Consensus vs Elicit vs Rayyan 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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Rayyan
AI-assisted screening for systematic reviews, free tier included
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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 | 7.2 / 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 systematic reviews for free | 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 | Team plan pricing available | — |
| Has API | ✗ | ✓ | ✗ | ✓ |
| Open source | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ |
| Free to use | ✓ | ✗ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Users | 500k+ users | 200k+ researchers | 300k+ researchers | 50m+ monthly visits |
| Founded | 2022 | 2018 | 2014 | 2015 |
| Maker | Eric Olson, Christian Salem | Ought (non-profit) | Qatar Computing Research Institute | 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... |
Rayyan remains the default screening tool for systematic and scoping reviews: blind dual screening, duplicate detection, AI relevance ranking and PICO highlighting, with over a million researchers claimed across 20,000+... |
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.