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Free AI research tools
26 research & search tools with a free plan, free tier or free open-source version. Research & Search tools whose official pricing page shows a free plan or free tier, plus open-source projects. Free plans usually have limits on usage, features or commercial use, so check each one before relying on it.
How to read this page. The tools are grouped by category and are not ranked. Pricing labels come from vendors' own pages when we could confirm them. Always verify plans and limits on the vendor's site.
Research & Search (26)
| Tool | What it does | Pricing | Link |
|---|---|---|---|
| Anara | AI research workspace, formerly Unriddle, for reading, searching and writing with papers and documents. | Freemium | Official site |
| Andi | AI search assistant that gives short answers with sources instead of a list of links. | Free | Official site |
| AskYourPDF | AI chatbot for asking questions about uploaded PDF files. | Freemium | Official site |
| Consensus | AI academic search engine for peer-reviewed literature. | Freemium | Official site |
| Elicit | AI research assistant for synthesizing evidence from scientific papers. | Freemium | Official site |
| Explainpaper | Explains highlighted sections of research papers in plain language. | Freemium | Official site |
| GPT Researcher | Open-source deep research agent. | Free | Official site |
| Humata | Ask questions of your documents and get answers with citations. | Freemium | Official site |
| iAsk.ai | AI search engine that answers questions with sourced responses. | Free | Official site |
| Jenni AI | AI writing and citation assistant for academic work. | Freemium | Official site |
| Keenious | Recommends relevant research papers based on the text you are writing or reading. | Freemium | Official site |
| Komo Search | AI search engine with chat answers and exploration modes. | Freemium | Official site |
| Liner | AI search and research assistant that answers with cited sources and searches academic papers. | Freemium | Official site |
| Linkup | Web search API designed for grounding AI agents on live results. | Freemium | Official site |
| Morphic | Open-source AI answer engine with generative UI. | Free | Official site |
| NotebookLM | Google's Gemini Notebook (NotebookLM) that summarizes and chats over your uploaded sources, with audio overviews. | Free | Official site |
| Paperguide | AI research assistant for finding papers, getting cited answers and managing references. | Freemium | Official site |
| PaperQA | Open-source agentic RAG for scientific papers from FutureHouse. | Free | Official site |
| Perplexity | AI answer engine that searches the web and cites its sources. | Freemium | Official site |
| Primus | Transformer Lab's autonomous research tool that runs multi-agent projects from a research question toward a paper. | Freemium | Official site |
| R Discovery | Research paper discovery and reading app with AI summaries and audio papers. | Freemium | Official site |
| ResearchRabbit | Tool for discovering and mapping academic literature. | Freemium | Official site |
| Semantic Scholar | Free AI-powered search engine for scientific literature. | Free | Official site |
| Undermind | Deep-search engine for finding academic papers. | Freemium | Official site |
| Vane | Open-source AI-powered answering engine (formerly Perplexica). | Free | Official site |
| Zotero | Free, open-source reference manager for collecting and citing research. | Free | Official site |