Read this article if...
you’re curious about whether Scispace is really worth your time. I’ve been using it nonstop and trust me, I’ve got some honest opinions you don’t want to miss in this Scispace review.
I’ll share the 3 things Scispace absolutely nails and—because it’s only fair—the 5 big mistakes it still makes.
Ever wondered how much Scispace really costs? I’ll break down the pricing so you get no surprises later.
Looking for better options? Don't worry, I’ll cover some cool Scispace alternatives you haven’t heard about.
Oh, and is Scispace legit or just another overhyped tool? I’ll answer that honestly, no sugarcoating.
Seriously, don’t skip this. If you just Google Scispace reviews, you’ll miss all the hands-on insights I included after weeks of testing and digging through tons of feedback.
Grab your drink, get comfy, and dive in with me!
Here’s a quick guide to everything you’ll find in this blog:
- Scispace Review Summary
- 3 Things Scispace Does Well
- 5 Big Mistakes Scispace Makes
- What Does Scispace Cost?
- What are Some Scispace Alternatives?
- Is Scispace Legit? - The Final Verdict

Scispace Review Summary

If you're in a rush, here's a quick 2-minute summary of this blog:
3 Things SciSpace Does Well
- Customer support: If something doesn’t work right or you choose the wrong plan, you can easily reach out, and they usually get back to you pretty quickly to fix things or answer questions.
- Literature search: There’s a feature that lets you look up lots of articles and papers, which can be handy if you have a big project or report to do for school.
- Refund process: If you accidentally pick the wrong plan or pay for something you didn’t want, you can ask for your money back, and many say you don’t have to wait too long.
- More on the advantages of SciSpace below.
5 Things That Make Scispace a Headache
- Terrible Refund and Cancellation Struggles: If you ever want a refund or try to cancel, good luck! You’ll end up waiting forever and talking to unhelpful bots instead of real people. It honestly feels like they just want your money and don’t care.
- Pay More, Get Less with Expensive Credits: They sign you up for pricey subscriptions, but any credits you don’t use vanish at the end of the month. So basically, you’re paying for stuff you never even get to use!
- Service is Always Down When You Need It: The site crashes all the time, especially on weekends. Imagine needing help for your paper, but Scispace just won’t work. Super frustrating when you actually need it the most.
- AI Chat and Research Tools Barely Work: The “helpful” AI assistant gives weird, useless answers and sometimes ignores your research requests. A lot of times, it’s no better than just using free tools like ChatGPT.
- Clunky File Management: If you upload a bunch of PDFs, good luck finding them again. The search is so limited, you end up scrolling forever because things stop working after a certain letter. It’s just a mess.
- More details about Scispace headaches below.
What Does Scispace Cost?

- Free Plan - Okay, so with the Free plan, you get 30 output previews, can download up to 1000 words, and have 5 bibliography downloads. It's free forever, which sounds nice, but it's really easy to hit those limits if you’re using it even a little bit.
- Premium Plan - If you’re paying $20 a month, billed yearly, you can preview as much as you want, get unlimited downloads, and grab as many bibliographies as you need. You do get priority support, which can be nice, but having to pay up for a whole year might turn off some folks.
- Team Plan - The Team plan is $18 per user each month. This one's good for groups since everyone on the team gets unlimited stuff, and you also get admin tools and your own custom domain, which bigger teams might like. But, again, you gotta pay for the whole year at once, which isn’t great if you just want to test it.
- So should you buy Scispace? To be honest, I'd pass if you don’t want your credits or limits running out fast, and the yearly payments make things pretty locked in. More on if it’s worth it below.
That’s the Scispace pricing breakdown in a nutshell. If you want more details, keep reading for my full review.
Scispace Review - What Does it Get Right?

These are the 3 things most people like about Scispace:
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Customer support:
- You can reach out for help when stuff goes wrong, like picking the wrong plan by mistake.
- Folks say the team replies pretty quick, sometimes even in just a day.
- People like that support actually listens and fixes things instead of just sending generic messages.
-
Literature search:
- If you need to find lots of articles or papers for school or work, the search makes it much easier.
- Users enjoy that the platform gives genuine references, not just random stuff off the internet.
- The deep research function stands out if you have to do more detailed digging for info.
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Refund process:
- If you buy the wrong plan or pay for something by mistake, you can just ask for a refund.
- Many folks say they get their money back pretty fast and don’t have to chase support much.
- The process seems simple and hassle-free for most people who mentioned refunds.
Here's a user talking about how BypassGPT helped them:
“Great tool! Great tool to be used for literature search! Also very helpful customer service! :)”
Scispace Review - What Does it Get Seriously Wrong?

Let’s dig into the worst 5 things about using Scispace:
-
Terrible Refund and Cancellation Struggles:
- If you ever want to cancel or get your money back, Scispace makes it almost impossible. The support team is painfully slow, and you’re stuck chatting with a bot, not a real person. That just wastes your time and patience.
- Honestly, it feels like they ignore your problem and don’t even wanna help. When I tried to get a refund, they just kept going in circles and never offered a real solution. It’s super frustrating as a paying user.
- You don’t get reminders before they hit you with a yearly renewal. Once you’re charged, even if you ask nicely, they won’t give you your money back or let you downgrade. It feels like they care more about keeping your cash than your satisfaction.
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Pay More, Get Less with Expensive Credits:
- Scispace signs you up for pricey plans, but if you don’t use the credits in a month, they just vanish. There's no roll-over, so you’re always paying for something you might never even use. That’s so unfair!
- Even if you upgrade thinking you'll get better features, you hit random limits like character caps that stop the new features from ever working right. That’s not what you expect when you pay extra.
- As soon as you finish paying, you realize those extra “benefits” don’t always show up. Missing credits and disappearing value make it a raw deal, especially for students like me trying to manage small budgets.
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Service is Always Down When You Need It:
- Whenever you actually need to use Scispace—like on the weekend for a last-minute deadline—the site seems to crash or glitch out. It’s become almost normal to deal with errors instead of getting help.
- From my own headaches, I can't count how many times I wanted to chat with a PDF but couldn’t even access my workspace. All I got was endless loading screens and error messages.
- This stuff really matters, especially when you pay for reliability but get stuck waiting for the site to work. A tool should help you, not leave you stuck refreshing the page.
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AI Chat and Research Tools Barely Work:
- The so-called smart assistant gives answers that make no sense or ignores your research questions completely. Sometimes it spits out stuff in the wrong language or just random info that doesn’t help at all.
- Even after upgrading to get extra features, you bump into limits or errors. When you try to go deep on research, it either refuses to run prompts or has weird restrictions that stop you cold.
- Honestly, you’re better off just using ChatGPT for free. Scispace sells itself as an upgrade, but the AI barely gives you anything you can actually use for research. Feels like a waste.
-
Clunky File Management:
- Once you upload your research PDFs, finding them again turns into an endless scroll. The search stops working after a certain letter, so you literally lose track of your own docs.
- There’s zero organization. Everything you add just gets dumped in, and if you have more than few files, it becomes a total mess. I spend ages just paging down to find basic stuff.
- If you’re a premium user like me, it’s embarrassing how hard it is to keep up with your own uploads. You expect better file tools, but Scispace just isn’t built for real research workflow.
Here's a review by Khaled Dabbous LB talking about their experience with the application:
“The application has enabled many features for researches such as uploading all the articles you want in a collection. But you cannot run a prompt on them. I updated my subscription to Premium to get the 'deep review' feature but it failed miserably due to a character limitation. In addition, I was emailed by the so-called CEO, founder Saikiran Chandha but I was talking to a bot (to my surprise).”
Here's a review by t from the US discussing their experience with customer service:
“Worse customer service than Comcast, or at least equal. It is so painfully slow and there are many limitations. You can upload your pdf but you cannot locate them again unless you do by paging down - but that stops at letter B. Great idea but pathetic and unusable product. Don't waste your time. btw I am a premium paid user.”
Looking for a service where your credits remain valid forever and you aren't forced into any recurring payments? Give AIDetectPlus a shot! You can also test it out for free with a limit of 1000 words here.
That wraps up our comprehensive overview. Interested in checking out some other Scispace alternatives? First, let's break down the pricing details!
What Does Scispace Cost?

Let’s pull back the curtain, shall we? Scispace throws a lot of plans at you, but honestly, you might want to think twice before emptying your wallet here. Let me break it down for you, so there’s no confusion!
Basic Free Plan
- This is the only “free forever” plan I found, and it’s honestly super limited. You get just 30 output previews, which means you can use Scispace only 30 times to check your outputs—after that, you’re stuck.
- The downloads are capped at 1000 words, which feels tiny if you’re doing even a few research papers or assignments.
- You only get 5 bibliography downloads. If you’re like me and cite sources left and right, this disappears in less than a week.
- Yeah, it has “suggestions & track changes”, “spellcheck”, and some basic support—but everything feels pretty watered down here. There’s no way you’ll get any serious academic work done on the free plan, and, in my experience, you’ll upgrade out of frustration in no time.
- This plan is free, but it almost feels like it’s just bait to nudge you into paying for something more.
Premium Plan ($20/month)
- Scispace calls this the 'Premium' plan, trying to seem fancy, but here’s the catch—you have to pay $120 straight up every single year, and if you do the monthly version, you end up spending even more.
- You do get unlimited output previews and unlimited downloads, which sounds nice, but remember, you’re paying for these each month—use it or lose it. If you skip a month, you don’t get your money back or any roll-over.
- Unlimited bibliography downloads and priority support sound cool, but in practice, customer support can be slow and you’re still left in the dark sometimes—I’ve had to wait days for a simple answer.
- This plan includes just one formatting service add-on. If you need more than that, be ready to keep swiping your card.
- To be real with you, even though you’re putting down $96 upfront for the year, if you don’t use your credits each month, they just vanish. That means you’re basically renting these features, not owning anything.
Team Plan ($18/month)
- This is set up for groups—the price is $18 per user, monthly, but you have to pay for the whole year at once.
- Like the Researcher plan, you get unlimited previews, downloads, and bibliography downloads for everyone on the team.
- They offer you two formatting service add-ons instead of one, but for a team working on loads of documents, that gets burned through really fast.
- Extras like secure custom domain and admin user management are nice if your team is big or you have strict IT rules, but most people honestly won’t use these.
- Okay, so if you have big needs, Scispace wants you to go “enterprise”—but the starter price is $199/month, which gets you just 30 articles. That’s almost $7 per article, at the lowest tier.
- You get premium features—exporting in lots of formats like JATS XML, HTML, ePUB, PubMed XML, your own template…but you have to really need all of these to make it worth that much cash each month.
- They throw in a dedicated account manager, OJS integration, and “auto-fill and correct references”. Sounds fancy, but most regular writers or researchers will never use all these high-end extras.
- This plan is absolutely wild for the price, and even if you cancel, you walk away with nothing because Scispace credits don’t carry over into the future. Trust me, it feels like you’re just burning money every month.
- Scispace also tries to up-sell you on add-ons like English Editing Service, which just tweaks your writing and fixes little mistakes. This is a totally separate cost, and it’s not cheap.
- Same for the Journal Submission Service—if you’ve got a tight deadline or complicated paperwork, they charge more to help you out, but these fees aren’t included in any of the main plans.
- If you’re using Scispace, you’ll quickly notice the extra charges piling up for just basic academic needs. It’s kind of a money pit, if I’m being honest.
- You pay for pretty much the SAME features over and over, month after month. Those “unlimited” labels are only good if you use all your credits every month. Any unused value? Gone forever.
- Honestly, the prices aren’t cheap, especially if you’re a student, researcher, or team trying to watch your budget. You’re forking over a chunk of cash, and if you don’t use all that month, it’s wasted.
- And don’t get me started on the add-ons—it’s like buying a snack, then finding out you have to pay extra for the bag it comes in. Everything adds up fast.
- AIDetectPlus lets you buy credits ONE TIME and use them whenever you want—your credits never expire, so you can save them for a rainy day without stressing about losing your money each month.
- You get features like an essay writer, AI humanizer, AI detector, paraphraser, PDF chat, and even a free LLM chatbot. And it all starts at just $9 for 5000 words. Not $9 every month—just once!
- You don’t ever have to worry about surprise add-ons or hidden fees—what you see is what you get. It’s SO much simpler and way fairer to your wallet.
- People love it because it works great for essays, research papers, and more. If you want legit evidence, check out their AIDetectPlus reviews and features.
- Bottom line: Scispace locks you into a cycle of monthly payments, with credits gone if you don’t use them. With AIDetectPlus, you actually keep what you pay for—no tricks, no wasted cash.
- Both Scispace and AIDetectPlus help with research and writing, but they’re pretty different:
- Scispace is mainly for searching academic papers, managing PDFs, and chatting with an AI about research stuff. It’s got some cool tools for finding articles and organizing your files.
- AIDetectPlus is like a Swiss Army knife for writing. It can write essays that pass AI and plagiarism checks, humanize your text, check for AI, paraphrase, chat with PDFs, and even lets you use a free chatbot. It’s all in one place, and super easy to use.
- Where is AIDetectPlus Better?
- One-click, undetectable essays: AIDetectPlus writes essays that don’t get flagged by AI or plagiarism checkers. Just click and you’re done—no stress.
- Chat with tons of PDFs at once: You can upload up to 100 PDFs and chat with them all together. It’s perfect for big projects or if you have a bunch of readings to go through.
- All-in-one toolkit: It’s got an AI detector, humanizer, plagiarism remover, essay writer, paraphraser, PDF chat, and even a free chatbot. Everything’s in one spot, so you don’t have to jump between websites.
- No subscriptions, no stress: You get a free trial, and after that, you just buy credits when you need them. They never expire. No monthly bills or surprise charges.
- Super helpful support: If you get stuck, you can talk to a real person and get help fast. No endless waiting or talking to robots.
- Great for all kinds of writing: Whether it’s homework, blog posts, or marketing stuff, AIDetectPlus has your back.
- Where is Scispace Better?
- Scispace is handy if you mostly want to search for academic papers and organize your research files. But honestly, if you want more features and less hassle, I’d go with AIDetectPlus.
- Both Scispace and Writeless AI help you with essays and research, but they aren’t exactly the same:
- Scispace is like a research buddy—it helps you find articles, manage your PDFs, search for sources, and handle bibliographies. It's more for folks who want to dig through real research and organize lots of reading.
- Writeless AI is made for those who just need to whip up a long essay, fast, with real citations already in place—super handy if you hate formatting or you’re scrambling at the last minute.
- Where is Writeless AI Better?
- Essay writing with built-in real citations: Cranks out big essays (like up to 20,000 words) and puts real, properly formatted citations in for you—no digging around for sources yourself.
- Lightning fast drafts: Can write a full-length essay in under a minute, which is awesome if you’re in a panic or just don’t want to spend all night writing.
- Undetectable AI writing style: Makes the writing look original so that AI detectors (like Turnitin or Originality.ai) can’t catch it—plus, it’s plagiarism-free.
- Where is Scispace Better?
- Research searching & file help: If you want to look up real research papers and try to keep your PDFs sorted, Scispace gives you some tools for that.
- Both Scispace and DeepAI are made for people wanting help with research or creative projects, but they do things pretty differently:
- Scispace is mainly for searching, reading, and organizing research papers. It tries to make it easier to find academic info, manage documents, and get citations with a bit of AI help.
- DeepAI is all about creativity—it gives you AI chat, voice features, and tools to make images, videos, music, and stories. It’s kind of like an all-in-one playground for messing around with AI content.
- Where is DeepAI Better?
- Tons of creative tools: DeepAI is not just for chatting. You can make images, videos, music, and more all in one place, so it’s better if you want to try out a whole bunch of things.
- Free and easy to try: You don’t even have to sign up to test out most stuff. So if you just want to play with AI and see what it can do, it’s super quick to start.
- Mix-and-match pricing: You can pay as you go or do a monthly plan for about $5 with a big chunk of credits. Great if you hate being locked in.
- Everything in one spot: You can chat, make creative stuff, and even use voice—all without switching between a ton of apps.
- Where is Scispace Better?
- Super useful for schoolwork: If you need to search for real research papers or organize your sources for an assignment, Scispace makes that a bit easier and faster.
- Reason #1: The Refund and Cancellation Drama: Trying to get your money back or even just cancel? Forget about it. My own experience was pure headache—you're stuck with slow, useless bots and it feels like customer support is just there to drag things out until you give up.
- Reason #2: Expensive Subscriptions, Lost Credits: You pay a bunch for those credits, but don't use them all? Too bad, they're gone at the end of the month. I've paid for stuff I never got to use—honestly, that's not fair.
- Reason #3: Service Fails When You Need It Most: It's super unreliable. I can't count how many times I needed Scispace for papers and the whole thing was down (especially on weekends!). And let's not even start about the AI and file management—most of the “helpful” tools barely work or just end up wasting your time.
- #1 Undetectable, Plagiarism-Free Essays with Citations: The Essay Writer here gives you solid essays that actually pass AI and plagiarism checks. It even does citations in APA/MLA, so you’re just ready to submit—no fixing up needed.
- #2 Your Credits NEVER Run Out: Buy credits, and they’re yours. Use them whenever you want. You only pay again if you need more—none of that “expired at the end of the month” mess.
- #3 Real Customer Support that Cares: This is huge. You actually get answers from real people, and you don’t wait long—usually under 12 hours. No annoying chatbots, no endless loops.
- #4 Everything You Need, All in One Place: AIDetectPlus isn’t just for essays. You get undetectable writing, plagiarism fixes, citation tools, paraphrasing, even a free chat LLM—no jumping around to other sites. So whether you're a student, researcher, or creating content, you can do it all in one spot. Just check out the menu above for all the options.
Enterprise / Custom Plan (Starts at $199/month for just 30 articles!)
Add-On Services (English Editing & Journal Submission Service)
Here’s the real problem with Scispace…
So what should you do instead? Let me tell you about AIDetectPlus…
What are some Scispace alternatives?

Alright, so you’ve seen what Scispace can do (and what it can’t). But before you decide, let’s check out some other options. Here are my top 3 picks:
#1 - Scispace vs AIDetectPlus
#2 - Scispace vs Writeless AI
#3 - Scispace vs Deep AI
Is Scispace Legit?

Short answer – Honestly? Not really!
Let me break it down for you:
Here's a review by Tainá Patiu Eiras SE expressing their disappointment:
“Service is always down or with Error. At the beginning, the AI tools ran smoothly. Now they are currently with issues, the subscription is expensive, and many times it runs into problems that make you unable to chat for the pdf for an entire weekend. Extremely disappointed!”
So, what should you use instead?
Honestly, AIDetectPlus fixes all the problems that made me give up on Scispace. Here’s how:

You get a real 1,000-word free trial (no tricks!), and check this out:
That’s a wrap! Hope this saved you some head-scratching over Scispace and pointed you towards something that actually works. If you wanna see for yourself, just head over to AIDetectPlus right here or jump right into your 1,000-word free trial. No credit card or phone number needed—just an email and you’re ready to go!