Rayyan vs SyRF

Rayyan is a platform for teams carrying out systematic evidence reviews, with workflows intended to be transparent, auditable, and reproducible. Its process spans reference import, collaboration, deduplication, title and abstract screening, full-text screening, data extraction, risk-of-bias assessment, and reporting. ResearchPilot AI Reviewer screens articles against criteria set by the user and gives decisions with reasoning notes. The Analyzer suggests inclusion or exclusion with justification, while the researcher retains final decision-making. ResearchPilot can also extract answers to custom questions from PDFs and metadata, highlight relevant passages, and let users inspect the answers. References are imported from exported files rather than a direct database connection. The API offers programmatic access to reviews, references, decisions, and metadata, plus workflow automation and external integrations. Rayyan is available on Android, iOS, web, and through an API. The Free plan allows three active reviews and two free reviewers; paid options start at $8.33 a month per seat, billed annually. Free mobile access is limited; Essential and higher provide unlimited mobile access.

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.