Elicit vs Inquisite

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

Is Elicit cheaper than Inquisite?

Elicit starts at $49/mo; Inquisite prices on request, so a quote is the only way to compare.

Does Elicit or Inquisite have a free tier?

Elicit has a free tier; Inquisite prices on request.

Which has a public API, Elicit or Inquisite?

Elicit ships a public API, as of our last verification. A public API for Inquisite is not confirmed by us — check its developer docs before you plan an integration.