Life & fun · alternatives · 2026
24 alternatives to Last year I asked HN to do it, now I am doing it myself-JournalClub iPad
Almost one year ago I asked HN if anybody is interested to make a Web app to make reading and finding scientific papers smarter [http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1664648]. No one did, at least no one did what "I" think is the best way to approach this problem. A a few month ago I decided to do it myself.<p>Meet JournalClub iPad app (absolutely free), http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/journalclub/id443819334? I have a recommendation engine in the pipeline that I would introduce in the next update (hopefully in a month or so). I really appreciate any comments, feedbacks.
JournalClub is a free iPad app designed to help researchers and academics read and discover scientific papers more effectively. The app provides tools for finding and managing academic literature, with a recommendation… Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes. Last year I asked HN to do it, now I am doing it myself-JournalClub iPad launched in 2011; newer entries below may have overtaken it.
- 1
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 →
- 2
Paperguide▲645Discover, read, write and manage research with ease using AI
2024 · paperguide.ai · its alternatives →
- 3
- 4
- 5HB
Hey guys, I love HN! I wanted to extend the same aesthetic and community towards things beyond tech-related news. I thought it would be cool to get the same quality of community gathered around the latest and greatest research coming out. Let me know what you guys think of what I have so far. It's still early so there are probably bugs and other quality issues. If there's any features missing that you'd want let me know. ALSO, if any of you are familiar with the map of the territory of any particular field, please let me know! Would love to pick your brain and to come up with a 'most…
2024 · papertalk.xyz · its alternatives →
- 6
Rocket Journal▲218Hi HN! I just launched Rocket Journal, a voice-first journaling app designed to make reflection as easy as talking. Key ideas: Rant mode — vent freely, no judgment Reflect mode — guided prompts to help dig deeper AI insights — mood tracking, patterns, helpful takeaways Stickers & scrapbook — journaling feels lighter and fun Privacy-first — your data isn’t used to train models I built this because journaling apps often feel like “work.” I wanted something that felt like having a safe, responsive companion for those late-night thoughts or walks outside. I’d love feedback from the HN community:…
2025 · rocketjournal.app · its alternatives →
- 7
Open Paper▲289Hi HN! Open Paper allows you to annotate and understand your research papers with an AI copilot. I wanted a paper-reading assistant that let met actually dig into papers in-place while benefiting from AI tooling. When it comes to studying, I'm not a fan of the typical chat interfaces that obfuscate uploaded files and turn them into black box 'content'. Hence, I've implemented a split-pane view. To mitigate the risk of hallucinations, all AI responses come with grounded citations that refer back to the source material in-flow. Some feature highlights: - Actually read your papers in one place…
2025 · openpaper.ai · its alternatives →
- 8
Over the past year, we’ve been frustrated with how clunky it is to manage research papers. So we built Ontosyn, a modern research paper reader, with clean ui, better in paper navigation (bookmarks, jumping back up after clicking on a reference), an integrated ai chat with useful tools such as recommending relevant papers that you can directly add to your library, and, of course, library functionality to keep everything organized. We launched a closed alpha last week, and our first users are quite pleased with it. One user asked for author-based search for paper recommendations yesterday, and…
2025 · ontosyn.com · its alternatives →
- 9
ZenJournal is a minimalist private journaling app for quick logging, search, and discreet writing. Open, type, done. No prompts, titles, or reminders.
2021 · thezenjournal.com · its alternatives →
- 10
- 11
- 12
journi 3.0▲134Easily create a journal, even together with friends
2014 · journiapp.com · its alternatives →
- 13
PaperClip▲98Memorize details from papers in machine learning and AI
2023 · paperclipapp.xyz · its alternatives →
- 14
Hello everyone! I always found it hard to find new research papers outside of my usual bubble. I thought a random feed (with no recommendation algorithms) might be a fun way to explore. But I also didn’t want to waste time on completely unrelated stuff — so the idea of a fast, swipeable format came to mind. Wikitok was a real inspiration! But Arxiv and Open Review APIs weren’t as robust as Wikipedia, so I pulled the papers into a Postgres backend. Right now, I’ve indexed papers from a few recent ML conferences to see if this might be useful for others too. No signups required and it’s…
2025 · artok.app · its alternatives →
- 15HA
Hi all, I find literature searches to be slow and despite all the tools nowadays, it is difficult to map out vast areas of research and then connect my ideas to what I’m trying to do (e.g. writing a review, learning something new, planning a new project, assignments, etc). Some of my peers and teachers also found this to be a problem so I built this MVP app to help people not only leverage AI search capabilities but also go on to connect their ideas, map out research projects, cite various results and organise their “stream of consciousness” as they work. I’d love to get some feedback on it…
2025 · hexle.ai · its alternatives →
- 16
Hi HN, Would love your thoughts on Open Paper Digest. It’s a mobile feed that let’s you “doomscroll” through summaries of popular papers that were published recently. Backstory There’s a combination of factors lead me to build this: 1. Quality of content social media apps has decreased, but I still notice that it is harder than ever for me to stay away from these apps. 2. I’ve been saying for a while now that I should start reading papers to keep up with what’s going on in AI-world. Initially, I set out to build something solely for point 2. This version was more search-focussed, and…
Dec 2025 · openpaperdigest.com · its alternatives →
- 17AF
https://github.com/inoda/private_journal Built this to use myself, and I'm curious if anybody would be interested in using it. I'm also wondering if anybody has tips to make it more secure (I'm super super new to encryption and whatnot). The security is probably a bit overkill since chances are that nobody cares about what I'm journaling, but it is fun to implement from a code standpoint.
2019 · its alternatives →
- 18
I have a short term memory and i have no passion to writing but i want to learn to write something, so i need my note as my second brain, but i need not only note app, i want to freely to write something from my mind, and set some to-do list, so i decide to create one web application that fit to my requirement. And here is my final product that you can try and maybe give me some feedback. This is a free application. Access https://paperly.id for detail
2025 · paperly.id · its alternatives →
- 19EM
Yesterday I decided I wanted to experiment with different ways of reading HN. After considering a few options, I settled on a Mac app and spent a couple of hours planning/sketching on paper. This morning I fired up Xcode and spent 4 hours hacking away and I must say I'm liking how it's looking. Since the project is in its very early stages, I though that it could be a very good time to get some feedback. I've posted a few screenshots at http://imgur.com/a/rCbVN and uploaded a binary at http://abra.rm-fr.net/~fiam/HackerNews.zip If you have some free time, give a try and let me know what you…
2011 · imgur.com · its alternatives →
- 20
It's dead simple. There's no fancy interface. Basic features are gone. That's all on purpose. If you're like me, you're always writing down ideas on pieces of paper. My webapp is like that, but for the internet. Let me know if you find it useful.
2012 · ideab.in · its alternatives →
- 21AE
Right now it's a Nicotine patch for brain rot/doom scrolling. You still get the scroll, but with more meaningful content. WHERE I WANT IT TO GO: Users mark what they are interested in (e.g. AI, or Space or Whatever), and it should crawl the latest scientific articles, high quality YouTube videos, pods, present it in a format that fits you, in a nice feed. NOW: You can search for anything (e.g. "Sea Explorers" --> The app crawls Wikipedia or YouTube and pulls together a short feed (e.g. Columbus, Vasco da Gama etc.,). I'm using RAG so that I always can reference the original data source…
2025 · reelly.app · its alternatives →
- 22HN
Since I got an iPad I was looking for a better Hacker News reading experience than the one you can get using the web version. On the iPhone I use the ihackernews.com web app (and soon going to try news.yc). It's decent for the iPhone, but it doesn't scale good on the iPad. To my surprise, when I checked there was no decent iPad app for HN (i.e. lacking ability to comment or vote, no readability support and more). I anyway wanted to give a try to iPad development, and was looking for an interesting project to work on. Making HN reader app seemed as a good candidate. Over the last weekend I…
2011 · bit.ly · its alternatives →
- 23
Yeah I know I hate the name too but I wasn't about to pay up for odyssey.app. It's an open source project so feel free to poke around with it / fork it. I talk about it more on the marketing website, but a few of us have been using it for the past month and kind of fun. Obviously there will be a slew of issues / feedback / nits that come from this, but c'est la vie. GH is here: https://github.com/johnlarkin1/odozi
Apr 2026 · odozi.app · its alternatives →
- 24AA
Do you have trouble keeping up with the latest advance in AI? I've built a recommender system to bring you the latest research papers in AI. Simply subscribe to the topics you're interested in, and the app will recommend you the latest research in that topic. The app is far from complete, but I'm seriously working to improve it. Please try it out if you have time, and send your feedback to: [email protected].
2023 · research-assistant-roan.vercel.app · its alternatives →
Also compare
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 →