Papyrus vs SA_agent
Price, ratings, monetisation and update history for both apps, side by side — with what reviewers say about each.
Papyrus
This native research workspace allows users to read, annotate, organize, and cite PDFs. It offers features for writing directly on pages with Apple Pencil, taking notes beside sources, and organizing research into themed notebooks. The app facilitates turning reading into writing by grouping papers for manuscripts and managing projects.
- Read and annotate PDFs
- Write on pages with Apple Pencil
- Take Markdown notes beside sources
- Organize research into themed notebooks
- Group papers for manuscript projects
- Search full text and annotations
- Import PDFs and BibTeX/RIS files
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Papyrus is a native research workspace for reading, annotating, organizing, and citing PDFs — built for iPad, iPhone, and Mac. READ AND ANNOTATE Open a paper in a fast built-in reader. Highlight, underline, and mark up pages, and every highlight stays searchable and linked back to its source. Bookmark a page as you go, and pick the paper up later from a Reading card that remembers where you stopped. On iPad, a References tab looks up the open paper's reference list and related work, so you can follow a citation trail and add what matters to your library without leaving the page. WRITE ON THE PAGE WITH APPLE PENCIL Mark up a PDF directly on iPad — annotate a proof, sketch beside a figure, work a derivation out in the margin. Your ink belongs to the paper and travels with it, encrypted, to your other devices. NOTES BESIDE THE SOURCE Keep Markdown notes next to each paper: headings, tables, code blocks, LaTeX math, and [[note]] cross-references. Notes stay with the paper and export as PDF when you need to share them. NOTEBOOKS Gather notes from across your library onto themed shelves — a topic, a chapter you're drafting, a reading group. Filing a note copies nothing and moves nothing: it still belongs to its paper, still says which paper that is, and one tap takes you there and back. A note can sit on several shelves at once. Fill a new shelf from what you've already written, search it by a note's text or by the paper behind it, order it four ways — including oldest paper first, which reads your own notes forward through the literature — and export a whole shelf as one Markdown document. All Notes lists everything you've written in one place, filed or not. ORGANIZE THE WAY YOU THINK Folders — a paper can live in several — plus tags, star ratings, and seven colored flags you can name yourself, each with its own shape so they stay tellable apart at a glance. Smart Collections keep themselves current from rules you set, including flag rules. Review Duplicates finds look-alike papers and merges each set after you confirm, combining tags, folders, projects, notes, and highlights. FIND ANYTHING Search titles, authors, notes, and highlights — or the full text inside your PDFs. TURN READING INTO WRITING Projects are where a reading pile becomes a manuscript. Group the papers behind a chapter or article, give each one a role, and capture evidence — claims, quotes, and your own interpretation — tied back to the source paper and page. Write the project note from a template (related work, method comparison, experiment plan, thesis chapter, reviewer response), keep its revision history, and run a preflight that catches missing citation keys and metadata gaps before you export. Export a bundle with Markdown, a BibTeX bibliography, and the PDFs. IMPORT AND CITE Bring in PDFs, whole folders, or BibTeX and RIS files — including libraries exported from Mendeley and Zotero. Papyrus looks up metadata by DOI or arXiv ID and fills in the details. Save papers straight from Safari with the included extension. Copy citations in the style you write in, and export BibTeX or RIS whenever you need them. READ ANYWHERE Paste an arXiv link, a DOI, or a PDF URL and Papyrus imports it, looks up the details, and fetches the PDF. Add a paper to Read Later and its PDF downloads ahead of time, so a flight or a commute doesn't need a signal. Ask Siri, or search from the Home Screen, to pick up the paper you were last reading on the page you left it. YOUR LIBRARY, YOUR DEVICES Your library syncs over iCloud across iPad, iPhone, and Mac. No account to create, no tracking, no ads. Free to download and use — every feature included, no in-app purchases, no subscription.
SA_agent
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SA_agent is a Safari Web Extension for researchers who use Google Scholar on iPhone and iPad. It adds local journal context to supported result pages. A 7-day free trial, then $4.99 per year, unlocks the extension. Summaries use Apple Intelligence on your device. RESEARCH WITH LOCAL JOURNAL CONTEXT • See color-coded SJR quartiles and available JCR, CAS, CiteScore, indexing, and discipline-list fields beside supported Scholar results. • Match journals on device with an ISSN hit, a result cache, a Bloom filter, a sorted prefix index, a token index, and a trigram index that checks plausible titles with a banded edit-distance test. • Search more than 35,000 bundled journals by title or ISSN without contacting a journal-ranking service. • Choose, reorder, and hide ranking badges to match your workflow. • Import a private custom journal list from CSV or JSON and display its ranks alongside bundled data. Custom datasets stay in extension-local storage. OPTIONAL AI RESEARCH TOOLS • Create focused paper summaries from Scholar results. • Choose a 30–1,000-word target and Academic, Formal, or Casual tone. • Regenerate or improve a summary, then copy it or download it as text. • Connect an optional Zotero Web API account, format up to 50 library items in APA, Chicago, MLA, or Harvard style, and generate a downloadable literature-review draft. • Summaries and literature reviews are created with Apple Intelligence on your device. SUBSCRIPTION Start a 7-day free trial in the SA_agent app, then subscribe for $4.99 per year. Apple confirms the price before the trial begins. Cancel during the trial and you will not be charged. An active trial or subscription unlocks Scholar rankings, Journal Search, custom datasets, summaries, and Zotero literature reviews. You do not paste an extension token. Earlier credit packs do not unlock the subscription. PRIVACY BY ACTION Journal matching, ranking lookup, and custom datasets are processed locally. Summaries and literature reviews use Apple Intelligence on your device and are not sent to an SA Agent server. Optional Zotero credentials are used for Zotero API requests. SA_agent does not sell personal information, collect general browsing history, or run advertising analytics. See the Privacy Policy for complete details. GET STARTED 1. Open SA_agent and start the 7-day free trial. After the trial, the subscription is $4.99 per year. 2. Enable the SA_agent extension in Safari and allow access to supported Google Scholar pages. 3. Open the extension Options page to choose badges, search journals, add a custom dataset, or connect Zotero. Availability of optional ranking fields depends on the licensed data included in the installed release. SA_agent is intended for academic research workflows. Google Scholar and Zotero are trademarks of their respective owners. SA_agent is not affiliated with or endorsed by Google Scholar or Zotero. Terms of Use (EULA): https://www.apple.com/legal/internet-services/itunes/dev/stdeula/ Privacy Policy: https://swiphtgroup.com/sa-agent/privacy/
Screenshots
Verdict
The clearest difference is in-app purchases: Papyrus at none against SA_agent's 4. Papyrus also leads on update cadence (weekly vs every 3 weeks). SA_agent's advantage is device support (5 vs 3) and iOS requirement (15.0 vs 17.0). On price and ads 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
Both are free to download. SA_agent sells 4 in-app purchases, starting at $4.99 per year. Papyrus asks for nothing beyond the download.
Papyrus ships an update weekly, SA_agent every 3 weeks. Both last shipped on October 31, 2026.
| Parameter | Papyrus | SA_agent |
|---|---|---|
| Price | Free | Free |
| Rating | 5.0 (2 ratings) — better | — |
| Number of ratings | 2 — better | — |
| Update frequency | Weekly — better | Every 3 weeks |
| Ads | No | No |
| In-app purchases | No — better | Yes |
| Monetization | Free | — |
| Devices | iPhone, iPad, Mac | iPhone, iPad, iPod, Mac, Vision Pro — better |
| Requires iOS | 17.0 | 15.0 — better |
| Further details — not scored | ||
| Size | 30 MB | 6 MB |
| Age rating | 4+ | 4+ |
| Developer | Zhenda Fu | 鹏帆 常 |
In-app purchases
Papyrus
No in-app purchases
SA_agent
- SA_agent Annual7 Days trial$4.991 Year
- SA Agent Credits$0.99
- SA Agent Credits$4.99
- SA Agent Credits$19.99









