Looking for a Web of Science alternative for chemistry?
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 citation tracking, h-index, journal impact factors, or cross-disciplinary literature search, Web of Science 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 Web of Science
Web of Science is Clarivate's flagship citation index platform, with over 60 years of expert-indexed scholarly literature across 250+ research areas. It is the gold standard for citation tracking, bibliometric analysis, journal impact factors (Journal Citation Reports), and researcher profiling. Universities and research institutions rely on it for research assessment, tenure decisions, and grant reporting. It is genuinely comprehensive — and it is locked behind institutional subscriptions with enterprise-level pricing that is not published publicly.
For chemistry researchers, Web of Science has a layer that is easy to overlook: its structure search and reaction data are not part of the base subscription. They require separate add-on subscriptions to Index Chemicus and Current Chemical Reactions. Even with those add-ons, the structure search tool accepts MOL file uploads but not SMILES or InChI, and it does not support similarity search. And like every other institutional platform, the results are records and citations — not extracted procedures, conditions, or yields. If your actual need is "find reactions involving this structure and tell me how to run them," Web of Science is an expensive and indirect way to get there. Saguaro Chem was built for that specific job.
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
- Chemists who need reaction search with extracted procedures, not just citation records
- Anyone who has tried to access Web of Science off-campus and hit a paywall or VPN wall
Access and pricing
Web of Science requires an institutional subscription. Pricing is not published publicly and is negotiated per institution, with real-world costs ranging from tens of thousands to nearly half a million dollars annually depending on institution size and product bundle. There is no self-serve option for individual researchers. The chemistry add-ons (Index Chemicus and Current Chemical Reactions) are separate subscriptions on top of the base Core Collection. 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.
Citation tracking vs reaction data
Web of Science excels at citation analysis: tracking who cited whom, computing h-index and impact factors, and analyzing research trends across 250+ disciplines. For bibliometrics and literature discovery, it is unmatched. But for chemistry reaction search, it is indirect. Its structure search requires a MOL file upload or the built-in Elemental drawing tool — no SMILES or InChI input — and it does not support similarity search. Results are compound and reaction records, not extracted experimental procedures. Saguaro Chem is built specifically for the chemistry workflow. You search by SMILES, InChI, or Ketcher drawing with exact match, substructure, and similarity search. Results include stepwise synthetic procedures, reaction conditions, yields, and the source passage from the original paper or patent. If your question is "how do I make this compound and what conditions worked," Saguaro Chem answers it directly.
When Web of Science is still the right choice
If you have institutional access and your workflow relies on citation tracking, h-index calculations, Journal Citation Reports, bibliometric analysis, or cross-disciplinary literature discovery across 250+ research areas, there is no reason to switch. Web of Science is the most comprehensive citation index in the field, backed by over 60 years of expert indexing. Saguaro Chem is built for researchers who need reaction search without the institutional barrier, not for researchers who need bibliometrics.
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
Custom extracted data 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.
See how Saguaro Chem works
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
Web of Science pricing is not publicly available and is negotiated at the institutional level, with costs ranging from tens of thousands to nearly half a million dollars annually. There is no individual subscription option. Saguaro Chem individual plans start at $40 per month with a 7-day free trial.
Web of Science supports structure search, but only through its Elemental drawing tool or MOL file upload. It does not accept SMILES or InChI strings, and it does not support similarity search. These features also require separate add-on subscriptions to Index Chemicus and Current Chemical Reactions. Saguaro Chem supports SMILES, InChI, and Ketcher drawing with exact match, substructure, and similarity search out of the box.
Web of Science returns compound and reaction records from its Index Chemicus and Current Chemical Reactions databases, but it does not extract or display stepwise synthetic procedures, reaction conditions, or yields. Saguaro Chem provides procedures, conditions, yields, and source passages directly in search results.
No. Saguaro Chem is a chemistry reaction database, not a citation index. If you need h-index calculations, journal impact factors, citation networks, or bibliometric analysis, Web of Science is the right tool for that. Saguaro Chem is designed for researchers who need reaction search without an institutional subscription.
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.