SciSummary vs Sidenote

SciSummary uses AI to help scientists, researchers, and students understand scientific papers through summaries, analysis, and extracted insights. Summaries are organized into abstract, methods, results, and conclusion sections. It can combine multiple papers into one summary and compare them, while folders and tags organize a research library. Figure chat interprets p-values, confidence intervals, and effect sizes. The service extracts abstracts, figures, and references and highlights key findings. Its web and API access includes a bulk API accepting PDFs, links, or full text, with hundreds of documents supported in one request. A REST API includes an official CLI and generated SDK clients from its OpenAPI specification. An MCP server connects with Claude Desktop and ChatGPT. SciSummary also summarizes webpages and accepts file uploads. Pricing is paid, starting at $4/mo (annual), with a 7-day trial and no standard free plan.

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.