Consensus vs NotebookLM

When to pick Consensus

• You are running a literature review — Consensus searches 200M+ peer-reviewed papers and its Consensus Meter summarizes yes/no/possibly across studies.
• You need evidence, not opinion: every claim links to a source paper, and Deep Search automates strategy across up to 1,000 papers per query.
• You work in medicine or science — Medical Mode filters to clinical guidelines and top journals, with student and clinician discounts.

When to pick NotebookLM

• You want to interrogate your own documents — NotebookLM grounds every answer in the sources you upload, with inline citations to the exact passage.
• You want audio: Audio Overview turns a notebook into a 10–20 minute podcast, a feature Consensus has no equivalent for.
• You want the lower price and a generous free tier — Plus is $7.99/month, and the free tier covers 100 notebooks with 50 sources each.

Bottom line

Consensus and NotebookLM are both source-grounded research tools, but they draw on different corpora. Consensus queries the published scientific literature — 200M+ papers — and is the pick for literature review, evidence synthesis, and clinical research, with Pro at $10/month. NotebookLM works only with documents you supply, grounding answers strictly in your uploads and turning them into podcasts and video overviews, starting at $7.99/month. Choose Consensus when the answer lives in peer-reviewed papers you have not read yet; choose NotebookLM when you already have the sources and need to question, summarize, or listen to them. Many researchers use both.