Alternatives to Asta
Ai2's scholarly research assistant for finding, summarizing and analyzing scientific literature. The listings below can replace it for an important use case. Each note says what changes if you switch.
The original
Asta
Ai2's scholarly research assistant for finding, summarizing and analyzing scientific literature.
Replacements
Listings that take over the same core job as Asta.
Elicit
An AI research assistant that finds papers, summarizes findings and extracts data for literature reviews.
Elicit finds papers, summarizes findings and extracts data for literature reviews, but it is a freemium service rather than free and is not built by Ai2.
Consensus
An AI search engine for peer-reviewed literature that gives evidence-based answers drawn from papers.
Consensus searches peer-reviewed literature and gives evidence-based answers drawn from papers, on a freemium model whose plan details are not given on its homepage.
SciSpace
An AI research assistant for searching papers, running literature reviews and writing with citations.
SciSpace searches more than 280 million papers and adds chat with PDF, citation generation and writing tools, but full features require a paid plan.
Undermind
An AI research agent that searches the scientific literature in depth and cites every source.
Undermind reads full texts and figures, follows citation trails and sends alerts on new work, but it is freemium and requires an account.
Scite
An AI research tool that answers questions from scholarly articles and shows how claims are cited.
Scite answers questions from scholarly articles and shows whether later work supports or contradicts a finding, with a browser extension and Zotero plugin, on a freemium plan.
Paperguide
An AI research platform for finding papers, managing references and running systematic reviews.
Paperguide gives cited answers from a large paper index and adds a systematic review workflow with PRISMA reporting, but it is freemium rather than free.
Paper Digest
A web platform that uses AI to search, review, read and write about academic research papers.
Paper Digest combines literature review, question answering and claim verification and also searches patents and grants, usable without signing in, though full-use pricing is unclear.
OpenRead
A web platform for searching, reading, comparing and taking notes on academic papers with AI help.
OpenRead searches more than 300 million papers, compares papers for agreements and contradictions and offers a choice of AI models, with advanced features on a Pro plan.
Also worth comparing
These listings name Asta as their own alternative, so the relationship runs both ways.
Semantic Scholar
A free, AI-powered search engine for scientific literature covering papers from all fields of science.
Asta comes from Ai2, the institute behind Semantic Scholar, and adds an AI assistant that summarizes and analyzes literature, but it is web only.
Similar software
Related functionality, not a direct replacement.
Google Scholar
Google's free search engine for scholarly articles, theses, books, abstracts and court opinions.
CORE
A search engine and database aggregating hundreds of millions of open access research papers.
ResearchRabbit
A web tool for literature reviews that finds related papers and builds citation maps.
Litmaps
A literature review tool that maps citation networks around seed papers to find related research.
Open Knowledge Maps
A nonprofit visual search engine that builds topic maps of research literature.
