Recast vs Scholarcy

Recast uses Claude AI to turn PDFs, article URLs, text, or topics into platform-ready content. It offers nine formats, including social posts, video scripts, newsletters, blog outlines, takeaways, and hooks. Study Mode creates study guides, slide decks, flashcards, quizzes, and citations from course material. Tone and reading-level controls are available; the Free Beta also includes Brand Voice and translation into 10 languages. Free Beta costs nothing, allows 10 generations per day across nine formats and five input types, and requires your own Anthropic API key. Anthropic charges usage directly, typically 0.05–$0.30 depending on length. Recast says keys, history, and browser-stored data remain on your device, while inputs go directly from the browser to Anthropic. URL pages are fetched through allorigins.win. Flashcards export to Anki and Quizlet. Planned Pro costs $15 a month and lists unlimited generations, no API key, bulk upload up to 10 files, priority generation, and founder support.

Scholarcy turns research material into interactive summary flashcards that highlight key information and provide context. It accepts research papers, PDFs, book chapters, online articles, plain text and YouTube videos. Users can add content by uploading or dropping files, entering a webpage URL, pasting text or using a browser extension. Enhanced summaries can be tailored to reading styles such as School level, General reader, Bulleted list, Undergrad level, One liner and Researcher. Research tools include cited-work findings, article prompts and questions, a Research Quality Indicator and comparisons with related research. Scholarcy imports directly from Zotero and exports referenced summaries to Markdown for tools including Roam, Obsidian and Notion. Extensions are offered for Chrome, Edge and Firefox; Safari is listed as coming soon. The free plan costs nothing and allows 10 summaries, with flashcards exported one at a time. Scanned PDFs without extractable text are unsupported unless OCR is run first, and URLs behind paywalls may not import. Scholarcy says customer data is encrypted at rest and in transit.