Elicit vs Consensus

Pick up to 4 tools and see their free plans, entry prices, platforms and limits in one table. Every fact comes from each vendor's own pages, checked 16 October 2026.

Written head to head: Elicit vs Consensus, with when to choose each side.

Compared on	Elicit Free plan · from $49/user/mo Visit Remove	Consensus Free plan · from $12/mo Visit Remove
What it is	AI research assistant that searches and summarises academic papers	AI search engine for peer-reviewed research papers
Free plan	Limited Research Agent and Research Reports usage; unlimited search across 138M+ papers, summaries and chat with papers; Zotero import; 20MB PDF limit	Basic paper search, 10 Pro messages per month, up to 3 Deep reviews per month
Cheapest paid plan	$49/user/mo billed annually (Pro)Elicit pricing	$12/mo billed annually (Pro)Consensus pricing
What it covers	Billed $588 a year on annual billing; academic users can choose discounted plans, from Plus at $11 per user a month billed annually.	$144 billed annually; the monthly-billing price is behind a toggle and was not captured. Students, faculty and US clinicians can get up to 40% off.
Free trial	None stated	None stated
Platforms	Web, API	Web, API
Integrations (vendor's figure)	Not stated	Not stated
Open source	No	No
Good for	Finding and summarising studies on a topic Pulling key figures from many papers into one table Running a structured literature review	Checking what published studies say about a question Starting a literature review for coursework or a report Finding peer-reviewed sources to cite
Watch out for	The free plan has limited Research Agent and report usage One monthly usage pool per plan; unused usage does not roll over Pro screens up to 5,000 papers in a systematic review	The free plan includes 10 Pro messages and 3 Deep reviews per month Pro includes 15 Deep reviews per month API and MCP use beyond the included amount costs $0.05 per use, with monthly caps
Made by	Elicit	Consensus

Entry prices are the cheapest paid plan, as each vendor publishes it; “What it covers” says what that price is per (a user, a channel, a brand, a number of contacts). The sources are listed on each tool's page.

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