LLMnesia vs Sider: AI Sidebar Assistant vs Searchable Chat History

Sider and LLMnesia are both browser extensions that touch multiple AI models, but they are built for opposite halves of the workflow. Sider is an AI sidebar assistant: it brings many models onto any web page so you can summarise, write, and research without switching tabs. LLMnesia is a free, local-first Chrome extension that indexes and searches your AI chat history across ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and 10+ platforms. Sider is about acting now; LLMnesia is about finding what you did before.

LLMnesia vs Sider at a glance

What Sider does well

Sider is a polished, feature-rich assistant for working across the web:

• Many models, one sidebar: call on GPT, Claude, Gemini, and other models from a single panel on any page.
• Act on page content: summarise articles, rewrite text, translate, and answer questions about what you are reading.
• Deep research agent: generate cited reports that scan large numbers of sources.
• Group chat with bots: compare answers from different models side by side.
• Always available: no tab switching, no separate app to open.

For in-the-moment productivity on whatever you are browsing, Sider is genuinely useful and actively developed.

Where it falls short for retrieval

Sider is an assistant, not an archive, and its history reflects that.

• History is not durable. Reviews note that Sider's chat history can disappear after closing tabs, so it is not built to be a long-term, reliable record of what you discussed.
• It does not see your existing conversations. Anything you did in the official ChatGPT app, at claude.ai, or in Gemini never enters Sider. Its history is limited to what happened inside Sider.
• Search is not the point. Sider optimises for fast assistance, not for finding a specific message from three weeks ago across your whole history.

If your goal is to reliably find past conversations, an in-the-moment assistant with ephemeral history is the wrong layer.

A concrete example

Last month you reasoned through a pricing model with ChatGPT and refined it later in Claude, both in the official apps. Today you need that thread. Sider cannot surface it: those conversations never happened inside Sider, and even its own recent chats may have cleared when you closed the tabs. LLMnesia indexed both as you worked, so you search usage-based pricing tiers and the ChatGPT and Claude messages appear with links back to the live conversations. That cross-tool recall is exactly what how to search multiple AI chatbots at once is about.

Can you use both together?

Yes, and they pair naturally. Use Sider for what it is good at, summarising and assisting on web pages in real time. Keep LLMnesia running underneath as the durable, searchable memory of your AI conversations across every platform. The assistant handles the present; the index handles the past.

Choosing between them

Use Sider if:

• You want an AI assistant on every web page to summarise, write, and research.
• Your need is acting on content in the moment, not recalling old chats.
• You want many models accessible from one sidebar.

Use LLMnesia if:

• You want a reliable, searchable record of your AI conversations.
• Your conversations live in the official ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini apps.
• You want a free, local-first tool whose history does not vanish when you close a tab.

These tools cover different stages of how you work with AI. If the gap you feel is "I know I discussed this, but I cannot find it," that is a retrieval problem, and installing LLMnesia free is the fix. For a wider view of the category, see the best Chrome extensions to save AI conversations.