Elicit vs Perplexity

When to pick Elicit

• You do academic research — Elicit searches 138 million papers and generates structured, sentence-level-cited reports you can verify claim by claim.
• You run systematic reviews: the Pro plan ($49/month) screens up to 5,000 papers and allows 144 reports a year.
• You need rigor over speed — coverage is limited to indexed academic literature, but every claim traces back to a specific paper.

When to pick Perplexity

• You want fast, cited answers to everyday questions across the live web, not just academic sources.
• You want the lower price: Pro is $20/month versus Elicit’s $49/month, and adds Deep Research, model choice, and file uploads.
• You want it everywhere — Perplexity runs on web, mobile, and as a browser extension, while Elicit is web and API only.

Bottom line

Elicit and Perplexity both cite their sources, but aim at different work. Elicit is a specialized research assistant for literature reviews: 138 million papers, systematic screening, and sentence-level citations, from $49/month. Perplexity is a general web answer engine — real-time, cited, and cheaper at $20/month, with Deep Research for multi-step queries. For rigorous academic reviews, Elicit wins; for fast everyday research across the open web at a lower price, Perplexity wins. Many researchers use both: Perplexity to scope a question, Elicit to review the literature formally.