u/KevinTMT_c9

Honestly, I feel like I’m falling behind my peers when it comes to using AI or other productivity tools. What’s actually saving you guys time?

Paperbanana was disappointing. It functions primarily as a prompt tool, and the outputs were often incoherent.

figurelabs was similarly underwhelming. It's essentially a wrapper with an agent and a "vector parser" added on, yet priced quite steeply. The free tier only allows around 2 figures, which feels extremely limited.

Overall, I don't see the value in either tool. If you're looking for something effective, I'd recommend just using Gemini instead and saving your money.

Actual Research/Data Analysis: 30%

Writing the Text: 15%

Crying/Procrastination: 10%

Fighting with diagram & fixing formatting (BioRender/Illustrator/etc): 45%

The fact that I spent almost half my time just trying to make chemical nodes look aligned is a tragedy.

It's $30 a month for what is basically a clipart library.

I only use it like 3 times a month.

Looking for alternatives that:

- Have good scientific icons/templates

- Let you export actual vector files

- Doesn't require a subscription or at least is cheaper than BioRender

Anyone found anything good?

Be honest.

I sketch literally every figure on paper first before I even open Illustrator. There's something about drawing it by hand that helps me actually understand what I'm trying to show.

But then I have to spend 5 hours recreating it digitally.

Anyone else do this? Have you found any good tools that bridge the gap between sketch and final figure?