Free Research and Data Tools for Analysts and Journalists
Free data tools for analysts, journalists, and researchers.
Academic Torrents
Distributes large research datasets — from the Enron email corpus to machine learning benchmarks — via BitTorrent instead of a single slow server.
AI2 Paperfinder
AI research search agent from the Allen Institute for AI, searching over 100 million abstracts with a transparent, step-by-step query process.
AlternativeTo
A crowdsourced directory that finds free and open-source alternatives to any software, app, or web service — covering desktop, mobile, and web platforms with community ratings and filtering by platform and licence.
Artificial Analysis
Independent benchmarks comparing AI model quality, inference speed, and pricing across providers — updated continuously with real measurements rather than self-reported figures.
arXiv
An open-access preprint server for research papers in physics, mathematics, computer science, economics, and related fields — free to read and submit.
Atlas of Economic Complexity
A Harvard research tool for visualizing global trade, economic complexity, and growth predictions across 250 countries and 5,000 products.
AWS Open Data Registry
Amazon's registry of publicly available datasets hosted on AWS — covering genomics, geospatial imagery, climate data, and economic indicators — searchable by domain, region, and data type.
Bellingcat
Independent investigative journalism collective pioneering open-source intelligence techniques for conflict verification and accountability reporting.
Climate Trace
Independent emissions tracking initiative using satellite data and machine learning to estimate greenhouse gas emissions from individual facilities worldwide.
Common Crawl
Free, open repository of petabytes of web crawl data, updated monthly — the raw material behind many large language models.
Connected Papers
Visual graph of academic papers related to a given paper, revealing research lineage and clusters.
CORE
An aggregator of millions of open-access research outputs from repositories and journals worldwide, with full-text search and API access.
Data Commons
Google project aggregating public datasets from governments and research institutions into one queryable graph.
Data.gov
The official open data portal of the US federal government, providing access to hundreds of thousands of datasets from government agencies.
Datasette
Open-source tool for exploring, publishing, and sharing SQLite databases as a browsable web API.
Datawrapper
A free online tool for creating publication-quality charts, maps, and tables from your data — no coding required.
DB-Engines Ranking
A monthly ranking of 400+ database management systems by popularity — based on job postings, Stack Overflow activity, Google search trends, and technical discussion frequency — with multi-year trend charts.
DBpedia
Extracts structured data from Wikipedia and publishes it as an open, queryable knowledge graph linking to other open datasets.
Dimensions
Research database linking publications, grants, clinical trials, patents, and policy documents.
Dimensions Research
Free research intelligence platform tracking the full lifecycle from grants to publications to policy.
DOAJ
Directory of Open Access Journals — a curated, community-vetted index of tens of thousands of peer-reviewed, freely accessible academic journals.
Eurostat
The statistical office of the European Union, providing free access to harmonized statistics across all EU member states.
Flourish
A browser-based data visualization and storytelling tool with animated charts, interactive maps, and embeddable graphics for non-programmers.
FRED Economic Data
Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis database of over 800,000 economic time series from hundreds of sources.
Gapminder
Interactive visualization of global development data across health, wealth, and population over time.
Global Forest Watch
Near-real-time deforestation monitoring platform using satellite data to track forest cover change across every country and protected area.
Google Dataset Search
A search engine specifically for finding datasets hosted across the web, using structured metadata to surface publicly available research data.
GovTrack
Tracks all US federal legislation and congressional voting records, with bill passage predictions and email alerts for specific representatives.
Harvard Dataverse
Open research data repository from Harvard's Institute for Quantitative Social Science, hosting 75,000+ citable datasets across every discipline.
Hugging Face
The central repository for open-source AI models, datasets, and Spaces demos — hosting over 1 million models and 150,000 datasets with free download and one-line API access.
Hugging Face Papers
Hugging Face daily ML papers feed linking research to open-source implementations, demos, and community discussion.
Humanitarian Data Exchange
OCHA's open platform hosting thousands of datasets on crises, displacement, food security, and health emergencies from UN agencies, NGOs, and governments — all freely downloadable.
Inciteful
An academic literature mapping tool that builds a citation network graph from a seed paper and uses network analysis to surface the most important connected papers you might otherwise never find.
Kaggle
Community platform for datasets, machine learning competitions, and collaborative notebooks.
Kialo
A structured debate platform that maps arguments as visual pro/con trees.
Lens
A free and open scholarly and patent search engine covering 227 million patent records and 209 million scholarly works — with full-text search, citation analysis, and export to reference managers.
LMSYS Chatbot Arena
A live human preference leaderboard where anonymous models compete head-to-head in blind evaluations, producing the most credible ranking of conversational AI quality available.
Macrotrends
A financial and economic data visualization site with 50+ years of historical charts for stock prices, P/E ratios, economic indicators, commodity prices, and interest rates — all freely accessible.
Metabase
Open-source business intelligence and data visualization tool — connect a database and build dashboards without Tableau's licensing cost.
NASA Climate
NASA's climate change portal with real-time data visualizations, interactive charts, and downloadable datasets covering global temperature, sea level, CO₂ concentration, ice coverage, and ocean heat from NASA satellites.
OpenAlex
A fully open catalog of the world's research output — over 250 million works with citations, author information, and institutional affiliations, free to query.
OpenCorporates
The largest open database of companies worldwide, aggregating corporate registry data from over 140 jurisdictions into one searchable index.
Open LLM Leaderboard
Hugging Face's primary benchmark leaderboard for open-weight language models, evaluating hundreds of models across standardized reasoning, knowledge, and coding benchmarks.
OpenSecrets
Nonpartisan database of US campaign finance data and lobbying records, tracking money in politics at the candidate and organization level.
Our World in Data
Interactive charts and research on global development, health, and energy.
Our World in Data Explorers
Interactive data explorers on topics from energy to pandemics, built on curated global datasets.
PDFAnnotations
Extract PDF highlights, comments & notes instantly. Export to Markdown, Notion, Obsidian, CSV. Processed locally in your browser.
Perma.cc
Harvard-run tool that creates permanent, citable snapshots of web pages to prevent link rot.
PhilPapers
A comprehensive index of philosophy research with curated bibliographies, discussion forums, and categorized access to papers across all philosophical disciplines.
PhysioNet
Repository of physiological and clinical research data, including openly accessible ICU and health record datasets for exploration without credentialing.
ProPublica
Nonprofit investigative journalism organization that publishes both articles and the underlying datasets used in every investigation.
ProPublica Data Store
A collection of datasets compiled by ProPublica journalists for investigative reporting, many available for free download.
PubMed
The National Library of Medicine's free database of over 35 million citations for biomedical literature, with full-text links where available.
RAWGraphs
An open-source web app for creating custom data visualizations from spreadsheet data using chart types not available in standard tools.
ResearchRabbit
Free citation-mapping tool that visualizes how academic papers connect — a strong free alternative to citation tools that institutions pay thousands for.
Scite
An academic research tool that classifies how papers cite each other — distinguishing supporting, contrasting, and mentioning citations — so you can see whether a paper's claims have been confirmed or challenged.
Semantic Scholar
AI-powered academic search engine with citation graphs, influence metrics, and paper summaries.
Setosa.io
Interactive visual explainers for math and statistics concepts that are notoriously hard to grasp.
Shipmap.org
A stunning data visualization of the global commercial shipping fleet, showing real vessel movement patterns over an entire year.
Similarsites
Discover websites similar to any site you already like — useful for finding alternatives or exploring a niche further.
SSRN
The Social Science Research Network — a preprint repository for economics, finance, law, political science, and management where authors post working papers before and after formal peer review.
Stanford Network Analysis Project
Collection of large network datasets — social graphs, communication patterns, web graphs, citation networks — for graph and network science research.
Statista
Statistics and market research portal aggregating data from 22,500+ sources, with infographic exports and curated industry reports.
The Markup
Nonprofit tech accountability journalism organization that investigates how algorithms affect people, publishing open-source tools and underlying data.
UCI Machine Learning Repository
Long-running collection of datasets for machine learning research, spanning classification, regression, and clustering with detailed documentation.
uMap
OpenStreetMap-based map creator for building custom maps with markers, lines, polygons, layers, and embeddable interactive views.
Unpaywall
Free browser extension and database that finds legal, open-access versions of paywalled research papers.
WeLib
Massive online library claiming tens of millions of books and academic papers with direct search for books, articles, magazines, comics, and downloadable formats.
Wikidata
Free, structured knowledge base underlying Wikipedia's infoboxes — every fact is machine-readable and directly queryable.
Wolfram Alpha
A computational knowledge engine that answers factual and mathematical queries by computing answers from curated data rather than searching the web.
World Bank Open Data
Free access to global development data covering hundreds of indicators across economics, health, education, and environment for every country over decades.
WTF Visualizations
A crowdsourced gallery of confusing, misleading, and badly designed data visualizations — truncated axes, 3D pie charts, dual scales, and charts that actively contradict their own headlines.
Zenodo
CERN-operated open research repository for datasets, software, papers, and other research outputs.
Zindi
Africa-based data science competition platform, with datasets and challenges covering healthcare, agriculture, and finance across the continent.
Zoom Earth
Live global weather map with near real-time satellite imagery and storm tracking.