Consensus vs Elicit vs Scholarcy 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 research says
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Elicit
AI literature search, extraction and systematic reviews with sentence-...
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Scholarcy
Turns papers into structured flashcards: findings, methods, refs.
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Semantic Scholar
Free AI-assisted academic search across 200M+ papers, from Ai2
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| RECATOOLS Score | 7.3 / 10 | 7.6 / 10 | 6.3 / 10 | 8 / 10 |
| Capability | ||||
| Value for money | ||||
| Ease of use | ||||
| ASEAN readiness | ||||
| API quality | ||||
| Pricing | Freemium | Freemium | Freemium | Free |
| Free tier | Basic paper search, 10 Pro messages and up to 3 Deep reviews a month | Basic: unlimited search of 138M+ papers, unlimited summaries and full-text paper chat, Zotero import; limited Research Agent and Reports usage | Free plan capped — the pricing page says both 10 summaries and one a day | Search, paper pages, TLDRs (CS/biomed), Semantic Reader, alerts, feeds and the API are free; an API key gives 1 request/sec |
| Paid from | Pro $12/mo billed annually ($20 monthly); Deep $45/mo annually ($65 monthly) | From $11/month (academic Plus billed yearly, or $19 monthly); industry Pro $49/month yearly | Scholarcy Plus from SGD 13.99 a month, priced by country | — |
| Has API | ✗ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Open source | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ |
| Free to use | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Users | 500k+ users | 200k+ researchers | 1m+ researchers | 50m+ monthly visits |
| Founded | 2021 | 2020 | 2018 | 2015 |
| Maker | Eric Olson, Christian Salem | Andreas Stuhlmuller | Everway (acquired October 2025) | Allen Institute for AI (Ai2) |
| Verdict | Consensus answers research questions from academic literature rather than the open web: a cited synthesis, natural-language filters for population, design and time frame, and a Consensus Meter showing how far studies agr... |
Elicit is the most complete AI tool for structured literature work: search, screening, extraction tables and cited reports in one place, with every claim tied to a source sentence. Published studies support it as a secon... |
Scholarcy does one job: feed it a paper and it hands back a structured summary — key findings, methods, tables, a pulled reference list — instead of you reading twenty pages to get there. The Chrome extension is the most... |
Semantic Scholar remains one of the best free tools for finding and tracing academic literature, with excellent citation data and a generous free API that other research tools build on. Its AI features are narrower than... |
| 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.