rayyan.ai Reviews 

As a graduate student, I chose Rayyan to help with my systematic review and initially thought it would be a worthwhile investment. Unfortunately, the experience did not live up to expectations.

The platform has some useful functionality, but I found it less intuitive than advertised. Many advanced features require additional payments, which can make the service expensive for students working with limited budgets.

The most frustrating part of my experience was customer support. After accidentally selecting an annual subscription instead of a shorter-term option, I contacted Rayyan almost immediately. I used the service for less than three weeks and asked if they could adjust my subscription or refund the unused portion. The request was denied, and the only option offered was future account credit, even though I clearly stated I would not be using the service again.

Mistakes happen, and companies that value their customers often work toward reasonable solutions. Unfortunately, that was not my experience here.

While Rayyan may work well for some researchers, prospective users should be extremely careful when choosing a subscription plan, as there appears to be very little flexibility once a payment has been made.

Rayyan might be a decent tool if you are working with a small library of 100 records. However, if you have a larger dataset, be prepared for a massive amount of manual labor just to clean and organize your references.

The pricing policy is also quite rigid. Even if you only need the tool for a few days for a single project, the minimum subscription period is three months (one quarter).

Moreover, the 'Priority Email Support' proved to be non-existent. My urgent request was completely ignored by human staff; instead, I only received an automated response from an AI bot with links to generic and unhelpful articles.

I cannot recommend this tool. Between the lack of customer support and the restricted functionality that still forces you to manually sort through thousands of records, you end up paying for work you still have to do yourself.

The app makes paper screening easy and I would 100% recommend it for that. However, the Student membership features were not delivered as advertised. After paying CHF 25.–, mobile app access was unlocked, but I did not receive unlimited features (e.g. tracking collaborators’ progress) or priority email support, despite these being advertised. It took 3 emails and 24 days to receive a reply, which stated that these features are not included in the Student plan. Regardless of whether this comes from inconsistent advertising, I paid based on what was shown in the app. Kinda useless to pay if the only additional tools are not delivered