Scholarcy vs Sidenote

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.

Sidenote is a browser-based AI reading assistant for asking questions about documents and tracing answers back to their source passages. Select a citation to jump to and highlight the cited text. It can summarize and explain documents, build glossaries, search files, and organize material with notes, highlights, tags, starred documents, and multi-document collections. It reads browser-rendered PDFs, including scanned PDFs with OCR, and accepts PDF, DOCX, PPTX, TXT, MD, MDX, and RTF uploads. Dedicated integrations include Confluence, Notion, Google Docs, Slack canvases, SharePoint, and OneDrive. Extensions are listed for Chrome, Edge, and Firefox; Opera is coming soon. The free plan allows 3 documents per month, while Pro is £10/mo billed monthly. A 7-day Pro trial requires no card and limits users to 10 documents, 20 summaries, and 10 chat turns. Users can choose to keep documents while their account is open or discard them, which purges a document within 24 hours. Sidenote says content is not used to train AI models, but it is not yet SOC 2 certified.