Scholaris beside Zotero, Elicit, NotebookLM and the rest
What each tool does, when another one suits you better than Scholaris, and what Scholaris does that the others do not set out to do. No figures about others that we cannot check.
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We have not measured the other tools with our benchmark, so there are no figures of theirs here and no tables of ticked boxes. What follows describes what each one is designed for, as of this review, and how Scholaris differs. Tools change fast: if something we say about them is no longer true, tell us and we will fix it.
Zotero
A free, open-source reference manager: it captures references from the browser, stores PDFs, annotates them and formats citations in Word, LibreOffice and Google Docs with CSL styles. For collecting and organising references it is hard to beat, and Scholaris does not try to replace it.
When to choose Zotero: to build and keep your bibliography, collaborate in reference groups and cite while you write in your word processor.
What Scholaris adds: reading the content of those sources (old scans, audio and video included), finding the passage by meaning and returning the citation with the exact printed page. They get on well: Scholaris imports Zotero's BibTeX or RIS with its file folder and matches every entry to its document.
Elicit
A research assistant that searches the published scientific literature, summarises papers and extracts data from them into tables for systematic reviews.
When to choose Elicit: to discover papers you do not have yet and compare many empirical studies at once.
What Scholaris adds: it works on your own library, not on a corpus of papers: seventeenth-century scans, specific editions, recorded interviews, notes; and it cites the printed page or the second of your copy.
NotebookLM
Google's tool for talking with the sources you upload, with references to the source passages and audio overviews.
When to choose NotebookLM: to get a quick sense of a small set of sources, free and with nothing to install, if you are happy for Google to process them inside its product.
What Scholaris adds: citations in bibliographic styles (APA, Chicago, MLA, ISO 690…) with the printed folio, ready for a footnote; foliation of early books and a modernised-spelling layer; verification with temporal logic; an open format (SPDF) to take your read library with you; an API and MCP, and a version you install on your own computer. And it does not summarise books for you: that is not what it is for.
ChatGPT or Claude with uploaded files
General assistants read the files you attach to a conversation and answer about them, often very well.
When to choose them: to talk, explore ideas or draft with help, over a handful of documents.
What Scholaris adds: a persistent library of thousands of documents instead of one conversation's files; citations that come from the stored anchor rather than the model, checked before they reach you; the printed page and the second; and the rule of not writing for you. In fact they can be used together: Claude can query your Scholaris library over MCP and cite from it.
Adobe Acrobat with AI
Acrobat's assistant answers questions about PDFs and generates summaries inside the most widespread PDF reader.
When to choose it: if you already work in Acrobat and asking about the PDFs you have open is enough.
What Scholaris adds: many formats besides PDF (EPUB, audio, video, web pages, slides), search across the whole library at once, citation styles and printed pages, and the text of old scans read faithfully.
In short
| If you need to… | Look at… |
|---|---|
| Collect references and cite while writing in Word | Zotero (and, for the content, Scholaris beside it) |
| Discover scientific papers you do not have yet | Elicit or an academic search engine |
| Get a quick sense of a few sources | NotebookLM or a general assistant |
| Find the exact passage in your library and cite it with its page or second | Scholaris |