Productivity, notes & research

What is the best AI research assistant for students and academics? Anara searches papers, reads your own library and answers with citations that link to the exact passage, so every claim can be checked in one click.

Anara searches more than 300 million papers, PubMed and ClinicalTrials.gov alongside your own files. Its extraction tables pull the same fields from every paper, with a citation in each cell, and export to CSV and Excel. It suits PhD students and academics running literature reviews, students writing a dissertation, and life sciences teams. It scores 4.4 on the Chrome Web Store from 7 ratings, and 2.4 on Trustpilot from 13 reviews, mostly about renewals and refunds.

Anara is SOC 2 Type II and ISO 27001 certified, with zero data retention agreed with its model providers, and stores data in the US with no EU-only option.

Is there a free AI tool for reading research papers? Anara's free plan refreshes its AI allowance daily and includes Zotero and Mendeley sync, with no card needed.

Free uploads are capped at 20MB or 120 pages per file, which is too small for long theses or books. Paid plans raise that limit and switch to weekly allowances: - Plus: $10 a month, or $8 billed yearly, with 100MB or 600 pages per upload - Pro: $20 a month, or $16 billed yearly, with four times Plus usage and a choice of models from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google and xAI - Max 5x: $100 a month, or $80 billed yearly, adding Deep Search and Model Council - Max 20x: $200 a month, or $160 billed yearly

Anara states it offers no student discount, so yearly billing is the main saving.

What is the cheapest virtual data room? Papermark's Data Rooms plan costs €99 a month on yearly billing, with unlimited data rooms, visitors and encrypted storage and no file size limit.

Papermark is open-source document sharing with page-by-page analytics and secure data rooms for fundraising and M&A. Data Rooms costs €149 a month on monthly billing, includes three team members and a custom domain, and has a 7-day free trial. Data Rooms Plus, at €349 a month or €249 yearly, adds a visitor audit log and a Q&A module. Watermarks, NDAs and file-level permissions need a Data Rooms plan. Papermark also lists US dollar prices, and it doesn't state how VAT is handled.

How do you share a pitch deck and see who read it? Papermark tracks each page a viewer reads, and its free plan includes those analytics with 50 links and 50 documents.

The free plan has one team member, unlimited visitors and no card needed, but keeps only 30 days of analytics and the last 20 views. Pro costs €29 a month, or €24 yearly, for unlimited links and 100 documents. Business costs €79 a month, or €59 yearly, for 1,000 documents, three team members, a custom domain and API access. Papermark scores 4.5 on G2 from 153 reviews, where reviewers praise quick setup and detailed page tracking but mention slow loading of large files, and 4.7 on Product Hunt from 7.

Papermark hosts in Frankfurt in the EU by default, which may suit UK firms that prefer European hosting, and its code can be self-hosted under AGPLv3.

How do you pay less for productivity and research apps? Yearly billing saves 20% on Anara and up to 35% on Papermark, and both free plans cover light use.

Self-hosting Papermark's open-source code avoids a subscription for teams with the skills to run it. Anara's extra usage credits cost $5 to $1,000 and expire 12 months after a web purchase, and its refunds are limited to 7 days from the first payment. Papermark's free trial covers only the Data Rooms plan, and extra team members cost €19 to €49 a month.