Heuristica

Reading a pile of papers, videos and web pages just to understand one topic takes hours, and Heuristica cuts that down by turning a subject into a visual concept map.

Heuristica is an AI mind mapping and research tool for students, researchers and writers who want to explore a topic and see how its ideas connect.

The free plan covers basic concept mapping on Llama 3 (70B), with limited functionality and only a few saved maps.

The Professional plan costs $6.99 a month and raises the limit to 100 saved maps.

It also lets you choose among models from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, DeepSeek and others, and pulls in sources from Wikipedia, arXiv, PubMed, Semantic Scholar, YouTube, podcasts and news links.

You can upload your own PDFs and chat with a finished map.

Paid features go past mapping.

Heuristica can write summaries, essays and blog posts, make flashcards and quizzes, and adjust the expertise level of its answers.

Custom prompts and prompt buttons are included too.

The free tier is a fair test, but most of the research tools sit behind the paid plan.