon long after the engagement ends.

👉 Build a client portal to share with clients, showing them updated tasks lists, documentation and invoices. Try Tana's Project template or see a live example of a published client portal.

For Product managers or designers: make PRDs from a voice memo

Take a walk while you're thinking through a new product idea, and have a ready Product Requirement Doc on your laptop when you come back. Build it out with numbers, customer insight, documentation from testing and Figma sketches, before sharing with developers or stakeholders.

👉 Try the PRD template in Tana now (optimized for mobile!) or see a live PRD example.

For Operations, Business support or Admin roles: Share information about events, procedures or information

Whether you're organizing an offsite, a panel debate or trying to get people to follow a process, Tana let's you structure various types of information the way that makes sense for you, and share it with a simple link that people can access without having to log in.

👉Try Tana's Project template or see a live example of an offsite information pack.

Easy publishing in 3 clicks

Publishing from Tana takes less than 60 seconds:

1. Find the node you wan to publish, right-click it and select "Publish", or press Cmd/Ctrl+K, the type "Publish (open preview)
2. Preview your content in the right panel to ensure formatting looks right
3. Click the "Publish" button in the bottom of the page to go live instantly

You can copy the sharing URL to your clipboard, the paste it wherever you want to share. When you update the source content, simply click "Publish changes" to sync updates live—no need to reshare links or notify viewers of new versions.

What can I add in a published node?

• You can publish up to 3000 nodes at a time
• Embed Youtube, Vimeo, Figma or Spotify links
• AI-generate images in Tana (for banner or in text)
• Multiple view formats (tables for data, cards for projects, tabs for categories)
• Video files (.mp4, .mov)

Publish vs. Workspace sharing

It’s helpful to understand how Publish compares with workspace sharing in Tana:

• Publish is for public sharing. Anyone with the link can view your content, no login required. Great for publishing resources, documentation, or external collaboration.
• Workspace sharing is for private collaboration. You can invite teammates into your workspace with specific roles and permissions. Shared workspaces let you co-create in real time, with full editing rights and structured collaboration. Learn more about workspace sharing.

Together, Publish and workspace sharing give you full control: you decide what stays private, what’s shared with your team, and what’s open to the world.

Common questions about Tana Publish

How secure is published content?

Published content is accessible to anyone with the link. Paid subscribers can set a password on pages published with Article view (coming soon to Tana view as well!). This makes Publish perfect for public documentation, marketing content, knowledge bases, and non-sensitive project information.

In the interactive Tana view, you have the ability to control which references you want to be visible in the published page, as references to nodes that live outside the node you're sharing will have a "Make content visible" button. This ensures that you don't accidentally share information you didn't mean to share.

For sensitive internal collaboration, Tana offers a completely different solution: Workspaces. These provide encrypted, member-only environments where teams collaborate in real-time with full access control. You can create separate workspaces for different security levels—a company-wide workspace for general collaboration and management-only workspaces for sensitive strategic planning. Content in private workspaces remains completely invisible to non-members, even when referenced elsewhere.

Can I update published content after sharing?

Yes — and this is where Tana Publish shines. Changes to your source content can go live instantly with one click. The URL never changes, so bookmarks, shared links, and embedded references all automatically show the latest version. No more "v2_final_FINAL_actually-final.docx" confusion.

What content types excel with Tana Publish?

Dashboards and collaborative portals: Give clients an updated view of project progress, access to meeting notes, documentation and even invoices in one place. This example shows a client portal with full interactive navigation.

Meeting notes and decisions: Share collaborative outcomes where readers can explore from high-level decisions down to implementation details.

Project documentation: Layer strategic vision with tactical execution. Stakeholders see the big picture while implementers drill into specifications—all from the same published page.

Knowledge bases and wikis: Create explorable reference materials where users find answers through natural navigation rather than search. Perfect for customer documentation, onboarding materials, and best practices.

Research and analysis: Preserve the connections between data points, insights, and conclusions. Readers can follow your analytical journey or jump directly to findings.

Strategic plans: Present vision and strategy with progressive disclosure—executives see key objectives while teams explore implementation paths relevant to their work.

Is published content indexed by search engines and AI?

Currently, Tana Publish pages not indexed by search engines, though they can be discovered if shared on public forums or social media. This gives you control over distribution while maintaining shareability.

For AI answer engines, Tana's structured format is inherently parseable—the hierarchical node structure, clear field definitions, and semantic organization make published content ideal for AI consumption when discovered.