Genei vs Paperguide vs Scholarcy vs SciSummary
A side-by-side look at scores, pricing and features — with RECATOOLS' ASEAN-aware verdict for each.
Genei
UK PDF and web-page summariser, still online but no longer maintained
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Paperguide
AI research workspace for literature search and systematic reviews
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Scholarcy
Turns papers into structured flashcards: findings, methods, refs.
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SciSummary
Cheap, cited summaries of research papers, with figure chat and podcas...
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| RECATOOLS Score | 5.4 / 10 | 6.8 / 10 | 6.3 / 10 | 5.5 / 10 |
| Capability | ||||
| Value for money | ||||
| Ease of use | ||||
| ASEAN readiness | ||||
| API quality | ||||
| Pricing | Subscription | Freemium | Freemium | Paid |
| Free tier | Not offered — a 14-day free trial on each plan | Free plan: 2,000 AI credits a month, limited reference manager and AI searches, and 10 Search API requests | Free plan capped — the pricing page says both 10 summaries and one a day | 7-day trial: 30,000 words of summaries, 5 figures, 100 chat messages; non-AI library features free without a card |
| Paid from | £9.99/month (Basic) or £7.99/month billed annually, academic Basic from £3.99 | $12/seat/month (Plus, billed yearly), or $19 billed monthly | Scholarcy Plus from SGD 13.99 a month, priced by country | $7/month (Pro, billed monthly), or $48/year |
| Has API | ✗ | ✓ | ✓ | ✗ |
| Open source | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ |
| Free to use | ✗ | ✓ | ✓ | ✗ |
| Users | — | — | 1m+ researchers | — |
| Founded | 2019 | 2023 | 2018 | 2023 |
| Maker | — | — | Everway (acquired October 2025) | — |
| Verdict | Genei was a promising early AI reader: Oxford-prize-winning, a Y Combinator Summer 2021 company, and genuinely useful to students who needed key points pulled out of dense papers. The core features, summaries, keywords,... |
Paperguide puts literature search, a reference manager, data extraction, a research agent and an AI writer in one workspace, and its newer Systematic Review module adds dual-reviewer PRISMA screening where the AI prepare... |
Scholarcy does one job: feed it a paper and it hands back a structured summary — key findings, methods, tables, a pulled reference list — instead of you reading twenty pages to get there. The Chrome extension is the most... |
SciSummary does one job cheaply: turning a paper into a structured summary you can check, since each statement links back to the passage it came from. Figure chat, multi-paper summaries, slides and a podcast mode make it... |
| Full review → | Full review → | Full review → | Directory listing → |
Comparisons cover up to 4 tools. Scores are RECATOOLS editorial assessments; verify current pricing on each vendor's site.