What i2 Analyst's Notebook is

IBM i2 Analyst's Notebook is the longest-running commercial link-analysis platform on the market. Founded in Cambridge, UK in 1990, acquired by IBM in 2011 for ~$500M, then sold to Harris Corporation in 2018, and most recently consolidated under N. Harris Computer Corporation — a subsidiary of Canadian software-rollup giant Constellation Software. It is the de-facto standard tool in many federal, state, and local law enforcement agencies; financial fraud teams; intelligence shops; and large corporate threat-intel teams. The product's strength is its longevity — analysts have been trained on it for 30+ years, file format compatibility with legacy ANB charts is preserved, and procurement officers know how to write contracts for it. The product's weakness is that the rendering engine, UI conventions, and price all reflect that 30-year tenure: the chart aesthetic is unmistakably 2011-era, the licensing model is per-seat enterprise, and meaningful UI updates have slowed as the product passed from owner to owner.

Where MemoryJar fits

MemoryJar is the analyst-tier alternative to i2: same core link-analysis workflow (entities, relationships, structured notes, chain of custody, court-ready exports), built on a modern desktop stack, and priced one-eleventh of i2's per-seat license. Where i2 charges $6,600 per analyst per year, MemoryJar charges $600 per analyst per year for a 1-year license. Where i2 requires enterprise procurement and IT deployment, MemoryJar installs in 60 seconds and runs air-gapped on Windows, macOS, or Linux. Where i2 supports a single domain (link analysis), MemoryJar provides 8 purpose-built jar types covering OSINT, case files, financial fraud, executive protection, systems architecture, mind mapping, workflow, and CRM — each with its own entity types, fields, reports, and import formats.

Pricing math you can put in a budget request

A team of five analysts using IBM i2 Analyst's Notebook spends $33,000 per year in license fees alone. The same team using MemoryJar spends $3,000 per year on a flat Team license. That is a $30,000 annual saving — enough to fund another analyst, a forensic toolkit, or three years of a state-level training program. Pricing is published, flat, and not subject to call-for-quote negotiation cycles. There is no enterprise tier hidden behind sales-development outreach. Solo analyst evaluation: $600/year covers one analyst with two device activations. Team license: $3,000/year flat for up to 5 analysts. Enterprise license: $1,500+/seat/year with a 10-seat minimum and onboarding included.

Supply chain and sovereignty

i2 has passed through three corporate parents in fifteen years. It currently sits under N. Harris Computer Corporation, a Canadian subsidiary of Constellation Software Inc. (TSE: CSU). For US federal procurement under Section 889 of the FY 2019 NDAA — which restricts certain foreign-supply-chain technologies — and for any agency with explicit American-made software preferences, the i2 supply chain is a documented foreign dependency. MemoryJar is built and maintained by a US-based founder operating under a US-registered private entity. All development happens in the United States. There is no foreign corporate parent, no foreign data residency, and no third-party transformation pipeline. For procurement officers building defensible vendor justifications, this is a fact that matters.

Migration path

MemoryJar imports CSV, JSON, Nmap XML, XMind, Reddit threads, SQL DDL, Docker Compose, OpenAPI specs, Prisma schemas, and source code structure. There is no native i2 ANB file importer, but ANB charts can be exported as CSV from i2's built-in export tools and ingested into MemoryJar through the standard CSV importer. For agencies with large historical i2 corpora, the practical migration path is: continue running existing i2 charts in i2 for archival lookup; build new investigations in MemoryJar from day one; export i2 charts as CSV and selectively re-import the cases that need to live forward. This avoids the all-or-nothing migration that kills most enterprise software transitions.