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.

The short answer

Cheaper paid plan: ScienceOS — $8/mo vs $49/mo for Elicit
Free plan: Both have one
Public API: Elicit has one; not confirmed by us for ScienceOS
Best fit: Elicit: Systematic reviews and evidence synthesis where every included paper needs the same fields pulled · ScienceOS: Literature reviews where citation trails matter
Trust score: About even — Elicit 94, ScienceOS 90

From our own records as of each tool's last check. Anything we have not confirmed is left out rather than guessed. How we verify

ElicitLiterature review workflow that extracts data into tables

ScienceOSResearch assistant that answers from 230M papers with citations, maps citation networks and chats across up to 4,000 PDFs.

Side by side

Fact	Elicit	ScienceOS
Category	Academic Search & Literature Review	Academic Search & Literature Review
Pricing model	Freemium	Freemium
Starts at	$49/mo	$8/mo
Public API	Yes	Not confirmed
Trust score	94 / 100	90 / 100
Platforms	Web, API	Web
Company	Elicit	scienceOS UG (haftungsbeschraenkt)
Launched	2021	—
Last verified	Oct 15, 2026	Oct 16, 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