Compare tools
Side-by-side features, use cases and pricing — because the right pick depends on your job and budget, not just the ranking.
⇄ Comparison dimension — pick the market you're actually shopping in
✕
Elicit
✓ verifiedFreemium
Well-adopted AI research assistant for finding papers, summarizing, and extracting data at scale.
2.1M visits/mo
✕
Scholar AI
✓ verifiedFreemium
AI research search tool for peer-reviewed papers with citation management, now integrated into Jenni AI's writing workspace.
156K visits/mo
✕
Open Knowledge Maps
✓ verifiedFree
Free nonprofit tool that visualizes scientific literature as topic maps, clustering papers to speed research discovery.
113K visits/mo1.1K saves
✕
Semantic Scholar
✓ verifiedFree
Free AI-powered academic search engine indexing 236M+ papers, for researchers wanting semantic literature discovery and an augmented reader.
7.9M visits/mo13K saves
Pricing
Basic: Free
Plus: $10 per month, billed annually
Pro: $42 per month, billed annually
Team: $65 per user, per month billed annually
Enterprise: Custom
Basic: $9.99/month (50 credits/month, 9TB uploads)
Premium: $18.99/month (unlimited GPT & Copilot use)
Credits: $4.99 (25 credits)
Credits: $9.99 (50 credits)
No public pricing
No public pricing
Core features
- ✦AI-enabled systematic reviews
- ✦Research reports
- ✦Upload your own PDFs
- ✦Quick summaries
- ✦Source quotes
- ✦Question answering
- ✦Search across millions of peer-reviewed papers
- ✦Agentic AI chat that consults research and uploaded PDFs
- ✦Auto-citation in over 2,600 citation styles
- ✦One-click Zotero/Mendeley library import with metadata and PDFs
- ✦ScholarAI GPT available in the ChatGPT GPT Store
- ✦Developer API for integrating research search
- ✦AI-generated visual maps of research topics
- ✦Clusters papers into themes
- ✦Open-access resource discovery
- ✦Open-source and nonprofit
- ✦Custom integrations/embedding for organizations
- ✦AI-powered semantic search across 236M+ papers
- ✦Semantic Reader for augmented, contextual paper reading
- ✦Free public API for paper search and metadata
- ✦Author and topic discovery
- ✦Citation graph exploration
- ✦Beta program for new features
Use cases
- →Speeding up literature reviews
- →Automating systematic reviews and meta-analyses
- →Learning about new domains
- →Data extraction in rigorous systematic literature reviews
- →Finding and citing academic sources for a paper
- →Chatting with AI about uploaded research PDFs
- →Importing an existing reference library for a new project
- →Building custom apps on top of academic search via API
- →Get an overview of a research field
- →Find relevant papers faster
- →Identify key concepts in the literature
- →Embed discovery tools in library systems
- →Researchers searching scientific literature across disciplines
- →Developers building applications on top of scholarly data via the API
- →Students exploring citation networks for a topic
- →Librarians and academics needing free literature discovery tools
Visit