scite.ai vs Elicit

A 2026 side-by-side comparison of scite.ai and Elicit — pricing, key features, platforms, API access, and the trade-offs of each, based on data collected from their official sites.

Tagline

See how scientific research has been cited and evaluated with Smart Citations

AI research assistant for scientific papers

Pricing

Freemium
Freemium

Rating

0.0 (0)
0.0 (0)

Platforms

Web
Web

API

No
No

Open source

No
No

Description

scite.ai is a platform designed to help researchers, students, and institutions evaluate and discover scientific publications through Smart Citations, which provide context on whether a paper has been supported, contrasted, or mentioned by subsequent research.

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

Key features

  • Smart Citations
  • Citation context search
  • Literature evaluation
  • Section-level QA
  • Zotero sync

Pros

  • Provides citation context showing whether subsequent papers support, contrast, or mention the target research (not confirmed in provided site data).
  • Enables users to quickly evaluate the reliability of scientific studies (not confirmed in provided site data).
  • Offers browser extensions to easily access citation insights while browsing other platforms (not confirmed in provided site data).
  • Allows tracking of specific topics, researchers, or journals (not confirmed in provided site data).
  • Helps filter publications based on citation types (not confirmed in provided site data).
  • Provides visualization tools to map out research networks and citation trees (not confirmed in provided site data).
  • Supports academic integrity and citation checking for publishers and authors (not confirmed in provided site data).
  • Offers search capabilities with deep citation context directly in search results (not confirmed in provided site data).
  • 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 crawled website content was provided to verify current features and platform capabilities.
  • No pricing details or subscription tiers are confirmed in the provided data.
  • API accessibility and developer documentation could not be verified.
  • No mobile application availability is confirmed on the site.
  • No open-source licensing or open repository details are confirmed.
  • 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

Not disclosed
  • 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 scite.ai if you need Smart Citations.
  • Choose Elicit if you need Section-level QA.
  • On budget: scite.ai is freemium, Elicit is freemium.