Search for an AI reading assistant and you'll find three browser tools at roughly the same price doing confidently different things. The category label - reading copilot - hides more than it reveals, so here's the honest map: what each of Wiseone, Recall and Sidenote is actually for, where each wins, and how to pick.
(Yes, Sidenote is ours. The comparison stays honest anyway - two of the three jobs below are ones we deliberately don't do.)
The three jobs
Wiseone: explore outward. Wiseone treats the article you're reading as a starting point. It simplifies concepts, surfaces related coverage and other perspectives, and cross-checks claims against other sources on the web. Its centre of gravity is the open web - news, articles, public pages - and the reflex it automates is "what does everyone else say about this?"
Recall: remember afterwards. Recall's product is a personal knowledge base. It summarizes what you consume - articles, YouTube videos, podcasts - into cards that categorize themselves and link to related cards, then uses spaced repetition to help you actually retain it. Its centre of gravity is after the reading: keeping what you learned from evaporating.
Sidenote: verify during. Sidenote answers questions about the document you have open - summaries, chat, explain-simply, a glossary - and pins every claim to the exact passage that supports it. Answers are checked server-side against the retrieved text and unsupported claims are dropped; clicking a citation scrolls the document to the sentence and highlights it. Its centre of gravity is trust: the moment when the answer has to be right.
Where each one wins
Wiseone wins on breadth of context. If your reading is news and public analysis, being one click from related coverage and a cross-check is genuinely valuable - and it's not something Sidenote or Recall attempts.
Recall wins on retention. Spaced repetition is the one evidence-backed way to keep what you read, and Recall operationalises it. It's also the strongest of the three for media - podcasts and YouTube summarised into reviewable cards.
Sidenote wins on verifiability and private sources. It's the only one of the three built around checked citations - and the only one that reads your work sources in place: Confluence, Notion, SharePoint and OneDrive, Google Docs and Drive files, Gmail and Outlook attachments, Slack canvases, all through your own signed-in session, read-only. It also handles scanned PDFs via OCR and answers across multi-document collections.
The decision in three questions
- Is the reading public or private? Private (wikis, contracts, work files, email attachments) points at Sidenote; the other two are built for public content.
- Do the answers need to be checkable? If a wrong answer costs you something - a clause misread, a number misquoted - you want citations that jump to the source, which is Sidenote's whole design. AI summaries do hallucinate; the question is whether your tool lets you catch it.
- Is the real problem forgetting? If what bothers you is that everything you read leaks away within a week, Recall is the purpose-built answer.
Side-by-side in one paragraph each
Wiseone - a reading enhancer for the open web: simplify, explore related coverage, cross-check. Free tier plus a paid plan around the usual price. Choose it for news-heavy reading where context matters more than verification.
Recall - a self-organizing knowledge base with spaced repetition, strong on YouTube and podcasts. Free tier plus a paid plan. Choose it if retention is the job.
Sidenote - a citation-first reading copilot for documents, wikis and everything behind your logins, with a library, collections, notes and share links. Free tier, an opt-in 7-day trial (no card), paid plans from £10/month. Choose it when the answer has to be right and the source has to be one click away.
We keep full, honest head-to-heads for both: Sidenote vs Wiseone and Sidenote vs Recall - including the rows each of them wins.