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
✓ 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
✓ verifiedFreemium
Well-adopted AI research assistant for finding papers, summarizing, and extracting data at scale.
2.1M visits/mo
✕
Thesify
✓ verifiedPaid
AI reviewer that critiques academic manuscripts and Coauthor agents that search, cite, and draft alongside researchers.
161K visits/mo32K saves
✕
Connected Papers
✓ verifiedFreemium
Widely used visual tool for exploring related academic papers.
873K visits/mo
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
Free: USD 0
Academic: USD 3 /month*
Business: USD 10 /month*
Academic Group: 3 USD / seat / month*
Business Group: 10 USD / seat / month*
Academic Library: Request a Quote
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 manuscript review flagging gaps in argument and evidence
- ✦Citation search across 200+ million academic sources
- ✦Coauthor agents that search, read, and draft alongside users
- ✦Journal recommender and chat support
- ✦Confidentiality guarantee that documents aren't used for AI training
- ✦Visual graph generation of related academic papers
- ✦Discovery of prior and derivative works
- ✦Identification of important and relevant papers
- ✦Exploration of research field dynamics
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
- →Graduate students refining a thesis or dissertation
- →Researchers preparing a manuscript for journal submission
- →Students polishing essays and reports for coursework
- →Getting fast feedback without waiting on a supervisor
- →Getting a visual overview of a new academic field
- →Ensuring no key papers are missed in a field with a large volume of new publications
- →Creating a bibliography for a thesis
- →Discovering relevant prior and derivative works
Visit