Elicit vs Clay

Tagline

AI research assistant for scientific papers

Build systems to grow revenue

Category

Pricing

Rating

Platforms

API

Open source

Description

Elicit finds, summarizes, and extracts data from millions of research papers.

Clay is a go-to-market (GTM) engineering platform that provides the infrastructure to get any data, run agentic workflows, and automate outbound plays. Users can scale their GTM operations by accessing 150+ premium data sources, waterfalling enrichment, and using AI research agents.

Key features

• Section-level QA
• Zotero sync

• Claygent AI research agents
• Sculptor workflow builder
• Signals tracking
• Audiences management
• Waterfall enrichment
• Ad sync to LinkedIn, Meta, and Google
• Email sequencer
• CRM enrichment
• Sandbox Mode
• Credit Usage Dashboard

Pros

• 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

• Enables users to combine multiple data providers via waterfall enrichment for the best possible coverage.
• Integrates over 150+ premium data sources and AI research agents into a single unified platform.
• Offers a 14-day Pro trial with no credit card required to test the software.
• Allows developers to build directly in Clay using a coding agent accompanied by an API and CLI.
• Enables direct synchronization of targeted ad audiences to LinkedIn, Meta, and Google.
• Features an enterprise-grade security framework compliant with SOC 2 Type II, GDPR, and CCPA.
• Provides a free tier option alongside flexible paid plans (Launch, Growth, Enterprise).
• Provides sandbox features for safer environment testing and table lookup executions.

Cons

• 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

• No mobile application for iOS or Android platforms is listed on the website.
• No offline desktop client for macOS, Windows, or Linux is mentioned in the official pages.
• Actual baseline dollar costs for Launch, Growth, and Enterprise plans are not explicitly declared on the main pricing page.
• Detailed credit consumption limits or allowance constraints for the Free tier are not disclosed on the pricing page.
• No self-hosted, on-premise, or completely open-source version of the infrastructure is available.

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

• FreeUSD0
  • • Find and enrich data from 150+ providers
  • • Run multi-provider waterfalls
  • • Launch email campaigns with Clay sequencer
• LaunchUSD167/month
  • • Everything in Free, plus...
  • • Bring your own API key
  • • Priority support queue
  • • Credit reporting dashboard
• GrowthUSD446/month
  • • Everything in Launch, plus...
  • • Run enrichment in bulk
  • • Schedule recurring enrichment runs
  • • Unlimited Ads Audiences
• Enterprise—
  • • Everything in Growth, plus...
  • • Get dedicated growth strategist
  • • Custom CSA and DPA
  • • Dedicated growth strategist (CSM)

Website