Anara

What is Anara and who is it for?

Anara is an AI workspace built for research, aimed at students writing theses, academics and scientists in industry. It used to be called Unriddle and took the Anara name in 2025.

You build a library from PDFs, notes, slides, recordings and YouTube links, or connect Zotero and Mendeley. Its agent then answers questions from your files, the web or both, and each claim links to the highlighted passage it came from. It can also search more than 300 million academic papers, PubMed and ClinicalTrials.gov, pull the same fields from every paper in a folder into a cited table, and draft notes that export to Word or LaTeX in your journal's citation style.

How much does Anara cost in the UK?

Anara prices its plans in US dollars only: Plus is $10 a month per seat, Pro $20, Max 5x $100 and Max 20x $200, with Enterprise on request. The pricing page does not say whether UK VAT is added at checkout, so the final sterling charge depends on the exchange rate your card uses.

• Free: a daily usage allowance, uploads up to 20MB or 120 pages, Zotero and Mendeley sync
• Plus: a larger weekly allowance, 100MB or 600 pages per upload, PubMed and ClinicalTrials.gov
• Pro: four times the Plus allowance, a choice of leading models, OCR for scanned papers, 300MB or 10,000 pages per upload
• Max: five or twenty times the Pro allowance, Deep Search, Model Council and no upload limits

Usage is measured as AI work rather than a set number of messages. When a weekly allowance runs out you can wait for the reset or buy credits from $5, and credits bought on the web expire 12 months after purchase.

Is Anara worth paying for?

For anyone who reads a lot of papers and needs to show where each claim comes from, it can be, and the free plan is a fair test before paying. The passage-level citations and the cited extraction tables are what researchers single out, and they matter most for literature reviews and systematic reviews.

The case against is billing and support. Most of the 13 reviews on Trustpilot are one star, and several describe being charged for a renewal they did not want and then refused a refund, because Anara's refund window covers only 7 days from the first payment. A few reviewers also say the models misread uploaded documents. Checking the renewal date under Settings and cancelling well before it avoids the most common complaint.

Anara vs NotebookLM and ChatGPT: which is better for research?

Anara is narrower than a general chatbot: it keeps a permanent library, searches academic databases and ties answers to exact passages, which suits literature reviews more than open-ended chat. Google's NotebookLM is free and handles a small set of sources well, while ChatGPT covers far more ground but is not built around a citable library.

Among the apps covered here, Fabric is closer to a general AI workspace for notes and files, and Julius is the better fit when the job is analysing spreadsheets and data rather than reading papers. Anara publishes a benchmark table showing it ahead of NotebookLM, Perplexity, Claude and ChatGPT on answer accuracy across many documents, but those are the maker's own figures, not independent tests.

Is Anara safe to use with unpublished research?

Anara says it is SOC 2 Type II and ISO 27001 certified and GDPR compliant, and that the AI model providers it uses keep no copy of prompts once a request is processed. Data is stored in the United States, mainly on Amazon Web Services, and EU-only hosting is not available, which may matter for UK universities or companies with data residency rules. Enterprise plans add single sign-on and a HIPAA agreement.

How do you get Anara cheaper?

Paying yearly is the saving Anara states: it takes 20% off, so Plus works out at $8 a month, Pro $16 and Max 5x $80 per seat. Anara says it does not offer a student discount and points students to the free plan instead, which refreshes its allowance every day.