R Discovery vs Plasmid editor
Price, ratings, monetisation and update history for both apps, side by side — with what reviewers say about each.
R Discovery
Access and discover over 300 million research papers with AI-powered tools. Understand findings, chat with PDFs, and organize your academic library. Stay current in your field with personalized feeds and alerts.
- Discover 300M+ research papers
- AI-powered research workflows
- Chat with PDFs
- Listen to research papers
- Personalized research feeds
- Organize academic library
- Translate research papers
Read full descriptionHide full description
R Discovery is your #1 place to discover research literature, stay current, and read what matters faster. Built for students, researchers, clinicians, educators, and academics, R Discovery helps you find relevant papers without spending hours searching across scattered sources. With research-grade AI workflows, R Discovery accelerates every step of your literature journey: discover papers, understand key findings, chat with PDFs, listen to research, translate papers, and build a personalized academic library around your interests. We search, curate, summarize, and organize the literature so you can spend more time on meaningful research and more time with the people you love. R Discovery gives you access to: • 150M+ journal articles • 78M+ open access papers • 10M+ conference documents • 5M+ preprints • 7.5M+ patents • 8M+ summaries and highlights • 9.5M+ research topics • 14M+ authors • 64K+ journals • 120K+ universities and institutions Why researchers use R Discovery: • Personalized research feeds based on your interests • Fast literature search for papers, journals, authors, topics, and institutions • Reliable, clean research database built to reduce duplication and low-quality content • Open access discovery so you can quickly find papers you can read • Full-text access with institutional login through GetFTR and LibKey integrations • Alerts for newly published papers in your field • Summaries and highlights to assess relevance faster • Bookmarks and reading lists to organize your library Upgrade to R Discovery Prime to accelerate your research further with unlimited access for research-grade AI workflows • Ask R Discovery for reference-backed answers from research papers • Chat with PDFs and get instant answers from full papers • Listen to papers with audio streaming for research on the go • Translate research papers into your preferred language • Sync your saved papers with Zotero and Mendeley R Discovery partners with leading global publishers, societies, and research platforms including Wiley, IOP Publishing, Springer Nature, Sage, Taylor & Francis, Hindawi, NEJM, Emerald Publishing, Duke University Press, IntechOpen, AIAA, Karger, Underline.io, J-STAGE, and more. Join 3M+ academics on R Discovery, the highest rated app in this space with a 4.6+ App Store rating. Free to use, or upgrade to R Discovery Prime for unlimited premium access. Get it now! Privacy Policy: https://cactusglobal.com/privacy-policy Terms of Use (EULA): https://www.apple.com/legal/internet-services/itunes/dev/stdeula/
Plasmid editor
Read full descriptionHide full description
Import a SnapGene, GenBank or FASTA file. Every element is matched against the bases rather than trusted from the label, and each one is marked with how it was established: confirmed by exact sequence match, taken from the file's own annotation, or predicted from structure alone. 1. FOUR EDITS Replace the promoter. Add a gene. Remove a gene. Swap a part. Each one produces a finished construct, the Gibson assembly plan, and primers with melting temperatures. Homology arms extend until they are unique, so repeated sequence does not produce an ambiguous junction. Every design is re-assembled in silico before it is issued: if the product does not come back identical, you do not get the plan. 2. DESIGNS THAT WOULD HAVE FAILED QUIETLY A cargo in a FLEX or DIO cassette is stored antisense. Paste a normally written coding sequence into those coordinates and it goes in backwards. The app works out the required orientation from the cassette architecture and places it correctly. An annotated CDS is often only part of a longer reading frame. Replace just the annotated piece and your new gene inherits whatever sat in front of it — tags, targeting motifs, linkers - as an N-terminal fusion. The app reads upstream in frame, names what it finds, and offers to remove it. 3. PACKAGING SIZE, BEFORE YOU ORDER The ITR-to-ITR genome is measured and compared against the real limit for AAV, self-complementary AAV, lentivirus or adenovirus. When a design is too large, you get specific reductions with the base pairs each one saves and what it costs you. 4. PROMOTERS AND CAPSIDS Sixteen promoters covering neurons, astrocytes, hepatocytes, cardiomyocytes and ubiquitous expression. Each was read out of a publicly deposited plasmid map and carries the Addgene number and the exact coordinates it came from. They are exactly what that deposit contains - not sequence written from memory. A capsid guide pairs cell types with AAV serotypes, each with the caveat that matters. 5. EXPORT GenBank, SnapGene, or FASTA. Annotations, strands and topology survive the first two; FASTA is bases only, and the app says so before you pick it. 6. PRIVATE BY CONSTRUCTION No account. No analytics. No advertising. Your vectors stay on your device. The app works offline; the one exception is an optional NCBI lookup when you type an accession, which sends nothing but that accession. 7. COMPANION APP Gene Search, free, finds genes and accessions in NCBI and hands them straight to this app. Gene Editing is a design aid. Every construct is a prediction from the sequence you supplied, and predictions can be wrong - most often because the file's own annotations were wrong. Verify every junction by sequencing before you rely on a construct.
Screenshots
Verdict
The clearest difference is price: R Discovery at Free against Plasmid editor's $1.99. Plasmid editor's advantage is in-app purchases (none vs 6). On ads, device support and iOS requirement there is nothing between them.
Scored on Price · Rating · Positive reviews · Number of ratings · Update frequency · Ads · In-app purchases · Monetization · Best chart rank · Devices · Requires iOS
R Discovery is free to download; Plasmid editor costs $1.99 up front. R Discovery sells 6 in-app purchases, starting at $11.99 per month. Plasmid editor asks for nothing beyond the download.
| Parameter | R Discovery | Plasmid editor |
|---|---|---|
| Price | Free — better | $1.99 |
| Rating | 4.8 (926 ratings) — better | — |
| Positive reviews | 57.8% of reviews | — |
| Number of ratings | 926 — better | — |
| Update frequency | Monthly | — |
| Ads | No | No |
| In-app purchases | Yes | No — better |
| Monetization | Freemium | — |
| Devices | iPhone, iPad, iPod | iPhone, iPad, iPod |
| Requires iOS | 15 — better | 15.1 |
| Further details — not scored | ||
| Size | 56 MB | 30 MB |
| Age rating | 4+ | 4+ |
| Developer | CACTUS COMMUNICATIONS SERVICES PTE. LTD | young-Hwan Jo |
Bugs and requests
R Discovery
Reported bugs
4 issues- Home screen takes a long time to load
- Audio translation feature doesn't work
- Buttons are extremely slow
- Switching between dark and light mode is glitchy
Requested features
5 requests- Add option to view author information in preview
- Enable screen rotation for iPad users
- Add more advanced search functionality
- Allow canceling of export in progress
- Improve integration with Zotero
Plasmid editor
Not enough reviews yet to summarise bugs or requests.
In-app purchases
R Discovery
- Monthly$11.991 Month
- Monthly$24.991 Month
- Monthly$25.001 Month
Show 3 moreShow fewer
- Yearly$69.001 Year
- Yearly$139.991 Year
- Yearly$143.991 Year
Plasmid editor
No in-app purchases









