What Sidenote - AI Reading Assistant is
AlternativeTo files Sidenote - AI Reading Assistant under AI Chatbot. It is recorded as Freemium, Proprietary, from United Kingdom. It ships on Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox. The topics its entry raises are chat.
That is our reading of the record. For AlternativeTo's own wording, see its page for Sidenote - AI Reading Assistant — the facts above were read on 2026-08-16.
| Price | Freemium |
|---|---|
| Licence | Proprietary |
| Category | AI Chatbot |
| Origin | United Kingdom |
| Platforms | Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox |
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.
Side by side
| Side by side | SumizAI | Sidenote - AI Reading Assistant |
|---|---|---|
| Price | $1/month, one plan, 7-day trial without a card | Freemium |
| Licence | Proprietary | Proprietary |
| Platforms | macOS, Windows, iOS, Android | Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox |
| Category | Note-taking — AI chat into Markdown | AI Chatbot |
| Where notes live | Standard .md files in a folder you choose | AlternativeTo does not say |
| AI model | Seven providers, always on your own API key | Its description does not mention AI |
| Origin | Poland, EU | United Kingdom |
Where they differ
- Sidenote - AI Reading Assistant is a place to have the conversation. SumizAI is not a chatbot — the conversation is the input, not the product. What comes out of it is a
.mdfile with a title, a place inbase.mdand a duplicate check against the notes already in the vault. If you only want to talk to a model, you do not need SumizAI. - AlternativeTo's description of Sidenote - AI Reading Assistant does not mention an AI model. That is the whole starting point in SumizAI: you have a conversation with a model on your own API key, and the answers worth keeping become notes without you filing them.
- Sidenote - AI Reading Assistant 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 Sidenote - AI Reading Assistant does not mention Markdown, so check what format your notes end up in before you fill it up. SumizAI writes standard
.mdfiles to a folder you picked, and an unpaid account can still export all of them. - AlternativeTo lists no mobile version of Sidenote - AI Reading Assistant. SumizAI runs on macOS, Windows, iOS and Android.
Which one to pick
Reasons to pick Sidenote - AI Reading Assistant
- it already fits how you work
Reasons to pick SumizAI
- the notes you want already exist inside conversations with an AI model
- you want the filing — title, chapter, duplicate check — to happen without you
- you want the result as plain
.mdfiles in a folder you picked - you would rather pay your AI provider directly than have a note app resell the model
Facts about Sidenote - AI Reading Assistant: AlternativeTo, read 2026-08-16. SumizAI is not affiliated with Sidenote - AI Reading Assistant, and the name is used only to identify the product being compared.
Taken from the AlternativeTo lists: ChatGPT.