Perplexity vs Elicit

Tagline

AI answer engine with real-time citations

AI research assistant for scientific papers

Category

Pricing

Rating

Platforms

API

Open source

Description

Perplexity answers complex questions with cited web sources and AI-native search.

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

Key features

• Source diversity
• Audio brief

• Section-level QA
• Zotero sync

Pros

• Real-time web search grounding
• Citations to sources
• Choice of LLMs on Pro
• Focus modes (academic, Reddit, etc.)
• Threads keep context
• Deep-research Copilot
• Native mobile apps
• Sonar developer API

• 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

• Free tier has query limits
• Citations sometimes mismatched
• Less conversational depth than ChatGPT
• Best models gated to Pro
• Occasional hallucinations
• Search bias toward popular sources
• Limited customization
• No file training

• 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

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