Best AI tools for research
28 reviewed tools, 20 with a free plan. Ordered by real popularity.
Last updated:
1. Consensus
Consensus is an AI research tool that helps users find peer-reviewed sources, highlight relevant papers, summarize findings, and identify study designs.
2. Elicit
Elicit helps researchers search papers and clinical trials, summarize findings, chat with full-text papers, and extract data. It also offers research reports, systematic review workflows, collaboration, and API access.
Free + paid plansFree planelicit.com
3. Agentset.ai
Agentset provides RAG infrastructure for developers building AI search and Q&A apps. It processes text, images, graphs, and tables, adds source citations, and supports metadata filters and a choice of models and vector databases.
Free + paid plansFree planagentset.ai
4. aiPDF
aiPDF is a browser-based tool for summarizing and chatting with PDFs, EPUB books, website URLs and YouTube videos. It answers questions using document references and offers multi-document chats, OCR and response exports.
Free + paid plansFree planaipdf.ai
5. ASReview
ASReview uses open-source AI to help researchers screen large text collections for systematic reviews. It supports model performance testing, benchmarking, and parallel screening with groups of experts.
Open sourceasreview.nl
6. ChatPDF
ChatPDF lets you question, summarize, compare, and translate PDFs and other documents. It links answers to sources and supports multi-file chats. The free plan includes analysis of two documents per day.
Free + paid plansFree planwww.chatpdf.com
7. Chroma
Chroma provides vector, full-text, regex, and metadata search for AI applications. Run it on your own infrastructure or use its serverless cloud service, with automatic scaling, data tiering, and dataset versioning.
Open sourceFree planwww.trychroma.com
8. CiteMe
CiteMe searches scholarly databases to format citations and check references, showing source provenance and flagging results for review. It also extracts references from PDFs and exports bibliographies in multiple formats.
Free + paid plansFree planciteme.app
9. Elephas
Elephas searches local documents and answers questions with source citations. It hides personal details before cloud AI requests, offers on-computer models, and supports shared team knowledge bases with encrypted sync.
Paidelephas.app
10. Elicit
Elicit helps researchers search papers, summarize findings, chat with full-text studies, and extract data. It also offers research reports, systematic review workflows, team collaboration, and API access.
Free + paid plansFree planelicit.org
11. Exa
Exa provides APIs for web search, content extraction, deep research, and scheduled monitoring. AI agents can retrieve relevant excerpts, generate structured results with citations, and access specialized data providers.
Free + paid plansFree planexa.ai
12. Explainpaper
Explainpaper simplifies research papers with AI explanations of highlighted text, adjustable complexity, and follow-up questions. Pro adds advanced models, paper summaries, saved highlights, and explanations of graphs, figures, and equations.
Free + paid plansFree planwww.explainpaper.com
13. genei
Genei uses AI to summarise PDFs and webpages, extract keywords, and answer research questions. It also offers document organisation, notes, citation management, and a Chrome extension for summarising or saving webpages.
Paidwww.genei.io
14. Gist AI
Gist AI is a free Chrome extension powered by ChatGPT that summarizes websites, YouTube videos, and online or local PDFs without content-length limits. Explore source details or jump to relevant moments in videos.
Freewww.gistai.tech
15. GummySearch
GummySearch helped users discover and analyze Reddit communities to validate startup ideas, research markets, plan content, and find leads. It offered keyword tracking and AI insights. The service closed on November 30, 2025.
Free + paid plansFree plangummysearch.com
16. Keenious
Keenious helps you search about 174 million publications, explore visual topic maps, and understand difficult passages with AI explanations. It supports research discovery on the web and through Word and Google Docs add-ins.
Free + paid plansFree plankeenious.com
17. LAION
LAION is a nonprofit research network sharing open datasets, models, training code, and evaluation tools to support reproducible machine-learning research and public education.
Open sourcelaion.ai
18. Libraire
Libraire creates book summaries from pasted text, PDFs, or a title and author in five styles. Save briefs in a private library, export Markdown, translate them, or turn them into narrated audio, two-host podcasts, and short videos.
Paidlibraire.ai
19. Litmaps
Litmaps helps researchers find relevant papers, visualize connections between articles, collaborate with others, and receive alerts about new literature. Free, Pro, and Team plans offer different search and mapping limits.
Free + paid plansFree planwww.litmaps.com
20. Metaphor
Provides APIs for web search, page content extraction, deep research, and scheduled monitoring. AI agents can retrieve relevant excerpts and structured results with citations, with free monthly credits and usage-based paid plans.
Free + paid plansFree planmetaphor.systems
21. RabbitHoles AI
Slashspace brings AI chats, PDFs, videos and notes onto an infinite desktop canvas. Branch conversations, compare models side by side and coordinate agents using your own API keys, subscriptions or local models.
22. Rayyan
Rayyan helps research teams organize references, remove duplicates, screen studies, extract data, and assess risk of bias. It combines AI-assisted workflows, collaboration, and PRISMA reporting for systematic reviews.
Free + paid plansFree planwww.rayyan.ai
23. Recall
Recall turns saved videos, podcasts, articles, PDFs, and notes into a connected AI knowledge base. It summarizes and auto-tags content, lets you chat with your sources, and supports learning through quizzes and spaced repetition.
Free + paid plansFree planwww.getrecall.ai
24. Scholarcy
Scholarcy turns papers, textbooks and videos into interactive summary flashcards. It helps users identify key findings, annotate texts, organize research libraries and export summaries and bibliographies.
Free + paid plansFree planwww.scholarcy.com
25. SciSummary
SciSummary creates structured summaries of scientific papers, compares and synthesizes multiple studies, and helps interpret figures. Researchers can organize papers with folders and tags and search their research library.
Paidscisummary.com
26. Sourcely
Sourcely uses AI to find academic sources from pasted text across over 200 million papers. It offers source summaries, credibility checks, search filters, source chat, a citation library, and reference exports in 700+ styles.
Free + paid plansFree planwww.sourcely.net
27. SummaryTube.com
SummaryTube turns YouTube videos into AI summaries. Its Chrome extension is free to install, while Pro offers 1,000 monthly credits, unlimited video length, key moments, transcripts, Q&A, top comments and no ads.
Free + paid plansFree plansummarytube.com
28. Undermind - AI-Powered Scientific
Undermind searches scientific literature, collects relevant papers, and analyzes full texts and figures. It creates tailored research reports with verified citations and supports shared workspaces and connections to AI agents.
Free + paid plansFree planundermind.ai
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