PHD Helper vs Folio

PhD life is a lot: deadlines, reading lists, writing targets, supervisor meetings, and endless admin. PhD Helper is a completely free app designed to help you manage your research journey in one calm, organised place. Built by a PhD student for PhD students, PhD Helper helps you plan your timeline, capture what you’re reading, track your writing, and keep all the little tasks and notes from slipping through the cracks. Key features PhD Roadmap: Enter your start and target finish dates and get an auto-generated timeline. Customise it with tasks, track progress, see if you’re ahead/behind, and use a countdown to stay motivated. Share with your supervisor: Export your roadmap or share it through the app so your supervisor can view it. Reading Library: Add papers and documents, tag what’s useful, take notes, and keep your sources organised. Automatic Harvard referencing: Generate Harvard references automatically and export a reference list. Writing Tracker: Time your writing sessions, add time manually if you forgot, and view stats like your top writing days and streaks. To-Dos (PhD admin included): Capture university tasks and classify them so you always know what they relate to. Brain Dump: Save ideas, paper titles, supervisor notes and more. Add images/screenshots, and capture voice notes with transcription. Profile & data control: Stay in control of your data and delete your account when you’re done. Pricing Free. No subscription required. If you want a clearer plan, a cleaner reading workflow, and a simple way to track your writing — PhD Helper is here to help.

Folio turns staying current with research into something you actually look forward to. Instead of cluttered tables and endless tabs, you get one paper per screen — swipe up for the next, just like your favorite feed. Pulled live from the open-access world: arXiv, bioRxiv, medRxiv, OpenAlex, Europe PMC, and Semantic Scholar. Whether you're a researcher, a grad student, or just science-curious, Folio meets you where your attention already is. WHY FOLIO • One paper at a time - a calm, full-screen feed instead of noisy lists • Real coverage - millions of preprints and papers across physics, biology, medicine, CS, and beyond • Math that renders - equations display properly, not as broken symbols • Save & tag - build your own library and organize it your way • Tune your feed - pick the sources and topics you care about • Fast and private - your library and settings live on your device, no account required OPTIONAL AI (BETA) Want a hand making sense of a paper? Folio's optional AI features can: • Summarize at your level - explain-like-I'm-12, standard, or expert • Ask the paper - get answers grounded in the abstract • Translate - read papers in your language • Synthesize - pull themes across a set of papers AI is completely optional and off by default. The whole app works without it. During the beta, AI runs on your own Anthropic Claude API key, stored only on your device — there's no subscription and nothing to buy inside the app. NO ADS. NO TRACKING. NO ACCOUNT. Folio doesn't sell your data and doesn't show ads. Your saved papers, tags, and settings stay on your device. Science moves fast. Folio helps you keep up - one swipe at a time.