toolspool

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

Semantic Scholar logo
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
Elicit logo
Elicit
✓ verifiedFreemium

Well-adopted AI research assistant for finding papers, summarizing, and extracting data at scale.

2.1M visits/mo
Open Knowledge Maps logo
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
Pricing

No public 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

No public pricing

Core features
  • 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
  • AI-enabled systematic reviews
  • Research reports
  • Upload your own PDFs
  • Quick summaries
  • Source quotes
  • Question answering
  • AI-generated visual maps of research topics
  • Clusters papers into themes
  • Open-access resource discovery
  • Open-source and nonprofit
  • Custom integrations/embedding for organizations
Use cases
  • 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
  • Speeding up literature reviews
  • Automating systematic reviews and meta-analyses
  • Learning about new domains
  • Data extraction in rigorous systematic literature reviews
  • Get an overview of a research field
  • Find relevant papers faster
  • Identify key concepts in the literature
  • Embed discovery tools in library systems
Visit
More in Research Assistants