alphaXiv vs Elicit

Two fact sheets from our own research, side by side — pricing, platforms, API access and status re-checked by us rather than quoted from the vendors.

The short answer

Cheaper paid plan: alphaXiv — $8/mo vs $49/mo for Elicit
Free plan: Both have one
Public API: Both have one
Higher Trust score: Elicit — 94 vs 88 for alphaXiv
Best fit: alphaXiv: ML and AI researchers tracking new arXiv papers · Elicit: Systematic reviews and evidence synthesis where every included paper needs the same fields pulled

From our own records as of each tool's last check. Anything we have not confirmed is left out rather than guessed. How we verify

alphaXivLets researchers search and discuss arXiv papers, with answers grounded in the paper text rather than free-form summaries.

ElicitLiterature review workflow that extracts data into tables

Side by side

Fact	alphaXiv	Elicit
Category	Academic Search & Literature Review	Academic Search & Literature Review
Pricing model	Freemium	Freemium
Starts at	$8/mo	$49/mo
Public API	Yes	Yes
Trust score	88 / 100	94 / 100
Platforms	Web, API, Chrome extension	Web, API
Company	alphaXiv	Elicit
Launched	2024	2021
Last verified	Oct 15, 2026	Oct 15, 2026

What our research says

alphaXiv

alphaXiv is useful for staying on top of a fast-moving research area because it ties discussion and search directly to arXiv papers instead of sending you to a separate forum. Its literature-review answers are grounded in citations you can click through to verify, which matters more here than in a general chatbot, but coverage is limited to what's on arXiv and heavier assistant use now sits behind paid Go and Pro plans.

Pros

Grounds generated answers in the actual paper text with citations
Surfaces researcher and organization activity around a topic, not just papers
Offers an MCP server and a Chrome extension for pulling search into other tools
Student discount on the Go plan for recognised academic emails

Cons

Limited to arXiv's corpus, so it misses paywalled or non-arXiv work
Free assistant use runs on preset models with strict limits
Plan prices appear only inside the signed-in subscription settings, not on a public pricing page

Elicit

Elicit is the only one of these tools that treats a literature review as a structured extraction job rather than a chat, which is exactly right for the work. The price assumes you are billing someone else for the hours it saves.

Pros

Column-per-field extraction into a table is the correct shape for review work and rare elsewhere
Free tier is unusually generous: unlimited search, summaries and full-text chat
Every claim links back to the paper it came from
API access is included from the first paid tier rather than sold separately

Cons

The $49 to $169 jump is steep and Scale is priced for institutions, not labs
Free tier's limits on the Research Agent and Reports are not quantified anywhere on the pricing page
Extraction accuracy still needs spot-checking against the source PDF
Coverage is paper-centric, so grey literature and preprint-heavy fields are thinner

Which one fits

Choose alphaXiv if you need

ML and AI researchers tracking new arXiv papers
Anyone writing a literature review who wants citations tied to source passages
Finding who else is working on a specific research topic

Choose Elicit if you need

Systematic reviews and evidence synthesis where every included paper needs the same fields pulled
Researchers screening hundreds of abstracts against defined inclusion criteria
Pharma, policy and academic teams that need an auditable trail back to sources