Undermind vs Elicit vs Consensus vs Perplexity AI
A side-by-side look at scores, pricing and features — with RECATOOLS' ASEAN-aware verdict for each.
Undermind
Deep AI literature search that trades speed for near-total recall
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Elicit
AI research assistant for academic literature reviews
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Consensus
AI search engine that shows what the science actually says
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Perplexity AI
The answer engine that cites its sources on every live web query
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| RECATOOLS Score | 7 / 10 | 7.6 / 10 | 7.3 / 10 | 8.4 / 10 |
| Capability | ||||
| Value for money | ||||
| Ease of use | ||||
| ASEAN readiness | ||||
| API quality | ||||
| Pricing | Paid | Freemium | Freemium | Freemium |
| Free tier | Free demo available | Basic: unlimited search + 2 automated reports/month; ~125-200M-paper corpus | 20 searches per day with basic features | Unlimited basic searches with standard model |
| Paid from | $9 per summary | Plus $12/mo; Pro $49/mo; Team $79/mo | Pro $15/mo ($10/mo annual); Deep tier for power users/researchers | $20/month (Pro); $200/month (Max, launched July 2025) |
| Has API | ✗ | ✓ | ✗ | ✓ |
| Open source | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ |
| Free to use | ✗ | ✗ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Users | 10k+ researchers | 200k+ researchers | 500k+ users | 30M+ standalone monthly active users (100M+ across all products, 2026) |
| Founded | 2023 | 2018 | 2022 | 2022 |
| Maker | Ian Fischer | Ought (non-profit) | Eric Olson, Christian Salem | Aravind Srinivas, Denis Yarats, Johnny Ho, Andy Konwinski |
| Verdict | Undermind, a YC-backed startup from two MIT physics PhDs, runs successive adaptive searches over the scientific literature instead of one-shot keyword retrieval, reading full texts and chasing citation trails to approach... |
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... |
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... |
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... |
| 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.