--- title: "SumizAI vs Chat Lens" url: "https://sumizai.com/alternative-to/sumizai-alternative-to-chat-lens.html" date: "2026-08-14T00:00:00+02:00" modified: "2026-08-14T00:00:00+02:00" description: "Looking for a Chat Lens alternative? SumizAI and Chat Lens side by side: price, licence, platforms and what each one actually does." tags: ["ai notes", "sumizai", "chat-lens", "alternative to Chat Lens"] --- # SumizAI vs Chat Lens Looking for a Chat Lens alternative? SumizAI and Chat Lens side by side: price, licence, platforms and what each one actually does. ## 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. **Key facts** - Price: Freemium - License: Proprietary ## 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. ## 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. Full side-by-side comparison table and pricing: [https://sumizai.com/alternative-to/sumizai-alternative-to-chat-lens.html](https://sumizai.com/alternative-to/sumizai-alternative-to-chat-lens.html)