CORE vs SciSpace
CORE
core.ac.uk
SciSpace
scispace.comSide by side
| Figure | CORE | SciSpace |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | Free | $5.83/mo |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Free trial | Yes | Yes |
| Open source | — | — |
| Web | Yes | Yes |
| iOS | — | Yes |
| Android | — | Yes |
| API | Yes | Yes |
| Self-hosted | Yes | — |
| Plans published | 11 | 16 |
| Spec score · Research Paper Discovery Tools | 8.8 (#3) | 8.7 (#4) |
| Headquarters | Milton Keynes, United Kingdom | Milpitas, California, USA |
| Integrations | CORE says its Discovery tool can integrate with repositories, and its API documentation includes examples and wrappers for common programming languages. | SciSpace says users can import references from Zotero or EndNote; its Zotero guide notes papers without a DOI will not be imported. |
| Notable news | The Chrome Web Store listing records a CORE Discovery update to version 1.0.4 on October 10, 2026. | SciSpace announced on LinkedIn in October 2026 that Advanced and Max plans receive unlimited agent usage. |
| Rating on Chrome Web Store | 0 out of 5 from 0 ratings (no ratings shown). | 4.4 out of 5 from 144 ratings. |
| Support | Starting members receive general support, while Supporting and Sustaining members receive increasing levels of technical support. | Official pages publish [email protected] as the support contact. |
| What it does | CORE aggregates and indexes open-access scholarly metadata and full texts so people can search, read and reuse research. | SciSpace describes itself as an end-to-end platform for discovering, analyzing and writing scientific literature. |
Plans
CORE
- StartingPriced on request
- SupportingPriced on request
- SustainingPriced on request
- CORE APIFree
- CORE API — free access without registrationFree
- Institution and Enterprise API trialFree
- Starting membershipFree
- Starting membershipFree
- CORE API — registered accessPriced on request
- Supporting membershipPriced on request
SciSpace
- Premium$12 a month
- Advanced$70 a month
- Max$160 a month
- BasicFree
- BasicFree
- Premium$12 a month
- Team$12 a month
- Researcher$20 a month
- Advanced$70 a year
- Advanced$70 a month
In their own words
CORE
CORE is a multidisciplinary discovery service for scholarly work gathered from repositories, preprint servers and journals. Its search covers research papers, journal articles, preprints, theses, dissertations, conference proceedings, reports and books. CORE says its collection holds 449 million searchable papers, including 57 million full texts. Researchers and the public can search this material; developers can use the API for real-time access to metadata and full texts. The CORE Dataset supports downloading data for analysis and text mining on an organisation’s own infrastructure, though access is limited to users representing organisations registered in non-sanctioned countries. Individuals can use the API instead. CORE Discovery is available as a browser extension, repository plugin and API, and CORE Recommender suggests related articles in repositories, journal systems and web interfaces. Free API access costs nothing, subject to rate limits of one batch request or five single requests per 10 seconds. Starting membership costs nothing for data providers. The service describes itself as not-for-profit and community-governed.
SciSpace
SciSpace is a platform for finding, analyzing, and writing about scientific literature. Its literature review tool searches more than 280 million articles and organizes concise findings in tables with customizable columns. Chat with PDF offers citation-backed answers, section-by-section summaries, explanations of highlighted passages, and related-paper recommendations. Writing tools include AI-assisted suggestions, paraphrasing in context, style improvements, and an editor supporting more than 75 languages. Users can import references from Zotero or EndNote, though the Zotero import flow excludes papers without a DOI. A Chrome extension explains selected text, math, and tables; its mobile app is for iOS and supports searching, summarizing, and exploring peer-reviewed journals. SciSpace says its repository has metadata for 200 million-plus papers and 50 million-plus open-access full-text PDFs. It lists extension, iOS, and web access. The free plan is free and includes 100 monthly credits; paid plans start at $20/mo. SciSpace says uploaded PDFs are private to the user and are not used to train its AI models.