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Launched 2021 · Verified Oct 15, 2026

Elicit

Verified Oct 15, 2026 Active
Academic Search & Literature ReviewWrite a reviewUnited StatesEffect71/ 100
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Literature review workflow that extracts data into tables

academic searchliterature reviewdata extractionsystematic reviewFreemium · from $49/mo

Listed on EffectHub ·

Web · API
Screenshot of the Elicit website
#355
elicit.com as we captured it — our own screenshot, not the vendor’s press image.

Pricing

Pricing model
Freemium
Paid options from
$49/mo
Billing
Monthly

Basic is free with unlimited search across 138M+ papers but limited Research Agent and Reports use. In the default Industry view Pro is $49/user/month billed annually ($588) and Scale $169/user/month billed annually ($2,028); an Academic view adds Plus at $11, Pro at $39 and Scale at $89 per user/month, all billed annually. No month-to-month amounts were found on the page; Enterprise is quote-only.

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Overview

About Elicit

Elicit searches roughly 138 million papers, pulls named fields out of each into a spreadsheet-style table, and summarises findings across the set. It is built for systematic reviews and the synthesis of evidence across studies, not for general question answering. Paid tiers add research agents, report generation and API access.

Platforms
Web · API
API
Yes
Last verified
Oct 15, 2026

Verified sources

  • Pricing page (Industry view): Basic free, Pro $49 per user/month billed as $588 annually with API access, Scale $169 per user/month billed as $2,028 annually, Enterprise custom (15 October 2026)elicit.com ↗
  • Pricing page (Yearly, Academic variant): Plus $11 per user/month billed as $132 annually, Pro $39 billed as $468, Scale $89 billed as $1,068 (15 October 2026)elicit.com ↗
  • Elicit began as a research effort inside the nonprofit lab Ought in 2021 and was incorporated as a public benefit corporation in 2023, headquartered in Oakland, Californiaought.org ↗
Fact check

Is Elicit legit?

We don’t label tools safe or unsafe. Below are the records we checked ourselves, each with the date we read it.

Domain registered
Sep 23, 1998 (28 years ago)Registry record (RDAP), registrar Cloudflare, Inc., looked up Sep 6, 2026
TLS certificate
Issued by Google Trust Services, valid until Jan 10, 2027Seen in our own connection to the site on Oct 15, 2026
Last checked
Oct 15, 2026The site answered
On the market since
2021The vendor's own material, read by us
Operated by
Elicit, United StatesOur research, card verified Oct 15, 2026

How we collect these records

Editorial verdict

Pros & cons of Elicit

medium confidence

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

Best for

  • 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

Not for

  • Casual literature searching, where the free tier or a general assistant is enough
  • Fields poorly covered by indexed English-language journal literature
  • Industry users paying out of pocket, at $49 a month on annual billing

Watch out: The free tier's constraint is undocumented: Basic advertises unlimited search and summaries but only 'limited usage' of the Research Agent and Research Reports, with no number given. The agent is the feature you are actually evaluating, so budget for hitting an unstated wall.

#5inAcademic Search & Literature Review· of 21 tools, ranked by rating and popularity

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