As the table below shows, PhilPapers' coverage of the philosophical literature is significantly more extensive than Philosopher's Index, both for online material and for offline material. Philosopher's Index data were taken from their web site at philindex.org. Data for both services were collected in July 2024.

In addition to providing a better coverage of the philosophical literature, PhilPapers has several widely used features not found on Philosopher's Index:

• Index entries are organized in over 5,000 fined-grained topical bibliographies that are maintained by over 650 academics. This is in addition to keyword tagging using thousands of keywords.
• PhilPapers provides pointers to all the copies of a work found online, whether in Open Access archives or behind publishers' paywalls.
• Links to subscription-based resources can be made to point to your reverse proxy server for convenient, one-click access.
• Users can organize their references on the site in reading lists and bibliographies that can be exported to (or imported from) all major bibliographic formats as well as RefWorks.
• Pre-prints can be archived on PhilPapers itself for optimal exposure.
• New content can be monitored using flexible email alerts (every search or page can be turned into an email alert). Tens of thousands of academics are subscribed to our alerts.
• Publication lists can be embedded on personal or departmental sites using our API.
• PhilPapers is available from anywhere and any device 24/7 without jumping through any authentication hoops (so long as your institution subscribes).