Consensus 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

Free plan: Both have one
Public API: Both have one
Best fit: Consensus: Checking whether a specific claim has support across published studies · Elicit: Systematic reviews and evidence synthesis where every included paper needs the same fields pulled
Platforms: Consensus: Web, iOS, Android · Elicit: Web
Trust score: About even — Consensus 90, Elicit 94

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

ConsensusSearch over peer-reviewed papers with claim summaries

ElicitLiterature review workflow that extracts data into tables

Side by side

Fact	Consensus	Elicit
Category	Academic Search & Literature Review	Academic Search & Literature Review
Pricing model	Freemium	Freemium
Starts at	—	$49/mo
Public API	Yes	Yes
Trust score	90 / 100	94 / 100
Platforms	Web, iOS, Android, API	Web, API
Company	Consensus NLP, Inc.	Elicit
Launched	2021	2021
Last verified	Oct 15, 2026	Oct 15, 2026

What our research says

Consensus

Useful when you want to know what a body of literature actually concludes rather than reading one paper at a time, but it orients you, it does not replace reading them.

Pros

Every answer is tied to specific papers with study design and sample size
Free tier is a standing plan rather than a time-limited trial
The yes-or-no consensus meter is a fast orientation device
Covers a very large index of peer-reviewed literature

Cons

Summaries can flatten real disagreement between studies into false consensus
Coverage skews to indexed English-language biomedical work
Pricing cannot be verified from outside; the site blocks automated access
Free allowance of the deeper analyses runs out quickly in real use

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 Consensus if you need

Checking whether a specific claim has support across published studies
Clinicians and students orienting quickly in an unfamiliar literature
Anyone who wants citations attached to every summarised claim

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