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What this page is

A quick decision aid for picking the right tool for a given medical writing task. It maps common jobs-to-be-done to the tool best suited to them, drawing on both third-party tools and the PharmaTools.AI suite. Use it as a starting point, not a prescription. Tool choice also depends on your organisation’s policies, the sensitivity of the data involved, and your own familiarity with the tool. The writer remains responsible for verifying outputs against the source.
Choose the tool based on the job to be done, not the model.

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What are you trying to do?

Work with sources

You have papers or internal documents and need to explore, extract, synthesise, or draft from them.

Draft from scratch

You are writing new text, building slides, creating figures, or transcribing spoken content.

Medical-writing-specific task

You need to verify claims, check MLR compliance, generate a plain language summary, or use another MW-specific tool.

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Working with sources

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Drafting from scratch

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Medical-writing-specific tasks

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A note on overlap

Several tools overlap. Claude and ChatGPT are largely interchangeable for drafting; Consensus, Perplexity, and Elicit all help with literature exploration; Napkin and Gamma both generate visual slides. The tables recommend one starting point per job — switch to an alternative if your organisation already has a preferred tool or a licence in place. The most important decision is usually not which tool you use, but whether you are applying AI to the right stage of the task. See Risk levels and Human in the loop for the principles that should guide that choice.