Unpaywall
Worth it
Confidence: High
Free, legal, and zero-maintenance . any student, researcher, or librarian hitting scholarly paywalls should install it.
New check
Comparison
Unpaywall vs OpenAlex
Unpaywall and OpenAlex both land on Worth it.
OpenAlex
Worth it
Confidence: Medium
You pasted the docs, not a product page . the product is OpenAlex, near-free scholarly metadata infrastructure with a $1/day free API budget.
| Compare | Unpaywall | OpenAlex |
|---|---|---|
| Verdict | Worth it | Worth it |
| Best for | Researchers and grad students | Bibliometrics and research analytics teams |
| Who it's not for | People wanting news or magazine paywalls bypassed . scholarly only | Sales teams hunting business contact lists |
| Privacy | No known public vulnerabilities found in the sources reviewed.11 | No known public vulnerabilities found in the sources reviewed. |
| Support quality | No support evidence in sources | Community, AI agent, office hours only |
| Public sentiment | Librarians and students praise it as a simple, free, legal way to reach open-access copies of papers.⁵ | No independent user reviews found; academic papers and a hospital library blog cite OpenAlex as a standard scholarly data source. |
| Biggest gotcha | Commercial Data Feed pricing is hidden; expect a sales conversation³ | Search endpoint runs $1 per 1,000 calls; filtered list calls are 10x cheaper15 |
Pick Unpaywall when
- Researchers and grad students
- Academic libraries
- Anyone hitting scholarly paywalls
- Developers wanting open-access metadata via API
When Unpaywall is not a fit
- People wanting news or magazine paywalls bypassed . scholarly only
- Anyone expecting every paywalled paper to have a free copy
- Teams needing guaranteed full-text delivery . hit rate is partial
- Buyers wanting a vendor with SLAs . it's a nonprofit project
Pick OpenAlex when
- Bibliometrics and research analytics teams
- Developers building scholarly search tools
- Systematic review literature searches
- Libraries modeling journal cancellation value
When OpenAlex is not a fit
- Sales teams hunting business contact lists
- Non-technical users . it is an API, not an app
- Teams needing SLAs or dedicated account support
- Buyers wanting polished onboarding and hand-holding
Sources
- Browser Extensionunpaywall.orgofficial
- REST APIunpaywall.orgofficial
- Data Feedunpaywall.orgofficial
- Unpaywall - Chrome Web Storechromewebstore.google.comreview
review
- Unpaywall - PMC (Dhakal, 2019)pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.govreview
news
news
- Unpaywall support has movedunpaywall.orgofficial
- Unpaywall security pageunpaywall.orgsecurity
security
- An open database of 31,903,705 free scholarly articlesnews.ycombinator.comnews
- Pricing Overview | OpenAlex Help Centerhelp.openalex.orgofficial
- Example costs - Pricinghelp.openalex.orgofficial
- Search - Queryinghelp.openalex.orgofficial
- Support - Generalhelp.openalex.orgofficial