OpenAlex vs ResearchRabbit
OpenAlex
openalex.orgResearchRabbit
researchrabbit.aiSide by side
| Figure | OpenAlex | ResearchRabbit |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | $1/mo | $0.83/mo |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Free trial | — | — |
| Open source | Yes | — |
| Web | Yes | Yes |
| Linux | Yes | — |
| API | Yes | — |
| Self-hosted | Yes | — |
| Plans published | 9 | 6 |
| Spec score · Research Paper Discovery Tools | 8.9 (#2) | 7.5 (#18) |
| Support | Member includes community support, Member+ includes ticket-based help for critical API bugs, and Partner includes full ticket-based support for API and data issues. | The contact page offers a support request form, and the ResearchRabbit+ plan includes faster support responses. |
Plans
OpenAlex
- Pay as you go$1 a month
- Member$5,000 a year
- Member+$10,000 a year
- Partner$20,000 a year
- FreeFree
- Pay as you go$1, paid once
- Member$5,000 a year
- Member+$10,000 a year
- Partner$20,000 a year
ResearchRabbit
- ResearchRabbit+$10 a year
- ResearchRabbit+$12.50 a month
- FreeFree
- ResearchRabbit+ Annual plan$10 a year
- ResearchRabbit+ Monthly plan$12.50 a month
- InstitutionPriced on request
In their own words
OpenAlex
OpenAlex is a free and open catalog of scholarly research, with a REST API for querying connected records such as works, authors, sources, institutions, and topics. API users can search, filter, sort, group, page through results, select fields, and retrieve individual entities. The complete database snapshot can be downloaded from Amazon S3 without an AWS account, and the data is released under the CC0 public-domain license. An official command-line tool supports bulk downloads with parallel transfers, checkpoints, rate limiting, retries, and resume. Full-text access provides PDFs and machine-readable TEI XML; each file download costs $0.01. Website exports include CSV, RIS, and TXT, while VOSviewer connects through the API. OpenAlex also offers Unpaywall's legacy-format open-access API, including a browser extension and integrations with SFX, EBSCO Discovery Service, and 360 Link. Its coverage includes journal articles, conference papers, books, chapters, datasets, dissertations, and preprints. OpenAlex is operated by a US 501(c)(3) nonprofit, and its code is open source.
ResearchRabbit
ResearchRabbit is a web service for discovering research related to papers users select. It analyzes those papers and recommends connected work, with interactive maps showing links among papers, authors and concepts. Its recommendations adapt to reading patterns and research interests. The Free plan costs nothing and provides unlimited searches across more than 310 million articles, an unlimited library and collections, sharing, core search settings and up to 50 seed articles. ResearchRabbit+ raises the seed limit to 300 and adds advanced search controls, multiple projects, Signals alerts and faster support responses. Its annual plan costs $10 a year (billed per month, Annual plan); the monthly plan costs $12.50 a month (billed per month, Monthly plan). Users can import selected articles from Zotero collections and export articles as BibTeX. ResearchRabbit is aimed at researchers and students, and does not provide screening workflows, full-text management or systematic review tools.