Consensus vs Elicit 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
|
You.com
Web-grounded research and search APIs for developers and enterprises
Visit
|
|
|---|---|---|---|
| RECATOOLS Score | 7.3 / 10 | 7.6 / 10 | 7 / 10 |
| Capability | |||
| Value for money | |||
| Ease of use | |||
| ASEAN readiness | |||
| API quality | |||
| Pricing | Freemium | Freemium | Freemium |
| Free tier | 20 searches per day with basic features | Basic: unlimited search + 2 automated reports/month; ~125-200M-paper corpus | $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 | 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 | 1B+ queries/month (via API/platform); no verified public figure for consumer user count |
| Founded | 2022 | 2018 | 2020 |
| Maker | Eric Olson, Christian Salem | Ought (non-profit) | 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... |
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 → |
Comparisons cover up to 4 tools. Scores are RECATOOLS editorial assessments; verify current pricing on each vendor's site.