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EnglishWhat Is Kompas and What Is It Used For?
Updated
Kompas is a desktop thinking-and-writing tool for macOS and Windows. You capture fragments — reading notes, AI conversations, half-formed ideas — and Kompas connects them into a graph that you can draw on when you write. It is aimed at people who want their ideas to accumulate over time rather than disappear into feeds and closed tabs. You can use it free, local-first, with your own AI keys; or pay for Pro Cloud, which adds cross-device sync and built-in AI after a 7-day free trial.
What Kompas actually does
The product describes itself as "a compass for thought" and frames its purpose as AI that works alongside your thinking, not instead of it. The workflow has three stages:
- Capture — documents, conversations, and loose ideas go into one place.
- Connect — every session lands in a graph, linked to what you wrote before.
- Write — the graph becomes source material for your own writing.
The page's own example is a live session on patience: Kompas surfaces an earlier session where you wrote about retrieval, quotes Camus, and keeps a session map linking "patience," "Camus," "Sisyphus," and "waiting." The point is that a thought you had weeks ago is retrievable and reusable instead of being re-thought from scratch.
The main surfaces
| Surface | What it's for |
|---|---|
| Sessions | Individual thinking sessions, including AI dialogue within a session |
| Projects | Grouping related work |
| Library | Stored material you can return to |
| Writer | Turning graph material into writing |
| Graph | The connected map of your ideas across sessions |
Free desktop vs. Pro Cloud
These are the two ways to use Kompas, and the choice depends mainly on whether you want your data synced and your AI handled for you.
Free · Desktop (local-first)
- Your ideas stay on your device.
- You bring your own AI: an OpenAI or Anthropic API key, a Claude Code or Codex subscription, or local models via Ollama.
- Open source under MIT.
- Available for macOS (Apple Silicon and Intel) and Windows (x64).
Pro · Cloud
- 7-day free trial, no credit card required.
- Cross-device sync between your desktops.
- Frontier AI built in — no setup and no API keys.
- Included AI usage with stated limits and optional top-ups.
The site's own guidance: start free, and move to Pro when you want sync and AI handled for you. If you already have API keys or prefer local models and want your notes to stay on one machine, the free desktop version covers the core capture-connect-write loop. If you work across multiple desktops or don't want to manage keys, Pro is the fit.
Privacy and data handling
Kompas states that your material is never sold and never used to train models. On the free tier this is reinforced by the local-first design — your ideas stay on your device. On Pro Cloud, your content syncs across devices and runs through built-in AI, so the local-only guarantee applies to the desktop version rather than the cloud one.
Who it's for
Kompas is for people who read and talk to AI a lot and want the output to compound into something reusable. The site puts it as: "For people who want their ideas to grow, not just be saved." It is less suited to someone who wants a simple note-taking app with no graph or AI layer, and more suited to writers and researchers who want earlier thinking to resurface while drafting.
To evaluate it, the practical path is to download the free desktop build for your platform, run a few real sessions on a topic you're actually working on, and check whether the graph surfaces connections you'd have missed. If it does, and you then want those sessions available on a second machine with AI built in, the 7-day Pro trial is the natural next step.