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The Stack / Research
Elicit
01 IntelligenceYes for anyone whose claims must trace to published research — Elicit turns weeks of literature screening into hours, and its unlimited free tier for search and summaries is the most generous in research AI. The paid tiers earn their price when you need bulk extraction into evidence tables.
The job in the stack
The literature-review seat: searching, screening, and extracting data from academic papers into structured tables.
Pricing
| Plan | Price | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Basic (Free) | $0 | Unlimited searches, summaries, and chats |
| Pro | $49/mo | Per user, billed as $588/yr (the page labels it 35% off; the month-to-month rate isn't printed on the public page). Systematic Review Workflow (5,000-paper screening), 20 columns at a time, reports from up to 135 sources, Routines, API access |
| Scale | $169/mo | Per user, billed as $2,028/yr (39% off). 5x usage, figure extraction, live team collaboration, 30 columns, reports from up to 200 sources, admin panel |
| Enterprise | custom | Screens up to 40,000 papers, 40-column extraction, SSO/SAML/2FA, no training on customer data, unlimited API |
Pricing verified 2026-10-11. Plans change — the source of truth is Elicit's own pricing page.
Models & versions
- Elicit workflows Semantic search over 138M+ papers; Research Agent, Research Reports, Systematic Review Workflow (screens 5,000 papers on Pro), column-based data extraction
The honest read
What works
- + Extraction into structured tables is the killer feature — evidence you can sort
- + Unlimited free search/summarize tier for everyday research questions
- + Built for systematic-review methodology, not just chat-over-papers
What breaks
- − Paid tiers are priced for researchers with budgets, not curiosity
- − Extraction accuracy still needs spot-checking against the source PDFs
- − Coverage skews academic — grey literature and industry reports live elsewhere
Use it for
- →Evidence-backed content and consulting claims
- →Academic and clinical literature reviews
- →Anyone screening dozens of papers for a decision
Skip it if
- ×Your research is web-current, not peer-reviewed — that's Perplexity's job
- ×You read papers occasionally — the free tier is honestly all you need
Questions operators ask
?Elicit or Consensus?
Consensus answers a question from the literature ('does X work?') with a consensus meter. Elicit processes the literature itself — screening and extracting across many papers. Quick evidence checks → Consensus; real reviews → Elicit.
What changed
- Re-verified on elicit.com/pricing (rendered): Basic free / Pro $49 / Scale $169 / Enterprise custom, 138M+ papers, unchanged. Correction: $49 and $169 are the annual-billed per-month rates ($588 and $2,028 per user per year), not month-to-month prices as we had labeled them. Updated billing and notes; the monthly rate isn't shown on the public page, so none is recorded.
- Re-verified on elicit.com/pricing: Basic free / Pro $49 (35% off annual) / Scale $169 (39% off annual) / Enterprise custom unchanged; 138M+ paper corpus, 20/30/40-column extraction and 5,000/40,000-paper screening limits all match. No changes to make.
- Re-verified on elicit.com/pricing: Basic free / Pro $49 / Scale $169 / Enterprise custom unchanged, feature lists match. A round of third-party aggregators claimed a $12/mo 'Plus' tier exists — not present on the official pricing page, treated as noise.
- Re-verified: pricing unchanged — free Basic tier (unlimited search/summaries/chat), Pro $49/mo (~35% annual discount), Scale $169/mo (~39% annual discount). Corpus grew to 138M+ papers (we carried 125M+). Current feature set noted: Research Agent, Research Reports, Systematic Review Workflow screening 5,000 papers on Pro, research Alerts, API access, Zotero import; Enterprise tier added to the table.
- Released from staging to the live stack. Re-verified: pricing unchanged (free Basic tier, Pro $49/mo, Scale $169/mo).
- Added to the stack (literature-review seat). Verified: unlimited free tier for search/summaries; Pro $49, Scale $169, ~35% annual discount.
Give Elicit a job
The literature-review seat: searching, screening, and extracting data from academic papers into structured tables.
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