Rayyan is a web and mobile platform where research teams import references, remove duplicates, screen titles, abstracts and full texts, and report with PRISMA diagrams. Relevance ratings come with every plan, while the ResearchPilot AI suite is limited to institutional plans.
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Rayyan is systematic review software that runs in the browser and as an iOS and Android app, built to take a review team from imported search results to a screened and reported set of studies. The company describes itself as the most widely adopted evidence synthesis platform and says it is trusted by 1 million+ researchers at 30,000+ institutions across 190+ countries. Those are vendor figures rather than audited counts.
The product started as an academic project. Rayyan's developers at the Qatar Computing Research Institute described it in a 2016 peer-reviewed paper as a free web and mobile app that speeds up title and abstract screening through semi-automation. Today Rayyan is run by Rayyan Systems Inc., a company based at 1 Broadway in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
The main plan boundary: relevance ratings and duplicate detection are free, while the ResearchPilot AI screening and extraction tools require an institutional plan.
Rayyan organizes a review into eight stages: import and organize, invite collaborators, deduplicate, title and abstract screening, full-text screening, data extraction, risk of bias, and reporting.
Rayyan reports that its classifier reached an AUC of 0.87 ± 0.09 and a WSS@95 of 0.49 ± 0.18 across 15 systematic review datasets, which it reads as skipping nearly half of the remaining references at 95% recall. That is the vendor's own validation; independent results appear under Limitations.
ResearchPilot is Rayyan's AI suite, and it has five modes: Help Center, Review Articles, AI Reviewer, AI Analyzer and Auto Extraction.
Ratings stay empty until the review has at least 50 screening decisions, including at least 5 Include and 5 Exclude decisions. The count is combined across the whole team, so no single reviewer needs to reach 50 alone.
Ratings are suggestions: they are never recorded as decisions, and references that two reviewers decided in opposite directions are left out of the computation.
AI Reviewer is added as a review member, and reviews with more than 2,000 references are screened in randomized batches of up to 2,000 references created with Data Sampling.
Rayyan is not limited to systematic reviews. When creating a review, a team picks Systematic Review, Literature Review, Scoping Review, Umbrella Review, Rapid Review, Qualitative Review, Meta-analysis, State of the Art Review, Mixed Study Review or Other, and the type can be changed later.
Rayyan's own plan guide maps the Free plan to research learners, Essential to PhD students and postdocs, Advanced to professionals, Business to research departments and Enterprise to institutions.
Two eligibility limits also apply. Users must be 18 years of age or older to use Rayyan under its Terms of Service. The privacy policy states that the Services are designed for users in the United States, EEA and UK, even though the company reports users in 190+ countries.
Rayyan pricing is shown in a quarterly and an annual view; only the Essential and Advanced prices change between them, and the institutional plans are billed annually in both. Prices below are in US dollars as listed on September 28, 2026.
| Plan | Listed price | Active reviews | Free Reviewers | Notable additions |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Free | $0 | 3 | 2 | 1 sample, duplicate detection, AI relevance predictions, limited mobile access |
| Essential | $8.33 per month, billed quarterly, or $4.99 per seat per month, billed annually | 3 | 5 | PRISMA diagrams, auto-resolve duplicates, unlimited mobile access, bulk actions, programmable shortcuts, dark theme |
| Advanced | $13.33 per month, billed quarterly, or $8.33 per seat per month, billed annually | 9 | 10 | Unlimited samples, AI PICO extraction, priority support |
| Business / Academic | $41.67 per license per month, billed annually, from 5 licenses ($2,500.00) | 50 org-wide | 250 | ResearchPilot, team dashboard, workspace roles |
| Enterprise | Custom | Unlimited | Not stated | Unlimited viewers, SSO / SAML, API, dedicated support |
The page advertises savings of up to 40% on annual billing. The quarterly figures are printed without the "per seat" wording used in the annual view, and Business carries a note that discounts are available for academics. ResearchPilot features beyond Help Center Mode are only available on institutional plans with ResearchPilot enabled.
Institutional plans cannot be bought online and are arranged through Rayyan's sales team, while Individual plans are self-serve, paid by card only and renew automatically by default. Upgrades are prorated for the remaining period, and downgrades take effect at the end of the current billing cycle.
Cancellation terms are described differently in two places. The Terms of Service say a membership must be cancelled 30 days before the renewal date to avoid the next charge, payments are non-refundable with no credit for partly used periods, and access continues until the paid period ends. The help center says cancelling stops renewal immediately and takes effect at the end of the billing cycle, after which the account moves to the Free plan. It adds that data is never deleted when a subscription ends, but any review no member opens for 30 days is archived automatically.
Peer-reviewed comparisons are the clearest evidence of which tools researchers weigh against Rayyan, and they measure different jobs.
Neither study tested ResearchPilot's AI modes.
No peer-reviewed evaluation of AI Reviewer, AI Analyzer or Auto Extraction was found as of September 28, 2026, so accuracy figures for those modes are not available here.
Yes. The Free plan costs $0 and includes three active reviews, two free Reviewers and AI relevance predictions, with mobile screening capped at 100 decisions.
It is part of ResearchPilot, which requires a Business/Academic or Enterprise plan with ResearchPilot enabled.
The vendor reports an AUC of 0.87; independent studies found high sensitivity with low specificity, and a 21% false-negative rate in one title-screening test.
The account returns to the Free plan at the end of the billing cycle. Data is kept, but reviews left unopened for 30 days are archived.
