Consensus vs Elicit vs Perplexity AI vs Semantic Scholar
A side-by-side look at scores, pricing and features — with RECATOOLS' ASEAN-aware verdict for each.
Consensus
AI search engine that shows what the science actually says
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Elicit
AI research assistant for academic literature reviews
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Perplexity AI
The answer engine that cites its sources on every live web query
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Semantic Scholar
Free AI-powered academic search across 236M+ papers, all fields.
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| RECATOOLS Score | 7.3 / 10 | 7.6 / 10 | 8.4 / 10 | 8 / 10 |
| Capability | ||||
| Value for money | ||||
| Ease of use | ||||
| ASEAN readiness | ||||
| API quality | ||||
| Pricing | Freemium | Freemium | Freemium | Free |
| Free tier | 20 searches per day with basic features | Basic: unlimited search + 2 automated reports/month; ~125-200M-paper corpus | Unlimited basic searches with standard model | Full access to all features for free |
| Paid from | Pro $15/mo ($10/mo annual); Deep tier for power users/researchers | Plus $12/mo; Pro $49/mo; Team $79/mo | $20/month (Pro); $200/month (Max, launched July 2025) | — |
| Has API | ✗ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Open source | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ |
| Free to use | ✓ | ✗ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Users | 500k+ users | 200k+ researchers | 30M+ standalone monthly active users (100M+ across all products, 2026) | 50m+ monthly visits |
| Founded | 2022 | 2018 | 2022 | — |
| Maker | Eric Olson, Christian Salem | Ought (non-profit) | Aravind Srinivas, Denis Yarats, Johnny Ho, Andy Konwinski | Allen Institute for AI |
| Verdict | Consensus answers research questions by pulling from peer-reviewed literature rather than the open web: type a question, get a synthesized answer with citations, a Consensus Meter showing what share of studies actually a... |
Elicit owns the literature-review niche: it searches 138 million papers, pulls methods, sample sizes and findings into structured comparison tables, and links every extraction back to source text, which makes verificatio... |
Perplexity remains the strongest citation-first answer engine: every query triggers a live web search and each sentence links to its sources, which makes verification fast in a way plain chatbots can't match. The free ti... |
Semantic Scholar, run by the nonprofit Allen Institute for AI, indexes over 236 million papers and ranks them by meaning rather than keyword overlap, which is where it beats Google Scholar's plain matching. The TLDR one-... |
| Full review → | Full review → | Full review → | Full review → |
Comparisons cover up to 4 tools. Scores are RECATOOLS editorial assessments; verify current pricing on each vendor's site.