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Elicit vs ScienceOS

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, ScienceOS at $8. Both have a free tier. Only Elicit ships a public API.

ElicitLiterature review workflow that extracts data into tablesScienceOSResearch assistant that answers from 230M papers with citations, maps citation networks and chats across up to 4,000 PDFs.

Side by side

FactElicitScienceOS
CategoryAcademic Search & Literature ReviewAcademic Search & Literature Review
Pricing modelFreemiumFreemium
Starts at$49 month$8 month
Public APIYesNo
PlatformsWeb, APIWeb
CompanyElicitscienceOS UG (haftungsbeschraenkt)
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

ScienceOS

Priced well below the usual academic-AI tier and unusually specific about its corpus - 230M papers, 800M snippets, 2.4B reference pairs, refreshed weekly. EU-only storage and a no-training commitment make it easier to clear with a university's data office than most rivals. The free tier is limited enough that serious use means paying.

Pros

  • Answers carry cited sources against a stated 230-million-paper index
  • Citation networks make backward and forward reference tracing practical
  • Chat spans up to 4,000 PDFs, with 1,000-file bulk import on Team
  • EU-only servers and an explicit no-training-on-user-data statement
  • Cheapest paid tier is around EUR 7 a month, well under most competitors

Cons

  • Figure extraction from PDFs is paywalled - the free tier is text only
  • The best model is unlimited only on the Team tier at six seats or more
  • No API for integrating results into other workflows
  • Euro pricing means dollar buyers absorb exchange-rate movement

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 ScienceOS if you need

  • Literature reviews where citation trails matter
  • Researchers who need EU data residency
  • Working across a large personal PDF library at once

More comparisons

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