Alternatives and competitors
Sites like Academia.edu
The 20 closest academic social network alternatives to Academia.edu, ranked by what they actually offer, and the 8 technologies behind it.
Looking for an alternative to Academia.edu? The closest matches are ResearchGate, De Gruyter Brill and SSRN. We match sites by what they actually offer, from their homepages, Wikidata and a summary by Claude, in any language. Vote on each alternative and leave a short note to help the next person choose.
- Neighbours
- k = 20
- Sites searched
- 4,032
- Vector
- 384-d
- Query
- 13 ms
01 · Entity
About Academia.edu
Academia.edu academia.edu
Wikidata: open repository of academic articles
Summary by Claude
A commercial platform where researchers upload and share academic papers, build profiles, and follow others' work; reading is free, while downloads require registration and extra features (analytics, advanced search) require a paid premium subscription.
- Who it’s for
- Academic researchers, students, scholars
- Business model
- Freemium subscriptions
02 · Embedding space
Competitor map
Each alternative by how close its vector is to Academia.edu’s (x) and how much traffic it gets, how much of the stack it shares, or where it sits in the embedding space itself (y). Lines split each axis at the median. Hover for the numbers, click to jump to it in the list.
similarity × popularity
03 · Nearest neighbours
Alternatives to Academia.edu
Thumbs up if it’s a real alternative to Academia.edu, thumbs down if it isn’t.
We can’t read academia.edu’s homepage (robots.txt disallows our crawler), so it’s compared on what Wikidata and Wikipedia say about it.
- 01
ResearchGate - Temporarily Unavailable
commercial scientific social network
Very close cos 0.942 - 02
De Gruyter Brill
De Gruyter Brill | Over 300 years of publishing excellence
Very close cos 0.919 - 03
Content Blocked
online digital archive for electronic preprints of scientific papers and related content
Very close cos 0.918 - 04
Client Challenge
distributor of eBooks and other digital media
Very close cos 0.917 - 05
LinkedIn: Log In or Sign Up
1 billion members | Manage your professional identity. Build and engage with your professional network. Access knowledge, insights and opportunities.
Very close cos 0.914 - 06
Scribd: Home to the world’s documents.
Get to the source. Specialized knowledge on any topic, and answers you won’t find anywhere else. Home to the world’s documents, 300M+ and counting.
Very close cos 0.912 - 07
OSF
tools that make open science practice easier
Very close cos 0.909 - 08
Semantic Scholar | AI-Powered Research Tool
Semantic Scholar uses groundbreaking AI and engineering to understand the semantics of scientific literature to help Scholars discover relevant research.
Very close cos 0.907 - 09
arXiv.org e-Print archive
online digital archive for electronic preprints of scientific papers
Very close cos 0.905 - 10
note ――つくる、つながる、とどける。
クリエイターが文章やマンガ、写真、音声を投稿することができ、ユーザーはそのコンテンツを楽しんで応援できるメディアプラットフォームです。だれもが創作を楽しんで続けられるよう、安心できる雰囲気や、多様性を大切にしています。
Very close cos 0.904 - 11
medRxiv.org - the preprint server for Health Sciences
medRxiv - the preprint server for biology, operated by openRxiv, a nonprofit organization dedicated to advancing scientific communication
Very close cos 0.902 - 12
digital journal platform
Very close cos 0.900 - 13
Client Challenge
global publishing company
Very close cos 0.901 - 14
Zenodo
research data repository
Very close cos 0.898 - 15
SurveyMonkey: The World’s Most Popular Survey Platform
Easily create surveys and forms with AI and templates for employee and customer feedback, market research, event registrations and more. Get started free.
Very close cos 0.898 - 16
database of biomedical research
Very close cos 0.898 - 17
Studocu - Access Blocked
On Studocu you find all the lecture notes, summaries and study guides you need to pass your exams with better grades.
Very close cos 0.895 - 18
ScienceDirect
journal
Very close cos 0.898 - 19
Client Challenge
American hosting service, owned by Scribd, for professional content including presentations, infographics, documents, and videos
Very close cos 0.896 - 20
RePEc: Research Papers in Economics
RePEc is a central index of economics research, including working papers, articles and software code
Close cos 0.891
Ranked by score: the cosine similarity of each site’s vector to academia.edu’s, less a small penalty for generic sites that are close to everything. Highlighted technologies are ones Academia.edu uses too. Votes and comments come from visitors and don’t change the ranking.
04 · Fingerprints
Technology
What Academia.edu is built with, and what its closest competitors use, from its homepage’s code and its DNS records.
Built with
- Marketing automation
- Mailchimp TXT v=spf1 mx include:_spf.google.com include:servers.mcsv.net include:ma…
- Live chat & support
- Zendesk TXT v=spf1 mx include:_spf.google.com include:servers.mcsv.net include:ma…
- Email hosting
- Google Workspace MX aspmx.l.google.com
- DNS hosting
- Amazon Route 53 NS ns-225.awsdns-28.com
- SaaS tools (verified in DNS)
- Apple Business TXT apple-domain-verification=1RjRckbT2g6y1YmT
- Google Search Console TXT google-site-verification=lpjzdQ-e9XKCo3NmQ3bCXpbD1MaufmV0_gd7ObUNAUc
- OpenAI TXT openai-domain-verification=dv-dkibUtORBvVa6pP1h6f5d7RB
- Zoom TXT ZOOM_verify_Rxzrf9pJxjR7JvgdFlk0Yd
Stack changes
No changes yet. Each new crawl is compared with the last one, and what Academia.edu adds or drops shows up here.
What competitors use
Across the 20 closest sites.
- Google Search Console 17/20
- Microsoft 365 · not on academia.edu 10/20
- Amazon Route 53 9/20
- Cloudflare · not on academia.edu 8/20
- Apple Business 7/20
- Atlassian · not on academia.edu 7/20
- Google Workspace 7/20
- OpenAI 6/20
- GlobalSign · not on academia.edu 6/20
- Meta Business Suite · not on academia.edu 6/20
- Cloudflare DNS · not on academia.edu 5/20
- Google Tag Manager · not on academia.edu 5/20
- Fastly · not on academia.edu 5/20
- Mailchimp 4/20
- Salesforce · not on academia.edu 4/20
- Zendesk 4/20