AI · alternatives · 2026
24 alternatives to arXivMax
I have a bad habit of bookmarking arXiv papers and never getting around to them. So I built arXivMax to make it easier to go through them. Think 3Blue1Brown-style video explainers (it uses the same OSS Manim engine underneath for the visuals: https://github.com/manimCommunity/manim) generated for any arXiv paper. No, this isn't to replace paper reading entirely, but it's a great passive listen in the background while you're vibe-coding/tokenmaxxing/washing the dishes. Here's one on the 2020 DDPM paper that popularized the Diffusion architecture:…
Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes.
- 1IM
As a grad student (and an ADHDer), I had trouble doing literature review systematically. To combat this, I made a website that finds similar papers using the meaning of the thing I am looking for. I used MixedBread's [^1] embedding model to generate vectors from the abstracts. I store and search similar vectors using Milvus [^2] and finally use Gradio [^3] to serve the frontend. I update the vector database weekly by pulling the metadata dataset from Kaggle [^4]. To speed up the search process on my free oracle instance, I binarise the embeddings and use Hamming distance as a metric. I would…
2024 · papermatch.mitanshu.tech · its alternatives →
- 2

2017 · arxiv-vanity.com · its alternatives →
- 3

Hey HN, I've been working on this side project for the past month. It generates a step-by-step tutorial guide for YouTube videos that you can follow along without watching long videos. Best suited for tutorial videos but can work for other videos aswell. No BS. Just straight to the point. The guides are generated from pure transcript so you don't have to worry about it being AI. It's my first project as a total beginner. Something I had to do inorder to get out of tutorial hell. Please let me know if you have any suggestions or if you face any problems or bugs. I would try to fix them to the…
2024 · stepify.tech · its alternatives →
- 4

Hello HN, Talk2Arxiv is a small open-source RAG application I've been building for a few weeks. To use it just prepend any arxiv.org link with 'talk2' to load the paper into a responsive RAG chat application (e.g. www.arxiv.org/abs/1706.03762 -> www.talk2arxiv.org/abs/1706.03762). All implementation details are in the GitHub. Currently, because I've opted to extract text from the PDF of the paper rather than reading the LaTeX source code (since I wanted to build a more generic PDF RAG in the process), it struggles with symbolic text / mathematics, and sometimes fails…
2023 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 5AT
I've been building prototypes of new AI learning tools for months, but I recently learned that 3blue1brown open sourced his incredible math animation library, Manim, and that LLMs could generate code for it without any fine-tuning. So I made a tool that automatically generates animated math/science explanations in the style of 3blue1brown using Manim from any text prompt. Try it yourself at https://TMA.live (no signup required) or see the demo video here: https://x.com/i/status/1874948287759081608 The UX is pretty simple right now, you just write a…
2025 · tma.live · its alternatives →
- 6AF
Hey HN! I've always found it hard to keep up with the latest AI research, so I built Arxiv Feed! https://arxiv-feed.vercel.app/ It's basically a feed of AI research papers + a one-liner explaining what problem its solving, etc. You can also click on any paper to get a TL;DR. Right now, I've only indexed a few hundred large language model papers, but will expand to indexing AI papers in other topics. Thinking of also adding a way for people to up-vote/down-vote papers. Would love to hear any thoughts/feedback! :D Thanks!
2023 · arxiv-feed.vercel.app · its alternatives →
- 7
X-Pilot▲328Hi HN, I'm Heshan, founder of X-Pilot. We're building an AI Video Generator for online courses and educational content. Unlike most text-to-video generator that render videos directly from models (which often produce random stock footage unrelated to the actual content), we take a code-first approach: generate editable code layers, let users verify/refine them, then render to video. The Problem We're Solving Most AI video generators treat "education" and "marketing" the same—they optimize for "looks good" rather than "logically accurate." When you feed a technical tutorial or course…
Apr 2026 · x-pilot.ai · its alternatives →
- 8

Understanding scientific articles can be tough, even in your own field. Trying to comprehend articles from others? Good luck. Enter, Now I Get It! I made this app for curious people. Simply upload an article and after a few minutes you'll have an interactive web page showcasing the highlights. Generated pages are stored in the cloud and can be viewed from a gallery. Now I Get It! uses the best LLMs out there, which means the app will improve as AI improves. Free for now - it's capped at 20 articles per day so I don't burn cash. A few things I (and maybe you will) find interesting: * This is…
Feb 2026 · nowigetit.us · its alternatives →
- 9

Oct 2025 · wadamczyk.io · its alternatives →
- 10

OpenScholarXIV is an open-source, aesthetic, minimal and AI powered app that allows users to search, read, bookmark, share, download and view summaries of academic papers from the arXiv repository. - ScholarXIV/OpenScholarXIV
2024 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 11

Built an automated system to run a deep search of ArXiv and carefully find all the precise papers that exist on a complex topic. It's different from simple RAG because it searches, classifies, and adapts based on relevant papers it uncovers, and then continues until it finds every paper on a topic (trying to mimic the human research process). Benchmarked 10x higher accuracy and total retrieval compared to Google Scholar for a median search (whitepaper on website). Also knows when it is complete, and misses virtually nothing (< 3% or so, once it's converged). Website has a free trial and a…
2024 · app.undermind.ai · its alternatives →
- 12AO
I built this yesterday to help understand papers I'm interested in. It's using the gemini 2.5 flash lite model, but you can run it yourself[1] and switch to 2.5 pro for better results. Happy to answer any questions or take suggestions on how I can improve it! 1. https://github.com/montanaflynn/asxiv
2025 · asxiv.org · its alternatives →
- 13
Evi AI▲13Explainer podcasts just for you ("video perplexity")
2025 · apps.apple.com · its alternatives →
- 14IR
I’ve been frustrated with PDFs and found arXiv HTML lacking, so I built a fully interactive paper reader. Features: • Hover references, citations, equations • Light/dark mode • Auto-generated dependency graphs for definitions/lemmas/theorems • Table of contents that syncs with scroll • Highlighting + annotations • “Copy raw LaTeX” anywhere Featured paper: Video models are zero-shot learners and reasoners (Veo 3) https://www.sciencestack.ai/arxiv/2509.20328v2
Nov 2025 · sciencestack.ai · its alternatives →
- 15
ArXivTok▲105I made this, and it's fully open source so if someone wants to contribute here you have the url: https://github.com/Miguel07Alm/arxivtok. For this project I was inspired by https://wikitok.vercel.app.
2025 · arxivtok.vercel.app · its alternatives →
- 16TA
I created this tool over the weekend because, as someone interested in AI and technology, I find many research papers on arXiv fascinating but often incredibly dense and difficult to understand due to the heavy jargon and technical language. I wanted to make these complex topics more accessible to laypeople like myself by converting the topics described in these papers into full-length books that break down key concepts, making cutting-edge research easier to grasp. You can think of it as generating prerequisite reading materials before being able to read the actual paper. Here are some…
2024 · instabooks.ai · its alternatives →
- 17BI
Hello HN, Recently an amazingly beautiful explainer was shared on HN: https://explainers.blog/posts/why-is-the-sky-blue/ I loved it so much that I wished more topics were explained that way. So, I decided to stress-test today's frontier models (Opus 4.6 in Claude Code) to generate similar explainer on any given topic WITH (almost) one shot and minimal nudging. I'm launching with four topics: Fourier transformation, scaling laws in bio, cellular automata and LLMs. I would let you be the judge, but I'm quite liking them. Some things I learned: - Prompting CC to test…
Feb 2026 · paraschopra.github.io · its alternatives →
- 18

- 19
arXiv-news▲11Hey HN! I built arXiv News (https://arxiv-news.com) – a discussion space for research papers. The problem: I browse arXiv constantly for new papers, but there's nowhere good to discuss them. Twitter is chaotic, Reddit is fragmented, and arXiv itself has no comments. So I cloned HN's design (using https://github.com/clintonwoo/hackernews-react-graphql) and applied it to arXiv. Upvote papers, comment, sort by hot/new/discussed, filter by category, post ideas/papers you've found. A daily scraper pulls all new papers automatically. I'd love to hear…
2025 · arxiv-news.com · its alternatives →
- 20RA
2018 · semanticscholar.org · its alternatives →
- 21

So, I spend a ton of time on arXiv, like probably most of you. And while it's obviously amazing for keeping up with new papers, I always found the actual searching and browsing part a bit... clunky? Especially when you're trying to quickly figure out if a paper is even worth diving into. I got a bit fed up with it, so I ended up building this little web app called ArxivLens (https://arxivlens.com/). My main goal was to make it way quicker to skim papers and find what you're actually looking for. The big thing I added that I think is pretty useful is an AI overview feature.…
2025 · arxivlens.com · its alternatives →
- 22

- 23EA
2025 · explainarxiv.org · its alternatives →
- 24
Alt▲21Most AI notetakers have a 300 minute limit. This is not enough for uni students like me, or people who do remote work. So, I made a notetaker that runs the ASR model on-device. - Free with local ASR & LLM models - No transcription time limit - High accuracy for non-english speech, support for 100 languages - Real-time transcription - Zoom/Google Meet support - No internet needed - Efficient battery usage (~6 hours on full charge on my M2 Pro) This started as a small cli tool I made for myself, then many of my uni friends really liked it, so here it is as an app! I hope a lot of people…
Dec 2025 · altalt.io · its alternatives →
Also compare
- I made a website to semantically search ArXiv papers alternatives
- Arxiv Vanity – Read academic papers from Arxiv as responsive web pages alternatives
- I made a website that converts YT videos into step-by-step guides alternatives
- Talk to any ArXiv paper just by changing the URL alternatives
- AI that generates 3blue1brown-style explainer videos alternatives
- ArXiv Feed – An easy way to keep up with AI research alternatives
Ranked by how close each launch is in meaning, then by votes. Prices were read from each product’s own site when checked and can change. Refine with your own description →