Alternatives to Explainpaper
A web tool that explains highlighted passages of uploaded research papers in plain language. The listings below can replace it for an important use case. Each note says what changes if you switch.
The original
Explainpaper
A web tool that explains highlighted passages of uploaded research papers in plain language.
Replacements
Listings that take over the same core job as Explainpaper.
SciSpace
An AI research assistant for searching papers, running literature reviews and writing with citations.
SciSpace offers chat with PDF to explain difficult papers, plus paper search, literature review and citation tools, with full features requiring a paid plan.
Gemini Notebook
Google's AI research notebook, formerly NotebookLM, that summarizes and answers questions about your uploaded sources.
Gemini Notebook answers questions and summarizes across several uploaded documents, but requires a Google account and has your documents processed by Google.
Scholarcy
An AI summarizer that turns papers, articles and videos into interactive flashcard summaries.
Scholarcy turns papers, articles and videos into interactive flashcard summaries with reference extraction, rather than explaining individual highlighted passages, and full features require a paid plan.
Also worth comparing
These listings name Explainpaper as their own alternative, so the relationship runs both ways.
ChatPDF
An AI tool that summarizes PDFs and answers questions about them, with citations to the source.
Explainpaper explains highlighted passages of uploaded research papers in plain language and answers questions, focusing on academic papers rather than general documents.
Humata
An AI tool for asking questions about your documents, with cited answers and summaries.
Explainpaper explains highlighted passages of an uploaded paper and answers questions about it, working on single papers rather than large file sets.
Similar software
Related functionality, not a direct replacement.
Semantic Scholar
A free, AI-powered search engine for scientific literature covering papers from all fields of science.
Elicit
An AI research assistant that finds papers, summarizes findings and extracts data for literature reviews.
Speechify
A text-to-speech and voice typing app that reads documents, PDFs and web pages aloud.
Mendeley
A reference manager from Elsevier for collecting, annotating and citing research papers.
Consensus
An AI search engine for peer-reviewed literature that gives evidence-based answers drawn from papers.
Scite
An AI research tool that answers questions from scholarly articles and shows how claims are cited.
