OpenAlex vs Undermind
OpenAlex
openalex.org
Undermind
undermind.aiSide by side
| Figure | OpenAlex | Undermind |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | $1/mo | $15/mo |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Free trial | — | — |
| Open source | Yes | — |
| Web | Yes | Yes |
| Linux | Yes | — |
| API | Yes | Yes |
| Self-hosted | Yes | — |
| Plans published | 9 | 4 |
| Spec score · Research Paper Discovery Tools | 8.9 (#2) | 7.7 (#13) |
| Integrations | Website exports support CSV, RIS for EndNote or Zotero, and TXT, while VOSviewer connects directly through the API. | The MCP connection guide lists ChatGPT, Claude, Cursor, VS Code, Codex, Claude Code, GitHub Copilot, Microsoft Copilot, and other compatible clients. |
| Product | OpenAlex is a free and open catalog of the world's scholarly research system. | Undermind describes itself as an AI co-researcher that finds relevant scientific literature for researchers. |
| 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 Team plan includes priority customer support, while Enterprise includes dedicated support; the site lists [email protected]. |
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
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.