Elicit is an AI research assistant that searches more than 138 million papers, summarizes them, extracts data into tables and runs systematic literature reviews. The free Basic plan includes unlimited search, summaries and chat with papers, with limited Research Agent and report usage. Prices depend on whether you pick academic or industry pricing. Academics pay $11 a month billed yearly for Plus, $39 for Pro and $89 for Scale, or $19, $69 and $149 monthly. Industry users pay $49 a month billed yearly for Pro and $169 for Scale, or $75 and $279 monthly, and get less usage at each level. Pro's systematic review workflow screens up to 5,000 papers.
Reviewed by EdGrows·Updated Oct 4, 2026This analysis is based on documentation, public user reports, and vendor materials — not yet on our own hands-on testing. How we rate
Elicit does the slow, mechanical half of a literature review. It finds papers, reads abstracts and pulls the same numbers out of fifty PDFs into one table. It doesn't decide what the evidence means. That split explains both why researchers like it and where it stops.
The pricing page hides one detail that matters a lot: a filter that switches between industry and academic prices. Academics pay much less and get more usage, and they get a cheap Plus plan that companies can't buy.
Industry prices with yearly billing, October 3, 2026. The filter at the top switches to academic prices.
| Per user a month | Basic | Plus | Pro | Scale |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Academic, billed yearly | Free | $11 | $39 | $89 |
| Academic, billed monthly | Free | $19 | $69 | $149 |
| Industry, billed yearly | Free | Not offered | $49 | $169 |
| Industry, billed monthly | Free | Not offered | $75 | $279 |
| Agent, report and review usage | Limited | Standard, academic only | Standard for industry, 5x for academics | 5x for industry, 9x for academics |
Yearly billing saves between 35% and 43%, depending on the plan. Enterprise, for companies and schools, is priced on request.
The usage row is the part to read twice. An academic on Pro gets five times the Research Agent, report and systematic review usage of a company employee on the same plan, and pays $10 less a month on yearly billing. Industry pricing buys less capacity for more money.
Basic is useful on its own. It searches more than 138 million papers without limits, summarizes as many as you like and lets you chat with papers that have full text available, with sources shown for every answer. You can import a library from Zotero. The limits fall on the heavier tools: the Research Agent and research reports get a small allowance, and systematic reviews need a paid plan.
For a student checking what's been published on a topic, that's often enough. Plus, at $11 a month on academic yearly billing, adds exports to RIS, CSV, BIB, PDF and DOCX, search across more than 500,000 clinical trials, five extraction columns at a time and standard usage of the agent tools.
Pro is where Elicit becomes a review tool. Its dedicated systematic review workflow screens up to 5,000 papers against your criteria. Tables take 20 extraction columns at a time, and reports can pull from up to 135 data sources. Pro also includes Routines, custom extractions from papers you upload, explanations for AI-generated answers, several output templates and API access.
Scale is built for teams. It extracts and interprets data from figures, allows live editing with colleagues, raises columns to 30 and data sources to 200, and adds an admin panel for seats and usage.
Enterprise screens up to 40,000 papers with 40 columns, which Elicit describes as PRISMA-grade screening and extraction. It adds SSO with SAML, two-factor authentication, single-tenant deployment, custom data sources, unlimited API access and a customer success team. It's also the only plan that states your data isn't used for training by default.
Extraction is where AI saves the most time and where errors hide best. Spot-check a sample of rows against the papers before you trust a table, especially for numbers such as sample sizes and effect sizes. Write explicit inclusion criteria before screening, so the tool applies your rules and not its own guesses. Keep in mind that search covers academic papers and clinical trials, so grey literature, preprints outside its index and industry reports need another route.
Not every question calls for an extraction table. Consensus gives fast, cited answers to yes-or-no research questions. For papers you already have, Gemini Notebook is free, and Perplexity covers the open web, with Education Pro at $10 a month. Some jobs need a specialist instead. Scite shows whether later work supports or disputes a claim, Undermind digs for hard-to-find papers and ResearchRabbit maps citation networks. Our AI research tools guide walks through all of them.
Elicit's advantage is structure. When a review has to be reproducible, a table of extracted data with a source behind every cell beats a fluent summary.
The Basic plan is free for anyone, with unlimited search across more than 138 million papers, unlimited summaries and chat with papers, and limited use of the Research Agent and reports. There's no separate student plan, but academic pricing makes the paid plans much cheaper: Plus costs $11 a month billed yearly and adds exports to reference managers.
Academic plans cost less and include more usage. Pro costs $39 a month billed yearly for academics against $49 for companies, and academic Pro gets five times the Research Agent, report and review usage that industry Pro gets. Academics also have a $11 Plus plan that industry pricing doesn't offer.
Pro's systematic review workflow screens up to 5,000 papers and adds 20 extraction columns at a time; Scale raises that to 30 columns. Enterprise screens up to 40,000 papers with 40 columns, and Elicit describes its screening and extraction there as PRISMA-grade.
Enterprise states that your data isn't used for training by default. The other plans don't mention training on the pricing page, so read Elicit's privacy policy before uploading confidential papers on an individual plan.
For systematic work, usually yes. Elicit searches a database of papers, ties each answer to its sources and extracts data into tables you can check row by row. A general assistant's deep research covers the wider web and writes more freely, which suits broad questions better than reproducible reviews.
Cited AI search plus the new Computer agent: free plan, Pro at $20 or $200 a year, Max at $200, Computer credits, and the free Comet browser.
An academic search engine that answers from peer-reviewed papers. Basic search is free, Pro starts at $12 a month billed yearly, and students get up to 40% off.
A free chat app and one of the cheapest frontier-class APIs: V4.1-Flash with vision and open weights, from $0.15 per million input tokens off-peak.