S
SElicit vs Perplexity AI
Pricing, features, platforms and who each one suits — side by side.
E
Choose Elicit if…
- you want a free plan to start with
- you're in its core audience: academic researchers, pharma and medtech research teams
P
Choose Perplexity AI if…
- you're in its core audience: researchers, knowledge workers
Side by side
Feature Elicit Perplexity AI
Pricing modelFreemiumPaid
Starting price$49/mo—
Free plan
Free trial
API
Open source
Source citations—
Academic paper search—
Upload own documents—
Citation export—
Zotero/ref manager sync—
Systematic review tools—
Shared workspaces—
PlatformsWeb, APIWeb, API
CategoryResearch AssistantsAI Search
CompanyElicit, inc.Perplexity
Based in——
Founded—2022
Part of——
Key features
E Elicit
- Search across 138M+ academic papers
- Automated screening and data extraction for systematic reviews
- Research reports with sentence-level citations
- Research Agent for in-depth questions
- Routines that refresh work with new research
- Library to store and reuse sources
- API and MCP server for agent integrations
- Zotero import
P Perplexity AI
- Answers questions using live web search
- Search API with Standard and Fast Search modes
- Agent API running OpenAI, Anthropic, Google and other models
- Built-in tools: web, image, people and finance search
- Code sandbox sessions for agents
- pplx-embed embedding models
- Orchestrator API with per-token billing
- Decisions API that charges for input tokens only
Plans and prices
From each vendor's site. Prices change — confirm before buying.
Elicit
BasicFree
Pro$49/user/mo ($588 billed annually)
Scale$229/user/mo ($2,748 billed annually)
EnterpriseCustom
Perplexity AI
Search API$5.00 per 1K requests (Standard); $1.00 per 1K (Fast Search)
Agent API toolsFrom $0.50 per 1K calls
Embeddings API$0.004–$0.05 per 1M tokens
Decisions API$0.01–$0.02 per 1M input tokens
Strengths and limitations
Elicit
- Free plan includes unlimited paper search, summaries and chat
- AI claims backed by sentence-level citations
- API access starts at the Pro plan
- Enterprise plan does not train on your data by default
- Free plan has limited Research Agent and Reports usage
- Collaboration features require the $229/user/month Scale plan
- Paid prices are listed on annual billing
- No mobile apps listed
Perplexity AI
- Published per-request and per-token API pricing
- Requests rejected with a 429 error are not billed on the Orchestrator API
- Access to models from several vendors through one Agent API
- Decisions API output tokens are free
- Search API bills successful requests even when they return no results
- Per-token model rates are on separate pages rather than in the main pricing overview
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Built from each vendor's public website; we haven't tested them hands-on. Editorial policy