Sidenote vs Recall

It depends which half of the job you mean. Recall is built for AFTER the reading: it saves summaries of what you consumed into a self-organizing knowledge base and resurfaces them later. Sidenote is built for DURING: summaries, chat, explanations and a glossary while the document is open, with every answer checked against - and linked to - the exact source passage. If the answers themselves need to be trustworthy, that citation rigor is what Sidenote adds.

Recall's knowledge base is its own product: saved cards that categorize themselves, links between related items, and spaced-repetition review to help you retain what you read and watched. Sidenote keeps a library of what you ingested, but it doesn't do spaced repetition or an automatic knowledge graph.

Recall leans into consuming media - summarizing YouTube videos and podcasts into cards is core to it. Sidenote does summarize YouTube videos (with citations that seek the player to the moment a claim was made), but podcasts aren't a Sidenote source.

Sidenote. It reads Confluence, Notion, SharePoint & OneDrive, Google Docs and Drive files, Gmail and Outlook attachments and Slack canvases through your own signed-in session, retrieves across multi-document collections, and pins every answer to a passage. Recall is aimed at personal knowledge building across public content.

A Recall card links back to the content it summarizes, which is the right granularity for a knowledge base. Sidenote's citations go a step further while you read: each claim in an answer is checked server-side against passages retrieved from the document, unsupported claims are dropped, and clicking a citation scrolls to the exact sentence.

Both have a free tier and a paid plan at a similar price point (Sidenote Pro is £10/month, with an opt-in 7-day trial that needs no card). Sidenote's higher tiers add a stronger chat model, bigger caps, and Confluence space indexing.

Genuinely, yes - they bracket the reading. Sidenote while the document is open, for answers you can verify; Recall afterwards, to keep and review what you learned.