Elicit vs Explainpaper vs Elicit (Scholarcy) vs Semantic Scholar
A side-by-side look at scores, pricing and features — with RECATOOLS' ASEAN-aware verdict for each.
Elicit
AI research assistant for academic literature reviews
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Explainpaper
Highlight a confusing line in a paper, get a plain-English fix.
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Elicit (Scholarcy)
Turns papers into structured flashcards: findings, methods, refs.
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Semantic Scholar
Free AI-powered academic search across 236M+ papers, all fields.
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| RECATOOLS Score | 7.6 / 10 | 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: unlimited search + 2 automated reports/month; ~125-200M-paper corpus | 5 paper uploads per month | 5 paper summaries per month | Full access to all features for free |
| Paid from | Plus $12/mo; Pro $49/mo; Team $79/mo | $12/month (Pro) | $9.99/month (Personal) | — |
| Has API | ✓ | ✗ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Open source | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ |
| Free to use | ✗ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Users | 200k+ researchers | 200k+ users | 1m+ researchers | 50m+ monthly visits |
| Founded | 2018 | 2022 | 2018 | 2015 |
| Maker | Ought (non-profit) | Aman Jain | Phil Gooch | Allen Institute for AI |
| Verdict | 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... |
Explainpaper does one thing: upload a paper, highlight a passage that's losing you, and get a plain-English explanation tied to that specific paper rather than a generic textbook definition. Follow-up questions turn it i... |
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, 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.