SumizAI vs Chat Lens

What Chat Lens is

What Chat Lens is

Chat Lens is a Chrome extension that brings all your AI conversations together in one place. Search across ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Grok, and Perplexity simultaneously, with automatic categorization powered by the proprietary Yellow Algorithm. Instead of remembering which specific AI tool hosted a given conversation from weeks ago, a user searches across all platforms at once from a single, unified interface.

A freemium model lets people try basic search for free, while a paid subscription presumably unlocks the full power of the proprietary categorization algorithm and support for handling more conversations at once. Being limited to a Chrome extension means Chat Lens targets Google browser users who rely on several competing AI tools at the same time, an increasingly common pattern among professionals testing different models for different tasks.

Addressing the problem of AI conversations scattered across multiple platforms is especially timely given where the market stands right now, with users increasingly relying on several different chatbots at once — one for coding, another for research, yet another for writing — which, without a tool like Chat Lens, leads to knowledge fragmentation that's unrecoverable without separately searching each platform's history on its own.

A consultant using ChatGPT for brainstorming, Claude for drafting documents, and Perplexity for market research all at once, using Chat Lens to quickly find a specific conversation from a month ago, still runs into a limitation — the ability to find a conversation doesn't automatically extract its key conclusions in a form ready to reuse in a new context or a new project.

SumizAI complements Chat Lens exactly at that point: after finding the right conversation via Chat Lens, its key conclusions can be saved as ai notes in a local Markdown file, creating a third layer of organization beyond search itself — not just finding a conversation, but extracting the essence worth remembering long-term. A consultant handling multiple clients at once ends up with ai notes per client or project, independent of which specific AI tool actually hosted a given conversation.

These tools complement each other: Chat Lens lets you find a specific conversation among every AI platform a user relies on, while SumizAI ensures the key conclusions from found conversations survive as ai notes organized according to the user's own needs, not according to which AI tool the information originally came from.

Combining these two tools creates a complete workflow for working across multiple AI platforms at once: Chat Lens finds, and these notes in SumizAI preserve and organize what's worth remembering, regardless of how many different chatbots a user tests in a given month.

A marketing team testing several AI models at once for generating campaign content, using Chat Lens to compare which model produced the best result for a similar brief a few weeks earlier, gains even more when the conclusions from such comparisons are systematically saved as these notes. Instead of relying solely on individual team members' memory of which AI model performed best for a given type of task, the team builds a shared, searchable collection of these notes documenting those observations, available to any new team member from day one.

That is our reading of the record. For AlternativeTo's own wording, see its page for Chat Lens — the facts above were read on 2026-08-16.

Chat Lens in depth

A search box for chat histories you do not own

Chat Lens exists because assistant vendors treat conversation history as a per-product silo. If you ask ChatGPT something on Monday, Claude something related on Wednesday and Perplexity a follow-up on Friday, there is no single place to look for any of it, and the built-in search inside each service is slow and scoped only to itself. The extension's answer is to index those conversations locally and put the results under the prompt box you are already typing in. There is no separate search interface to open: press Tab inside a supported chat page, type, use the arrow keys to move through matches, press Enter to jump to one, Escape to dismiss. The vendor's own framing is that this is Cmd+F extended across every assistant you use, and the whole interaction is designed so your hands never leave the keyboard.

The extension is published by Worksian, a small outfit whose stated aim is building narrow productivity tools that remove friction rather than adding features. The Chrome Web Store lists the publisher as Ethan Blackmoor with a Gmail contact address, declares the developer a non-trader for European Union purposes — a status that means EU consumer contract rights do not apply to purchases — and points support at a Discord invite. This is a one-product, small-team operation, and the numbers reflect that: at version 2.12.1, last updated 21 July 2026, the listing shows 339 users and a 4.8 average built on six ratings. The download weighs 1.93 MiB and the interface is English only.

What it actually does inside a chat page

Instant search is the core, covering messages rather than just conversation titles. Around it sit several smaller features that together define the product. A prompt library stores reusable prompts and offers them back with a single keystroke, so a phrasing that works can be recalled instead of retyped. Bookmarks are keyword-based rather than folder-based: you tag a conversation with a word, type that word later, and land on the thread — closer to a jump-to-definition than to a bookmarks bar. A media and files view collects images, attachments and generated output into one gallery, though the store listing is explicit that this currently works on some services and not all of them. Response notifications tell you when a long generation has finished in a background tab, which matters when you have fanned a question out to three assistants at once.

The most interesting group is labelled Smart Suggestions and marked beta. Three behaviours are described: detecting that you have asked essentially the same question before and pointing you at the earlier answer; noticing that a conversation has drifted from its original topic and proposing you start a fresh one; and surfacing an earlier conversation that is relevant to what you are typing now. These are the features that distinguish the product from a plain search index — they treat the history as something to be consulted proactively rather than only when you go looking. They are also the features most likely to misfire, and the vendor's beta label is an honest signal about that.

One claim in the AlternativeTo entry deserves a caveat. The directory description credits automatic categorisation to a proprietary "Yellow Algorithm" and speaks of full-text semantic search with contextual understanding. Neither the current store listing nor the vendor's own site repeats that name or claims semantic embedding-based retrieval; the language there is keyword, question and topic search. The directory entry was created on 23 January 2026 and has not been touched since, and the extension has clearly moved several versions past it, so where the two disagree the vendor's current material is the safer guide.

Where the data lives, and what leaves the machine

This is the part worth reading closely, because it is both the product's main selling point and the place where two official documents pull in different directions. The privacy policy, last revised on 8 April 2026, is unusually specific: messages, titles, timestamps and cached media are held on the device in the browser's own storage, using IndexedDB together with the Origin Private File System, and conversation content is never uploaded. Media files needed for the gallery are downloaded and cached locally. A backup and restore feature writes an export to a local file that the developer says it has no access to, and deleting everything is a matter of clearing storage from the extension's settings or simply uninstalling, which removes the associated storage automatically.

The extension does make network calls, and the policy enumerates them rather than glossing over them. One is to a Cloudflare Worker under the developer's account, which serves remote configuration — chiefly hotfixes to the CSS selectors the extension uses to read each chat site's DOM, since those break whenever a vendor redesigns — and receives only the extension's version number. The other is licensing, proxied to Polar.sh, the payment provider: a license key plus a randomly generated device identifier for activation, and a Polar customer ID and email address for subscription checks. Those identifiers are kept locally and sent back only to Polar. The policy states plainly that there is no analytics, no telemetry, no crash reporting, no browsing tracking outside supported chat sites, and no use of conversation data for model training.

Against that, the Chrome Web Store data disclosure for the same extension lists three categories of handled data: personally identifiable information, personal communications and website content. Those declarations are about what an extension touches rather than what it transmits, and reading conversations on the page is exactly what this tool is for, so the two statements are reconcilable — but a cautious buyer should notice that the store form says the extension handles personal communications while the marketing says one hundred percent private. The permission list explains the surface area: storage and unlimitedStorage for the local index, activeTab and scripting to inject readers into chat pages, alarms for the periodic config refresh, contextMenus for right-click actions, downloads for backups, host permissions for each of the eighteen-plus supported sites, and — the one that will give some people pause — cookies, needed to fetch media from services that require an authenticated session, such as Google's.

Coverage and cost

The privacy policy names ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Grok, Perplexity, DeepSeek and Copilot among the eighteen-plus supported services and does not enumerate the rest; neither does the store listing or the marketing site, which is a gap worth closing before purchase if a specific assistant is the reason you are looking. Because coverage depends on scraping each site's page structure, breadth is also fragility: every supported service can break the extension by shipping a redesign, which is precisely why the remote configuration channel exists.

Pricing on the vendor's page is concrete. The free tier costs nothing and gives multi-platform support and media search but caps you at fifteen searches a day and three bookmarks. Pro removes both caps and adds file and media search for $3.99 a month with a seven-day trial and cancellation at any time, or $39.99 for a year. A lifetime option, presented as founding access, is $59.99 once and includes everything in Pro plus all future updates and priority support. A thirty-day guarantee is advertised alongside. Note that the AlternativeTo record's figures — a $4 monthly subscription and a one-time purchase somewhere between $10 and $50 — are approximations that no longer match the published sheet; take the numbers above from the vendor's pricing page instead.

Who it fits, and the honest risks

The natural user is someone genuinely spread across several assistants who has accumulated enough history that finding things has become a real cost — a researcher, a developer with three tabs of different models open, a writer maintaining a prompt library. For that person the fifteen-search daily cap on the free tier will be hit within a day or two, so the practical question is whether $3.99 a month or a single $59.99 payment is worth removing it, and the trial exists to answer that.

The risks are equally clear. Chrome only, English only, and no mobile story, so the index lives on one browser on one machine and there is no synchronisation between devices — the backup file is the only transfer mechanism. Six ratings and a few hundred users mean there is almost no independent track record; the 4.8 average is real but statistically thin. A lifetime licence bought from a single-developer project is a bet on that developer staying interested, and the same is true of continued selector maintenance. And a paid tier of any kind depends on the licence server and Polar staying up. None of that makes the extension a bad choice — the local-only architecture means your data survives the vendor disappearing, which is more than many competitors can say — but it is the shape of the commitment.

Readers comparing this against SumizAI should note the categories differ: Chat Lens does not talk to a model at all, it only makes the transcripts of other assistants findable, so the two can sit side by side rather than replacing one another.

Product page: worksian.dev

What SumizAI is

A note-taking application built around a conversation with an AI model. You ask a question, the answer streams back, and the answers worth keeping become Markdown notes — filed into a vault that is a folder on your own disk.

A vault is a directory holding base.md, a generated table of contents up to six levels deep, and a notes/ folder with one .md file per note. Before a note is written it is checked against the ones already there, so the fourth note about the same idea gets merged instead of added. Links between notes are ordinary Markdown links to files that exist.

The model is never ours: you bring your own API key to one of seven providers — Anthropic, OpenAI, Gemini, Groq, OpenRouter, a local Ollama or your own server — and pay that provider directly. A question sends the table of contents plus at most five relevant notes within a 24,000-character budget, and the app shows you which five it used.

Every answer kept this way becomes one of these ai notes, ready to search again months later without hunting back through old chats.

Side by side

Where they differ

• Both mention AI. The difference is whose key it runs on: SumizAI never resells inference — you connect one of seven providers (Anthropic, OpenAI, Gemini, Groq, OpenRouter, a local Ollama or your own server) with your own API key and pay that provider directly. Check what Chat Lens does with the model bill before comparing prices.
• Chat Lens is freemium: there is a free tier and a paid one, and the line between them is the thing to read before committing. SumizAI has one plan at a dollar a month, so there is no feature held back for a higher tier — and an unpaid account still opens and exports every vault it already has.
• AlternativeTo's description of Chat Lens does not mention Markdown, so check what format your notes end up in before you fill it up. SumizAI writes standard .md files to a folder you picked, and an unpaid account can still export all of them.
• Chat Lens is extensible through plugins. SumizAI is not, and that is a genuine trade: you cannot bend it into something else, but there is also no plugin to keep working after the next release. What it does instead is fixed and small — a chat, a filing rule and a folder of Markdown.
• AlternativeTo lists no mobile version of Chat Lens. SumizAI runs on macOS, Windows, iOS and Android.
• Both search. SumizAI's search reads the whole note — title, summary, body and the original question and answer — rather than titles alone.

Which one to pick