Bango vs SyRF

Bango automates abstract screening for systematic literature reviews by assessing articles against criteria users define. Its AI screening returns decisions along with reasoning, matched rules, suggested tags, and confidence scores. Projects can import RIS and BibTeX files or Zotero collections, with up to 10,000 articles supported per project. Bibliometric analysis includes co-authorship networks, citation graphs, keyword maps, publication timelines, author rankings, and co-citation analysis. Bango can produce PRISMA 2020 flow diagrams from record counts and export them as SVG or PNG. It also supports Zotero import and export and can generate Boolean search strings for several research indexes and libraries. The maker says project data stays on the user's computer, with no cloud uploads, login, or account required. The README describes locally encrypted API keys and backups that omit credentials. AI connections include hosted providers such as OpenAI, Anthropic, Google Gemini, Mistral AI, and z.ai, as well as local and other OpenAI-compatible endpoints. Bango runs on Linux, macOS, and Windows, though macOS builds support Apple Silicon only. The Free plan is free, with no subscription, paywall, or limits.

SyRF is a web platform for researchers conducting systematic reviews and meta-analyses of preclinical studies. It supports collaborative projects, configurable workflows, study screening, annotation, data extraction, and educational guidance. By default, two reviewers assess studies against inclusion and exclusion criteria, with a third reviewer handling disagreements. Student projects can enable single screening, though the guide does not recommend it for journal-bound reviews. Administrators create annotation questions and assign them to workflow stages; graph extraction requires data extraction and annotation together. Studies and associated data, including quantitative results for analysis in R or SAS, can be downloaded. References must be deduplicated and supplied as EndNote Desktop XML or CSV. Full-text PDFs may be linked, but users provide the files separately for SyRF staff to process and store. Projects can be public or private, and each project currently supports one criteria set. SyRF is free online, with a minimum feature set under continuous development.