  A well-known conjecture states that for any $l$-component link $L$ in $S^3$,
the rank of the knot Floer homology of $L$ (over any field) is less than or
equal to $2^{l-1}$ times the rank of the reduced Khovanov homology of $L$. In
this paper, we describe a framework that might be used to prove this
conjecture. We construct a modified version of Khovanov homology for links with
multiple basepoints and show that it mimics the behavior of knot Floer
homology. We also introduce a new spectral sequence converging to knot Floer
homology whose $E_1$ page is conjecturally isomorphic to our new version of
Khovanov homology; this would prove that the conjecture stated above holds over
the field $\mathbb{Z}_2$.
