Skip to content
effecthub

Elicit vs Paperguide

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 starts at $49, Paperguide at $29. Both have a free tier. Only Elicit ships a public API.

ElicitLiterature review workflow that extracts data into tablesPaperguideLiterature search, reference manager, extraction tables and systematic review with PRISMA screening in one tool.

Side by side

FactElicitPaperguide
CategoryAcademic Search & Literature ReviewAcademic Search & Literature Review
Pricing modelFreemiumFreemium
Starts at$49 month$29 month
Public APIYesNo
PlatformsWeb, APIWeb, Chrome Ext
CompanyElicitPaperguide
Launched2021—
Last verifiedSep 6, 2026Sep 6, 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

Paperguide

Unusually complete for this category: most tools do search or reference management or extraction, and Paperguide does all three plus PRISMA-grade systematic review screening. That breadth is worth the $29 if you actually run reviews. Credits meter everything, and some headline features are still labelled as coming.

Pros

  • Search across a stated 200M papers with citation-grounded answers
  • Imports existing libraries from Zotero, Mendeley or DOI
  • Data extraction into structured, cited tables rather than free text
  • Systematic review module with PRISMA reporting
  • Free tier of 1,000 credits a month to evaluate properly

Cons

  • Image and table extraction and dual-reviewer screening are still marked as coming soon
  • Everything is metered in AI credits, so heavy review work hits limits
  • Advertised low prices assume annual billing; month-to-month is roughly 70% more
  • No named legal entity — the terms only give a Georgia, US jurisdiction

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 Paperguide if you need

  • researchers running systematic or scoping reviews
  • teams that want search, references and extraction in one tool
  • anyone migrating a Zotero or Mendeley library into an AI workflow

More comparisons

All Elicit alternatives →All Paperguide alternatives →Browse all Academic Search & Literature Review →