Sidenote vs Consensus
Consensus surveys 200M+ papers to tell you what the literature says; Sidenote reads the one document already open in your browser and cites the exact passage.
Reads the PDF, article or doc in front of you, and cites the exact line.
Searches 200M+ scientific papers and shows how much research agrees.
Should you use Sidenote or Consensus?
Choose Sidenote if…
Choose Sidenote when the document is already in front of you (a PDF, a web article, a Notion or Confluence page) and you want fast, grounded answers with citations that jump to the exact passage on the live page.
Choose Consensus if…
Choose Consensus when you are doing a literature review and need to discover, compare and synthesize findings across a huge corpus of peer-reviewed papers, with a meter that shows how much of the research agrees.
Both cite their sources instead of asking you to take an answer on faith. Consensus is a discovery engine for the whole scientific record; Sidenote is a reader for the specific document you already have open. Many researchers use Consensus to find the papers and Sidenote to actually read them.
Sidenote vs Consensus: feature by feature.
| Capability | Sidenote | Consensus |
|---|---|---|
| Reads the page or document you already have open | Yes | No |
| Large-scale literature / paper discovery | No | Yes |
| Developer API | No | Yes |
| Works on private Confluence, Notion & SharePoint pages | Yes | No |
| Works on web articles & live web pages | Yes | No |
| Citations scroll & highlight the exact passage | Yes | Partial |
| Server-side citation check drops unsupported claims | Yes | No |
| Ask across many documents at once | Yes | Yes |
| Reads scanned PDFs with built-in OCR | Yes | No |
| Lives in the browser side panel | Yes | No |
| One-click glossary of jargon & acronyms | Yes | No |
| No-login free tier | Yes | Yes |
Last reviewed: 3 July 2026.
Both tools cite their sources. Consensus is an evidence-search engine over 200M+ peer-reviewed papers, so it wins on discovery, scale, an open API and an MCP server; Sidenote reads the specific document you already have open and cites the exact passage on the live page. Both let you start on a free tier without signing up first, though creating a Consensus account unlocks its Pro Analysis features. The cross-document row is powered by Sidenote Collections.
A search engine for all research, or a reader for the one paper in front of you.
Consensus starts from a question and searches 200M+ scientific papers to find and synthesize the evidence, complete with study citations and a Consensus Meter that shows how much of the literature agrees. It is built for discovery across the whole corpus, not for working through a single document you already have.
Sidenote starts from the document you are already reading and answers questions about it in place, whether it is a PDF, a web article, a Google Doc or a private Notion, Confluence or SharePoint page. Every claim is cited to the exact source passage, and clicking a citation scrolls the live page to it and highlights it.
You are reading a 40-page clinical PDF a colleague sent you and want to know what it concludes about dosing. Consensus can tell you what the wider literature says about the topic, but Sidenote answers from that exact PDF and drops any claim it cannot ground in the text, then scrolls you to the sentence that backs it up.
Where Consensus is the better tool.
Consensus is an excellent tool that does something Sidenote deliberately does not attempt. Where it is strong, it is genuinely strong.
Unmatched research scale
Consensus searches 200M+ peer-reviewed papers, including licensed full-text content from major publishers. For a literature review, that breadth is something a single-document reader simply cannot match.
The Consensus Meter
For yes/no research questions, Consensus shows at a glance what proportion of studies support or contradict a claim. It is a genuinely useful way to gauge scientific agreement quickly.
Open API and MCP server
Consensus exposes its corpus through a developer API and a hosted MCP server, so compatible clients like Claude and ChatGPT can query its papers directly in a conversation. Sidenote has no public API today.
Sidenote vs Consensus: common questions
Read anything. With citations.
Open Sidenote in your browser's side panel and get grounded, cited answers about the exact PDF, article or page in front of you. No upload, no searching, free to start.
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