Looking for a SciFinder alternative?
Find millions of compounds, reactions, properties, and documents
Starting at just $40/month
Quick summary
- Saguaro Chem offers reaction search and structure lookup starting at $40/month with no institutional license required
- If you need CAS Registry Number lookup, retrosynthesis planning, or the most comprehensive database available SciFinder is still the better fit
- 7-day free trial, cancel anytime, no procurement process or enterprise contract
What is Saguaro Chem?
Saguaro Chem is a web-based chemical reaction database built for independent researchers, students, and small labs. Search synthetic procedures, reaction conditions, yields, and source documents by chemical structure, substructure, similarity, or bibliographic metadata — without an institutional subscription.
About SciFinder
SciFinder has been the default chemistry research platform for decades. Built by CAS (Chemical Abstracts Service), a division of the American Chemical Society, it provides access to a curated registry of over 200 million substances, expert-indexed reaction data, retrosynthesis planning tools, and bibliographic search across chemistry literature. It is genuinely impressive — and it is licensed primarily to universities and large pharmaceutical companies through institutional subscriptions with enterprise-level pricing that is not published publicly.
If you are reading this page, you probably already know whether you have access to it or not. Maybe your institution's subscription lapsed. Maybe you are working independently and do not have one. Or maybe you are just tired of dealing with VPN issues every time you want to look up a reaction from home. Whatever brought you here, the question is simple: can you get reaction search without an institutional SciFinder license? Saguaro Chem says yes.
Is Saguaro Chem a good fit for you?
- Independent researchers and consultants without university or corporate access
- Small labs and startups that cannot justify enterprise subscription costs
- Students and postdocs who need reaction search off-campus without VPN issues
- Anyone who has tried to get SciFinder pricing as an individual and hit a wall
Access and pricing
SciFinder requires an institutional subscription. Pricing is not published publicly and typically involves enterprise-level contracts negotiated through your university or company. If you are not part of an institution with a license, there is no self-serve option to just sign up and start searching. Saguaro Chem takes the opposite approach. You create an account, pick a plan, and start searching. Individual plans start at $40 per month with a 7-day free trial. No quotes, no demos, no procurement process.
Search capabilities
SciFinder's strength is its curated substance registry and expert-indexed reaction data. It covers retrosynthesis planning and reaction condition optimization that Saguaro Chem does not attempt to replicate. Where Saguaro Chem focuses is on giving you reaction search with full experimental context. You search by structure, substructure, or similarity, and results include stepwise synthetic procedures, reaction conditions, yields, and the source passage from the original paper or patent. If your workflow is "I need to find how to make this compound and what conditions worked," Saguaro Chem covers that directly.
When SciFinder is still the right choice
If you have institutional access and your workflow relies on CAS Registry Number lookups across the full substance database, retrosynthesis route planning, or SciFinder's expert-curated reaction indexing, there is no reason to switch. SciFinder's substance registry is the most comprehensive in the field, and its curated reaction data is backed by decades of expert indexing. Saguaro Chem is built for researchers who do not have that access and need reaction search without the institutional barrier.
What Saguaro Chem brings to the table
- Search by structure, substructure, or similarity using SMILES, InChI, or the built-in Ketcher drawing tool
- Reaction and bibliographic metadata search by DOI, title, author, or journal
- Results from peer-reviewed journals and patents with full experimental context
- Stepwise synthetic procedures, reaction conditions, yields, and source passages
- No institutional license required. Sign up individually in under two minutes
- Transparent pricing starting at $40/month with a 7-day free trial
A custom chemistry database from 30+ journals and patents
6M+
Compounds
13M+
Reaction passages indexed
15M+
Characterization details
Extracted directly from 30+ top peer-reviewed journals and patent offices including:
- Nat. Chem.
- Organic Letters
- J. Org. Chem.
- Angew. Chem.
- Adv. Synth. Catal.
- Green Chem.
- Chem. Sci.
- USPTO Patents
Coverage is selective but spans a significant portion of each source's reaction literature.
Ready to try Saguaro Chem?
Individual
Individual access to Saguaro Chem
- Structure, substructure & similarity search
- Reaction procedures, conditions, yields & characterization data
- Source documents with DOI & patent links
- No VPN required — use from anywhere
Team
Team access to Saguaro Chem
- Everything in the Individual plan
- 3 seats included, up to 10 total
- Additional seats at $30/month each
- Centralized billing & team management
Enterprise
Custom deployment and integration for organizations
Pricing
Custom pricing for your organization
Tailored to your needs
- Everything in the Team plan, scaled to your org
- SSO / SAML & custom authentication
- Isolated or dedicated hosting options
- API access & custom data pipelines
- Dedicated support & onboarding — let's talk
No price increases without 90 days notice · Cancel any time, one click, no retention loops · Subscriptions auto-renew until cancelled.
All prices in USD. Digitally delivered subscription — access begins immediately after account activation. 7-day free trial requires a credit card; cancel before it ends and you won't be charged. All fees are non-refundable except as required by applicable law. View full subscription & billing terms
Have questions? Learn more about Saguaro Chem or contact us
Frequently asked questions
Saguaro Chem offers a 7-day free trial, after which individual plans start at $40 per month. It is not free, but it is designed to be affordable for researchers who do not have access to an institutional SciFinder subscription.
Yes. Saguaro Chem requires no institutional license, no VPN, and no IP authentication. You sign up with an email address and a credit card.
No. SciFinder's CAS Registry is a curated database of over 200 million substances. Saguaro Chem focuses on reaction search with experimental context from peer-reviewed literature and patents rather than attempting to replicate that registry.
Not currently. Saguaro Chem is focused on reaction search and synthetic procedure lookup. If retrosynthesis route planning is a core part of your workflow, SciFinder's retrosynthesis tools are more developed.
Saguaro Chem indexes data from over 13 million reaction passages — individual text segments extracted from source literature that describe a reaction. Not all data types are available for every record. Some entries include the raw source passage, others include annotated procedures, reaction schemes, or characterization data, and some may only contain the extracted compounds and their roles in the reaction. The specific data available depends on the source document and extraction quality.
Saguaro Chem indexes experimental reaction information from 30+ peer-reviewed journals, including: ACS Catalysis, ACS Chemical Neuroscience, ACS Medicinal Chemistry Letters, ACS Omega, ACS Pharmacology & Translational Science, Advanced Synthesis & Catalysis, Angewandte Chemie International Edition, Asian Journal of Organic Chemistry, Beilstein Journal of Organic Chemistry, ChemCatChem, ChemMedChem, Chemical Communications, Chemical Science, Chemistry – A European Journal, Chemistry – An Asian Journal, Chinese Journal of Chemistry, European Journal of Organic Chemistry, Green Chemistry, Journal of Medicinal Chemistry, Molbank, Molecules, Nature Chemistry, Nature Synthesis, New Journal of Chemistry, Organic & Biomolecular Chemistry, Organic Chemistry Frontiers, Organic Letters, Synlett, Synthesis, Tetrahedron, Tetrahedron Letters, The Journal of Organic Chemistry.
Yes. Saguaro Chem currently indexes reaction information from USPTO granted patents. We are actively working to expand patent coverage to additional patent offices in future updates.
Yes. Saguaro Chem extracts and indexes stepwise experimental procedures directly from source literature. Each procedure includes reagents, quantities, reaction conditions, and workup steps where reported, presented in a clean, structured format so you can reproduce the synthesis in the lab.
No. For reactions sourced from academic articles, Saguaro Chem does not display the source text or distribute PDFs. Instead, we try to show as much non-passage context as possible in the form of a reaction scheme and an annotated procedure, along with characterization details where available — though the specific data types available may vary by entry and are not necessarily comprehensive. Each entry links back to its original source so you can access the complete publication or supplementary information on the publisher's website.
Yes. Unlike academic articles, Saguaro Chem does display the raw source passages from patents for reactions sourced from patent literature. Each patent-sourced entry includes the relevant excerpt from the original patent text alongside the structured data, so you can read the procedure, conditions, and characterization details exactly as they appear in the patent.
Yes. We never log the contents of your search queries — no SMILES strings, no structure drawings, no text searches are ever recorded. Our infrastructure is hosted on SOC 2 Type II compliant hosting (Railway), accounts support two-factor authentication via Clerk, and IP addresses are truncated and hashed before any storage.
All payments are handled by our authentication provider, Clerk, which uses Stripe as its underlying payment processor. De Novo Chem never sees, stores, or handles your credit card information — the entire payment flow is managed by Clerk and Stripe.