OpenRead vs Semantic Scholar
Price, platforms and features side by side. The table says where each price was read and when.
OpenRead
AI platform for searching, reading and comparing papers
Free plan
Semantic Scholar
Free AI-powered search engine for scientific literature
Free
Where they differ
- Only Semantic Scholar lists a browser extension.
- OpenRead also covers chat assistant and notes.
- Semantic Scholar also covers citations.
In commonFree planWebAI searchResearch
At a glance
| OpenRead | Semantic Scholar | |
|---|---|---|
| Pricing | Free plan | Free |
| Starts at | Not published | Free |
| Free plan | The homepage shows a Free label on its AI tools and a separate Pro option; what the free plan includes could not be confirmed. | Entirely free, with no paid plans. Papers can be read without an account; a free account adds a library, email alerts, Research Feeds and author page claiming. |
| Free trial | None listed | None listed |
| Web | ||
| Browser extension | ||
| Made by | OpenRead, Inc. | Allen Institute for AI (Ai2) |
| Price read from | Not confirmed | semanticscholar.org |
| Checked | Oct 5, 2026 | Oct 5, 2026 |
Who each one suits
OpenRead
- Readers who want paper search, questions and notes in one place
- Comparing the findings of several papers side by side
- Keeping up with newly published and trending papers
Semantic Scholar
- Free literature search across all fields of science
- Keeping up with new papers through alerts and recommendation feeds
- Developers who need open scholarly data through an API
Worth knowing
OpenRead
- Plan prices and free-plan limits are not recorded: the pricing and FAQ pages were behind a browser security check when this entry was researched.
- The homepage links only to the web app; it lists no mobile apps or browser extension.
Semantic Scholar
- There is no smartphone app; the FAQ says the site is designed to be used in mobile browsers.
- TLDR summaries are limited to papers in computer science and the biomedical fields.
- Semantic Reader is in beta and covers mostly arXiv papers, and Ask This Paper works on a limited set of papers.
- Unauthenticated API calls share one pool of 1,000 requests per second; an API key starts at 1 request per second.
Key features
OpenRead
- Paper and web search
- AI search runs over papers or the open web. The homepage says new papers arrive every 5 minutes from more than 20,000 journals.
- Paper Compare
- Sets several papers side by side to compare their findings and spot contradictions, with options such as an expert review or a comparison of frameworks.
- Reading tools
- The reading view brings together Paper Espresso, Paper Q&A, a Related Paper Graph and note taking, so a paper can be read and annotated in one place.
- Oat chat assistant
- Oat, short for OpenRead AI Technology, is a chat assistant with a choice of AI models plus web access, diagram drawing and image editing.
- Trending papers
- A trending page lists the papers that other readers on the platform are opening most.
Semantic Scholar
- Paper search with TLDR summaries
- Searches papers with filters for venue, author, publication type and date. TLDRs are very short AI summaries, available for nearly 60 million papers in computer science, biology and medicine.
- Highly Influential Citations
- A machine-learning model flags the citations where the cited paper had a significant effect on the citing one, so a long citation list has a starting point.
- Library and Research Feeds
- Save papers into folders, share public folders and bulk export citations. Turning on a Research Feed for a folder brings paper recommendations based on its contents.
- Paper and author alerts
- Email alerts report new citations of a chosen paper, or new papers and citations for an author you follow.
- Semantic Reader
- A beta reading view for most arXiv papers, with in-line citation cards, a table of contents, AI skimming highlights and on-demand definitions of terms.
- Academic Graph API and datasets
- A REST API for papers, authors, citations, venues and recommendations, plus downloadable datasets. Most endpoints work without a key.
Plans
OpenRead
Pricing could not be confirmed. See openread.academy.
Semantic Scholar
Free$0
Search, TLDR summaries, Semantic Reader, a paper library, alerts and Research Feeds, plus rate-limited API access.
