OpenAlex vs SciSpace
OpenAlex
openalex.org
SciSpace
scispace.comSide by side
| Figure | OpenAlex | SciSpace |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | $1/mo | $5.83/mo |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Free trial | — | Yes |
| Open source | Yes | — |
| Web | Yes | Yes |
| Linux | Yes | — |
| iOS | — | Yes |
| Android | — | Yes |
| API | Yes | Yes |
| Self-hosted | Yes | — |
| Plans published | 9 | 16 |
| Spec score · Research Paper Discovery Tools | 8.9 (#2) | 8.7 (#4) |
| Funding | OurResearch announced a $7.5 million, five-year Arcadia grant on 13 March 2024 to establish OpenAlex as sustainable open infrastructure. | Crunchbase lists three funding rounds and names Disruptors Capital and Haresh Chawla among two investors, with amounts obscured. |
| Integrations | Website exports support CSV, RIS for EndNote or Zotero, and TXT, while VOSviewer connects directly through the API. | SciSpace says users can import references from Zotero or EndNote; its Zotero guide notes papers without a DOI will not be imported. |
| 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. | Official pages publish [email protected] as the support contact. |
| What it does | OpenAlex is an open index and knowledge graph covering scholarly works, authors, sources, institutions, topics and related entities. | SciSpace describes itself as an end-to-end platform for discovering, analyzing and writing scientific literature. |
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
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
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.
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.