Best AI research tools
22 ai research tools in the Tool Hut catalog — compare them, find alternatives, and track the ones you actually use.
Open Tool Hut — it's free →- Perplexity
Answer engine that cites live web sources — best for quick factual research.
- Elicit
AI research assistant for academic papers — summarises, extracts, and synthesises.
- Consensus
Searches peer-reviewed research and surfaces consensus across studies.
- NotebookLM
Google's document-grounded AI — upload sources and ask questions across them.
- Audiogest
AI meeting and interview processor — transcribes, summarises, and extracts action items from audio.
- Semantic Scholar
Allen Institute's free academic search across 200M+ papers with AI summaries.
- scite
Shows how papers cite each other — supporting vs contrasting evidence.
- ResearchRabbit
Visual literature discovery — map related papers and authors over time.
- Connected Papers
Generate a visual graph of papers related to any seed work.
- SciSpace
Read, understand, and chat with research papers; explains jargon inline.
- Scholarcy
Summarises papers into flashcards with key points and references.
- Humata
Ask questions across your PDFs and long documents with cited answers.
- ChatPDF
Upload a PDF and chat with it — quick Q&A over any document.
- Explainpaper
Highlight confusing parts of a paper and get plain-language explanations.
- Wolfram Alpha
Computational knowledge engine for maths, science, and data queries.
- Glean
Enterprise AI search and assistant across your company's apps and docs.
- Hebbia
AI for deep document analysis across large financial and legal corpora.
- Undermind
Deep scientific search agent that runs thorough multi-step literature scans.
- STORM
Stanford's tool that researches a topic and writes a cited, wiki-style report.
- Iris.ai
Researcher workspace for systematic reviews and literature mapping.
- Afforai
Reference manager that chats with your library and drafts with citations.
- Recall
Summarises and connects articles, videos, and notes into a knowledge base.