Consensus vs Elicit

When to pick Consensus

• Pick this if you want the lower price: Pro is $10/mo billed annually ($15/mo monthly) versus Elicit’s $49/mo, and a 40% student discount drops the effective annual rate to roughly $6/mo.
• Pick this if you need a fast yes/no/possibly read on a specific question — the Consensus Meter aggregates findings across analyzed studies into one visual signal, reranked by citation count, study design, and journal reputation.
• Pick this if you search broadly: Consensus indexes 220M+ peer-reviewed papers (against Elicit’s 138M), and the free tier includes unlimited searches plus 3 Deep Searches/month.

When to pick Elicit

• Pick this if you run large systematic reviews: the Pro workflow screens up to 5,000 papers per review (40,000 on Enterprise), far beyond Consensus Deep Search’s 1,000 papers per query.
• Pick this if you need an API — Elicit includes API access on Pro ($49/mo) and above to embed literature review and data extraction into your own tools, which Consensus does not offer.
• Pick this if your work is data extraction: Elicit builds structured tables pulling specific fields from up to 200 sources at once, with sentence-level citations on every claim.

Bottom line

Both tools are AI search engines for academic literature with free tiers, large corpora, and citations tied to source papers — the split is by workload. Consensus is the better default for cost-sensitive users and quick evidence checks: it is cheaper at $10/mo, indexes more papers (220M+ vs 138M), and its Consensus Meter answers a focused question in seconds. Elicit is the better fit for rigorous, high-volume research — its systematic review workflow screens up to 5,000 papers, its extraction tables pull from up to 200 sources, and Pro includes the API access Consensus lacks. If you mainly want to confirm scientific consensus on a question, pick Consensus; if you need structured screening and report generation at scale, the $49/mo for Elicit pays for itself.