ScienceOS vs scite

ScienceOS

Priced well below the usual academic-AI tier and unusually specific about its corpus - 230M papers, 800M snippets, 2.4B reference pairs, refreshed weekly. EU-only storage and a no-training commitment make it easier to clear with a university's data office than most rivals. The free tier is limited enough that serious use means paying.

Pros

• +Answers carry cited sources against a stated 230-million-paper index
• +Citation networks make backward and forward reference tracing practical
• +Chat spans up to 4,000 PDFs, with 1,000-file bulk import on Team
• +EU-only servers and an explicit no-training-on-user-data statement
• +Cheapest paid tier is around EUR 7 a month, well under most competitors

Cons

• −Figure extraction from PDFs is paywalled - the free tier is text only
• −The best model is unlimited only on the Team tier at six seats or more
• −No API for integrating results into other workflows
• −Euro pricing means dollar buyers absorb exchange-rate movement

scite

The citation-classification dataset is the moat — no other research assistant tells you a paper has been contradicted 14 times. Use it to vet sources, not to discover them; Elicit and Consensus are better at the initial sweep.

Pros

• +Supporting/contrasting/mentioning classification is genuinely unique among research tools
• +Zotero plugin, browser extension and MCP server carry the data into existing workflows
• +Pro plan includes API access to papers, tallies, citations and Reference Check
• +Backed by a public company since the 2023 acquisition, so it is unlikely to disappear

Cons

• −Classification quality depends on full-text access; low-coverage publishers yield sparse tallies
• −No permanent free plan any more, only a 7-day trial that converts automatically
• −The Assistant is competent but not clearly better than dedicated research chat tools
• −API access now requires the Pro plan, not Basic

Is ScienceOS cheaper than scite?

On published entry prices, ScienceOS starts lower — $8/mo against $12/mo for scite. Entry price is the lowest paid plan as we last verified it; what each plan includes differs.

Does ScienceOS or scite have a free tier?

ScienceOS has a free tier; scite has paid plans only.

Which has a public API, ScienceOS or scite?

scite ships a public API, as of our last verification. A public API for ScienceOS is not confirmed by us — check its developer docs before you plan an integration.