There's a moment most of us have had by 5pm. You look up, and there are twenty-something tabs open across the top of Chrome, each one a sliver of grey, none of them readable. A Notion doc. Three half-read articles. A YouTube tutorial you meant to finish. Two ChatGPT conversations you'll never find again. You didn't plan any of this. It just accumulated.
AI sidebars are supposed to fix that. And to be fair, the good ones genuinely help. They put a capable assistant one click away, on whatever page you're already looking at, so you stop copying text into a separate tab and pasting answers back. That alone saves real time.
But after living with most of them, I kept hitting the same wall. The assistant is smart in the moment and amnesiac the second you move on. Close the tab, and the context is gone. The sidebar remembers your current conversation; it has no idea what you did today. For a quick rewrite that's fine. For a day of actual research, it's the whole problem, just relocated.
So this is a comparison of the seven AI sidebars worth knowing in 2026, judged on how they hold up across a real working day rather than a thirty-second demo. Quick disclosure before we start: this is published on Noted's blog, and Noted is one of the seven. I'll make the case for it at the end, but I'm not going to pretend the others are bad. Several are excellent, and for some kinds of work they're the better pick. You'll get more out of this if I'm straight with you.
How I judged them
Three things, mostly. First, does the assistant actually understand the page you're on, or are you still copy-pasting? Second, what happens to everything you do across a session. Is there any memory of it, or does each tab start from zero? Third, the boring but decisive one: what does the free tier really give you, and what does it cost when you outgrow it? Headline prices in this category hide a lot, because almost everyone meters usage with credits.
1. Sider AI - the one most people land on first
Sider is the default answer when someone asks for an AI sidebar, and there's a reason. It puts twenty-plus models - GPT, Claude, Gemini, DeepSeek behind one panel, and you can fire the same question at several of them and compare answers side by side. The translation is genuinely good, the YouTube summaries are quick, and it loads fast. Several million people use it. None of that is hype.
Where it lost me was the day after. Sider keeps no real history - no folders, no search across past chats, no export. You can have a brilliant exchange in the morning and have no way to find it by afternoon. For a tool built around doing research, that's a strange gap, and it's the single most common complaint you'll read in reviews. The free plan is also closer to a trial than a free tool; the daily credits run out before lunch on a busy day.
Price: free tier with limited daily credits; paid plans run roughly $8 to $20 a month depending on the tier and whether you pay annually.
Best for: people who mainly want multi-model answers in one place and don't need to keep anything.
2. Monica AI - the all-in-one that does a bit of everything
Monica went wide. Chat, summarize, translate, write, generate images, and it runs everywhere. Chrome, Edge, Safari, phone, desktop. It has something like ten million users and a free tier that's actually usable for light work rather than a locked demo. If you want one assistant that follows you across every device, Monica makes a strong argument.
The flip side of "does everything" is that it can feel like a lot, and the credit system is a genuine source of confusion different actions burn different amounts, advanced models drain it faster, and you can hit a wall mid-task without quite understanding why. It's an interface layer over the same models everyone else uses, so the answers aren't better; the pitch is convenience and breadth.
Price: free daily queries; paid plans land roughly in the $9 to $20 a month range depending on billing.
Best for: people who want one cross-device assistant and value breadth over focus.
3. Merlin AI - the best free tier in the category
Merlin deserves credit for the most generous free plan here by a distance: 102 queries a day, no credit card. That's not a demo, that's a tool you can genuinely run for a week or two before deciding. It does the expected multi-model chat plus standout YouTube summarizing and handy Gmail and LinkedIn integrations, and at roughly $19 a month (less on annual billing) it's reasonable value if you're replacing two paid AI subscriptions with one.
The thing nobody mentions at signup: the "unlimited" Pro plan has a fair-use cap of about $100 of usage a month, after which your account can pause until the next cycle. It's unlimited until it isn't. Worth knowing if you're a heavy user planning to lean on it all day.
Price: free 102 queries/day; Pro around $19/month, cheaper annually.
Best for: anyone who wants to test properly before paying, and content and research folks who'll use the free tier hard.
4. HARPA AI - the automation power tool
HARPA is a different animal. Underneath the chat and summaries it's really an automation engine: it reads the live page, and with a hundred-plus prebuilt commands it can monitor a page for changes, watch a product price and alert you, scrape a table to CSV, or run a chain of steps on a schedule. Around half a million people use it, the Chrome rating sits at 4.7, and your data stays local rather than on their servers, which privacy-minded users will like.
It's also the steepest learning curve on this list, and the free tier gets restrictive quickly. But the pricing model is clever: around $12 a month, or a one-time lifetime option if you bring your own API key. If you actually use the automation, it pays for itself. If you just want to chat with a page, it's overkill.
Price: free tier (limited), about $12/month, or a lifetime bring-your-own-key option. Chrome only.
Best for: power users who want to automate repetitive browser work, not just talk to it.
5. MaxAI - the fast, focused one
MaxAI is refreshingly disciplined. It does three things: summarize, translate, rewrite and does them really well, built around a highlight-then-act workflow: select text on any page, pick an action, done. It also drops AI summaries into Google results. There's a usable free tier, and it's the cleanest "quick action" experience in Chrome.
Deliberately, it's narrow. No image generation, no agents, no slide-making, and you don't always pick the model by hand. If you want a toolbox, this isn't it and that's the point.
Price: free tier; paid plans starting at $12 per month.
Best for: readers and writers who want the fastest highlight-to-result flow and nothing they won't use.
6. Glarity - the lightweight free option
Glarity is the one to know if you mostly want summaries and don't want to think about subscriptions. It's freemium and focused: quick summaries of YouTube videos, articles, and search results, sitting quietly next to your content. It won't run your whole workflow, and it isn't trying to. As a free, low-friction summarizer it does the job.
Price: free/freemium.
Best for: people who want fast summaries without paying for or learning a bigger tool.
7. Noted AI - the one built around memory
Here's the one we make, and here's the specific reason it exists. Every tool above gives you a chatbox. Noted adds the thing they're all missing: a memory of your whole session. As you browse, it quietly captures what you opened and read, and at the end you click once - "Noted Mode" - and it summarizes the entire session into a doc, a deck, or a note you can push straight to Notion, Slack, GitHub or HubSpot.
It's also a normal multi-model sidebar - ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, DeepSeek in one place, chat with any page or PDF, write in context. But the multi-model part isn't the point; Sider and Merlin do that fine. The point is that Noted is the only one that can answer "what did I actually do today?" That's the gap I kept hitting with everything else, and it's the whole reason this product is on the list.
Fair cons, because you should hear them: Noted is the newcomer here, without the install base Sider or Monica have, and it's Chrome-first while some rivals are everywhere. If your need is purely quick translations or a lifetime automation deal, one of the others fits better. If your day involves research that you have to turn into something - a brief, a summary, a deck - the memory layer is hard to give up once you've used it.
Price: free tier, with a Pro plan for heavier use.
Best for: researchers, students, PMs, writers and founders who read a lot online and need to turn it into output.\
The quick version
If you'd rather not read all seven again:
Tool | Strongest at | Watch out for | Price |
|---|---|---|---|
Sider AI | Multi-model answers, translation | No history, search or export | Free – ~$20/mo |
Monica AI | Cross-device, all-in-one | Credit confusion, feature sprawl | Free – ~$20/mo |
Merlin AI | Generous free tier, value | Hidden ~$100/mo fair-use cap | Free – ~$19/mo |
HARPA | Web automation, monitoring | Steep learning curve | ~$12/mo or lifetime |
Max AI | Fast highlight-to-action | Narrow on purpose | Free – low-teens/mo |
Glarity | Free quick summaries | Limited scope | Free / freemium |
Noted AI | Session memory, one-click export | Newer, Chrome-first | Free + ~$8/mo |
So which one should you install?
Don't think "winner." Think "which job." If you just want several AI models in one panel and don't keep anything, Sider AI is the obvious pick. If you live across devices, Monica. If you want to try before paying, start with Merlin's free tier - it's the most honest trial in the category. If you want your browser to do repetitive work on autopilot, HARPA, full stop. If you want the fastest possible highlight-and-summarize, MaxAI. And if you just need quick summaries for free, Glarity.
Noted AI is the answer to a narrower, sharper question: does your work involve reading a lot online and then having to produce something from it? If yes, the session memory changes the math, because the part you used to dread - turning a messy research day into a clean summary becomes one click.
Honestly, the best way to decide is to stop reading comparisons, including this one. Pick two that fit your work, install both, and use them for a week. Keep the one you find yourself reaching for without thinking. That habit is the real test.
If the thing you keep losing is the work itself - the tabs, the threads, the research that evaporates by evening - that's the gap Noted AI was built for.
You can add it to Chrome for free and try Noted Mode on your next research session.