C
CAI search engine that answers questions from peer-reviewed research papers
Free, from $20/mo
Elicit vs Semantic Scholar
Pricing, features, platforms and who each one suits — side by side.
E
Choose Elicit if…
- you're in its core audience: academic researchers, pharma and medtech research teams
S
Choose Semantic Scholar if…
- you're in its core audience: researchers, students
Side by side
Feature Elicit Semantic Scholar
Pricing modelFreemiumFree
Starting price$49/moFree
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 AssistantsResearch Assistants
CompanyElicit, inc.The Allen Institute for AI
Based in——
Founded—2015
Part of—Ai2
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
S Semantic Scholar
- Search across 239+ million scientific papers
- Coverage of all fields of science
- Semantic Reader augmented reading for select papers (beta)
- Developer API with paper search
- API documentation, tutorials and gallery
- Free user accounts
- Resources for librarians and publishers
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
Semantic Scholar
FreeFree
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
Semantic Scholar
- Free to use
- Indexes over 239 million papers from all fields
- Public API with documentation and tutorials
- Built by the nonprofit research institute Ai2
- Semantic Reader is in beta and only works on select papers
- No mobile apps listed
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Built from each vendor's public website; we haven't tested them hands-on. Editorial policy