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Inquisite vs Semantic Scholar

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. Only Semantic Scholar is free. Only Semantic Scholar ships a public API.

InquisiteLets research teams semantically search over 100 million papers and visualize how they relate to each other.Semantic ScholarFree search across 237M research papers, with citation context, one-line summaries and an open scholarly API.

Side by side

FactInquisiteSemantic Scholar
CategoryAcademic Search & Literature ReviewAcademic Search & Literature Review
Pricing modelContactFree
Public APINoYes
PlatformsWebWeb, API
CompanyInquisiteAllen Institute for AI (Ai2)
Launched20232015
Last verifiedSep 1, 2026Sep 6, 2026

What our research says

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

Semantic Scholar

The most useful free academic search on the open web, and the only one that also hands you its corpus and its API. Coverage is broad but metadata quality varies by publisher, so it will not replace Scopus or Web of Science for a systematic review. Treat the TLDR summaries as triage, not as a reading substitute.

Pros

  • 237M+ papers searchable without an account
  • TLDR one-line summaries generated per paper
  • Semantic Reader shows citation context inline
  • Free Academic Graph API and the open S2ORC corpus

Cons

  • Metadata and full-text availability vary by publisher
  • No systematic-review tooling such as PRISMA exports
  • Non-profit funding means feature pace is not commercial

Which one fits

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

Choose Semantic Scholar if you need

  • screening a literature list before you read
  • tracing who cited a paper and in what context
  • developers who need free bulk scholarly metadata

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