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Elicit vs Inquisite

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. Elicit publishes a starting price ($49); Inquisite does not. Only Elicit has a free tier. Only Elicit ships a public API.

ElicitLiterature review workflow that extracts data into tablesInquisiteLets research teams semantically search over 100 million papers and visualize how they relate to each other.

Side by side

FactElicitInquisite
CategoryAcademic Search & Literature ReviewAcademic Search & Literature Review
Pricing modelFreemiumContact
Starts at$49 month—
Public APIYesNo
PlatformsWeb, APIWeb
CompanyElicitInquisite
Launched20212023
Last verifiedSep 6, 2026Sep 1, 2026

What our research says

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

Inquisite

Inquisite targets science and R&D teams rather than students, with a semantic search index built for finding related work across a large paper corpus and turning it into project-organized synthesis. Coming out of a university research background gives it some credibility on the science side, but the lack of public pricing makes it hard to evaluate against competitors without contacting sales.

Pros

  • Indexes a large corpus of over 100 million papers for semantic rather than keyword search
  • Built by domain-experienced founders from a university research program
  • Offers multiple LLM choices for the analysis step

Cons

  • No public pricing, so evaluating cost requires contacting the company directly
  • Full features are gated behind account sign-in, limiting what can be checked without registering
  • Organized as a young public benefit corporation, so longevity is less proven than established players

Which one fits

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

Choose Inquisite if you need

  • R&D and science teams doing systematic literature reviews
  • Researchers who want to visualize relationships between papers, not just a search list
  • Teams wanting a choice of underlying LLM for analysis

More comparisons

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