RevMan vs Synthesis
RevMan
cochrane.orgSynthesis
synthesis.infoSide by side
| Figure | RevMan | Synthesis |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | £6.67/mo | — |
| Free plan | Yes | — |
| Free trial | Yes | Yes |
| Open source | — | — |
| Web | Yes | — |
| Windows | Yes | Yes |
| macOS | Yes | Yes |
| Linux | Yes | Yes |
| Plans published | 11 | 0 |
| Spec score · Literature Review Software | 8.7 (#3) | 7.5 (#22) |
| Headquarters | London, United Kingdom | The maker says Synthesis Research Inc. is located in Calgary, Canada. |
| Intended users | RevMan supports diagnostic test accuracy, intervention, methodology, overview, prognosis, qualitative, and flexible review types. | The site describes use in academic research, hospitals, government agencies, private corporations, and nongovernmental organizations. |
| Purpose | RevMan is Cochrane’s software for producing transparent systematic reviews, guiding authors from structured data entry and analysis through result visualization. | Synthesis is software for conducting scoping, systematic, and regular literature reviews. |
| Support | Cochrane directs users to its Support Team and provides how-to articles, screencasts and release notes. | The support page offers an online reference manual, a help sheet, and YouTube tutorials. |
Plans
RevMan
- Cochrane author accessFree
- Cochrane author accessFree
- Practice reviewFree
- Individual student annual subscription£80 a year
- Student£80 a year
- Academic£100 a year
- Individual academic annual subscription£100 a year
- Individual standard annual subscription£130 a year
- Standard rate£130 a year
- OrganizationPriced on request
In their own words
RevMan
RevMan is Cochrane’s software for building systematic reviews, from structured data entry and analysis to presenting results. It supports diagnostic test accuracy, intervention, methodology, overview, prognosis, qualitative, and flexible review types. Authors can edit separate parts of a review at the same time and see who else is working on it. Analysis options include pairwise meta-analyses, sensitivity and subgroup analyses, and fixed-effects, random-effects, Mantel-Haenszel, and inverse-variance models. Built-in outputs include forest, SROC, and funnel plots, risk-of-bias assessments, and PRISMA flow diagrams. Authors can work from ready-made or custom templates and structured headings with Cochrane methodological guidance. RevMan imports study data and references from Covidence, and RIS reference imports can draw on Crossref, PubMed, or CRS. A free practice review is deleted after 30 days and permits one person, with no data export. Free access is also available to authors working on Cochrane Reviews. Individual annual plans are £80 a year for eligible students, £100 a year for eligible academics, and £130 a year for standard subscriptions; VAT applies in the EU and UK.
Synthesis
Synthesis is software for conducting scoping, systematic and regular literature reviews. It organizes references and PDFs, searches abstracts and full-text PDFs by keyword or phrase, and automatically de-duplicates imported references. The support page reports externally validated deduplication sensitivity of 98% and specificity of 99%. Its screening workflow supports primary and secondary reviewers working through abstracts and full text, with kappa scores calculated for both. Analysis tools include AI-assisted topic clustering, word clouds, metadata extraction and charts. Embedded searches cover PubMed, PubMed Central, IEEE, arXiv.org and US Patents; references can also be imported from Ovid, Web of Knowledge, ProQuest and ACM. Synthesis can download many full-text PDFs when open or institutional access is available, and exports references and data as RIS and CSV. The trial allows unlimited projects, but each project can import only 50 references and uses a slower PDF viewer. The maker says orders and downloads are temporarily suspended during development of a new release. Licenses are tied to individual computers; pricing is available on request.