Consensus vs Elicit
A 2026 side-by-side comparison of Consensus and Elicit — pricing, key features, platforms, API access, and the trade-offs of each, based on data collected from their official sites.
Consensus
AI academic search engine for peer-reviewed literature—your research OS for finding, organizing, and analyzing science 10x faster.
Elicit
AI research assistant for scientific papers
Tagline
AI academic search engine for peer-reviewed literature—your research OS for finding, organizing, and analyzing science 10x faster.
AI research assistant for scientific papers
Pricing
Rating
Platforms
API
Open source
Description
Consensus is an AI academic search engine for peer-reviewed literature. Designed to act as an AI workspace for scientific research, it enables researchers, students, and clinicians to find, organize, and analyze scientific findings efficiently. It offers search across millions of scientific papers with synthesized AI summaries, natural language querying, consensus metrics on scientific topics, citation graphing, and custom citation exporting.
Elicit finds, summarizes, and extracts data from millions of research papers.
Key features
- Search 220M+ scientific papers
- Pro Search and Deep Search modes with synthesized AI answers
- Ask Paper to chat with any paper
- Consensus Meter showing scientific agreement on yes/no questions
- Study Snapshots with key findings and methodology
- Citation Graph for paper relationships
- Citation export in RIS, BibTeX, and CSV
- Collections to organize research libraries
- Consensus API integration
- Section-level QA
- Zotero sync
Pros
- Allows searching through over 220 million scientific papers.
- Features Pro Search and Deep Search modes that synthesize papers into direct AI answers.
- Allows users to directly chat with any paper via 'Ask Paper'.
- Includes a Consensus Meter showing scientific agreement on yes/no scientific questions.
- Provides Study Snapshots highlighting key findings and methodology.
- Enables exported citations in specialized formats like RIS, BibTeX, and CSV.
- Exposes an API to integrate citations and paper metadata directly into external tools.
- Available for free accessibility, allowing users to try core capabilities without immediate payment.
- Semantic search across papers
- Automated data extraction
- Citation graph exploration
- Paper summarization
- Systematic-review workflows
- Generous free tier
- Export to CSV and Zotero
- Trusted by academic researchers
Cons
- No desktop software for macOS, Windows, or Linux is listed on the site.
- No native mobile apps (iOS, Android) are listed in the product description pages.
- Exact pricing details and plan figures for paid tiers are not disclosed in the text.
- Requires JavaScript and a modern web browser to run, limiting accessibility on older systems.
- The Consensus API is capped returning up to a limit of 20 papers per query.
- Free tier is credit-limited
- Primarily English papers
- Occasional extraction errors
- Weaker for humanities
- Requires paper access rights
- Limited fine-tuning
- Slow on very large corpora
- Team plans get expensive
Pricing plans
- BasicUSD0
- • Unlimited search across more than 138 million papers
- • Unlimited summaries across as many papers as you want
- • Unlimited chat with papers with full-text access
- • Unlimited search across more than 500 thousand clinical trials
- PlusUSD11/month
- • Standard usage for Research Agent, Research Reports, and Systematic Literature Reviews
- ProUSD39/month
- • Custom extractions from uploaded papers
- • Standard usage for Research Agent, Research Reports, and Systematic Literature Reviews
- ScaleUSD89/month
- • 5x usage for Research Agent, Research Reports, and Systematic Literature Reviews
- • Dedicated Systematic Review Workflow that can screen 5,000 papers
- • Reports extract from up to 135 data sources
- • Subscribe to 10 personalized research Alerts
- Enterprise—
- • Custom usage for Research Agent, Research Reports, and Systematic Literature Reviews
- • Greater scale: screen 40,000 papers and extract 40 columns
- • Enterprise-level security and controls, including SSO & SAML, 2FA, user analytics, domain verification, and custom deployments
- • Dedicated customer success team providing training, onboarding, and success planning
- Team—
- • 9x usage for Research Agent, Research Reports, and Systematic Literature Reviews
- • Extract and interpret from figures in research papers
- • Live editing and real-time collaboration with your team
- • Admin panel with usage tracking and seat management
Which one should you pick?
- Choose Consensus if you need Search 220M+ scientific papers and API access.
- Choose Elicit if you need Section-level QA.
- On budget: Consensus is freemium, Elicit is freemium.