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Side-by-side features, use cases and pricing — because the right pick depends on your job and budget, not just the ranking.
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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
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Elicit
✓ verifiedFreemium
Well-adopted AI research assistant for finding papers, summarizing, and extracting data at scale.
2.1M visits/mo
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PaperLens
✓ verifiedFreemium
AI research assistant that answers questions grounded in peer-reviewed papers and organizes findings into summaries.
412 visits/mo
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Inquisite
✓ verifiedFree
AI-powered semantic search over 100M+ research papers that extracts structured attributes and maps relationships across results.
11K 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
Starter: $8/mo billed yearly ($15/mo billed monthly, 500 searches/mo)
Pro: $20/mo billed yearly ($50/mo billed monthly, unlimited searches)
Free trial available
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 answers grounded in peer-reviewed literature
- ✦Conversational follow-up questions and paper deep-dives
- ✦Structured summary generation (findings, methods, limitations)
- ✦Personal research library for saved papers
- ✦Filtering by date, quality, and source credibility
- ✦Semantic search across academic databases
- ✦Semantic search across 100M+ research papers
- ✦Structured attribute extraction (methods, findings, limitations)
- ✦Table, list, synthesis and graph visualizations
- ✦PDF upload and import from URL
- ✦Project organization and adjustable search scope
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 evidence-backed answers to a research question in seconds
- →Summarize a scientific paper's methods and findings quickly
- →Build a personal library of saved research papers
- →Filter search results to the most credible recent studies
- →Running literature reviews across many papers
- →Extracting comparable data points from studies
- →Mapping relationships between research papers
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