Consensus vs Elicit vs Perplexity AI vs You.com
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
Visit
|
Elicit
AI research assistant for academic literature reviews
Visit
|
Perplexity AI
The answer engine that cites its sources on every live web query
Visit
|
You.com
Web-grounded research and search APIs for developers and enterprises
Visit
|
|
|---|---|---|---|---|
| RECATOOLS Score | 7.3 / 10 | 7.6 / 10 | 8.4 / 10 | 7 / 10 |
| Capability | ||||
| Value for money | ||||
| Ease of use | ||||
| ASEAN readiness | ||||
| API quality | ||||
| Pricing | Freemium | Freemium | Freemium | Freemium |
| 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 | $100 one-time free API credit for new signups |
| 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) | Research API per 1,000 calls: Lite $12 up to Frontier $2,000+ (contact sales) |
| Has API | ✗ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Open source | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ |
| Free to use | ✓ | ✗ | ✓ | ✗ |
| Users | 500k+ users | 200k+ researchers | 30M+ standalone monthly active users (100M+ across all products, 2026) | 1B+ queries/month (via API/platform); no verified public figure for consumer user count |
| Founded | 2022 | 2018 | 2022 | 2020 |
| Maker | Eric Olson, Christian Salem | Ought (non-profit) | Aravind Srinivas, Denis Yarats, Johnny Ho, Andy Konwinski | Richard Socher, Bryan McCann |
| 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... |
You.com finished its long pivot in February 2026: the consumer answer engine is now the shop window for a B2B Research API business, with effort-tiered endpoints (lite through frontier, roughly $6.50 to $300 per thousand... |
| 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.