Elicit
Reviews hundreds of research papers at once and extracts findings into a comparison table you can filter, sort and export.
What it costs
| Tier | Price | For | Includes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Basic | $0 | Trying it on a real literature-review question before paying for anything. | Unlimited search across 138M+ papers, unlimited summaries, chat with full-text papers, Zotero import; limited Research Agent and Report usage. |
| Pro | $49/user/month, billed monthly ($588/year if paid annually, saves 35%) | A researcher running literature reviews regularly, on their own. | Standard usage of the Research Agent, Reports and Systematic Literature Reviews; a workflow that can screen 5,000 papers; 20 table columns; API access. |
| Scale | $169/user/month, billed monthly ($2,028/year if paid annually, saves 39%) | A small team producing reviews collaboratively and often. | 5x the usage of Pro; extraction from figures in papers; real-time collaborative editing; 200 data sources; 30 table columns. |
| Enterprise | Custom pricing | An organisation running reviews at PRISMA-grade rigour with security requirements. | Custom usage; screening up to 40,000 papers; SSO/SAML/2FA; dedicated success team; unlimited API access. |
Read from Elicit's own pricing page on 25 Sep 2026. Vendors change prices without notice.
Where it breaks
The Research Agent and Systematic Literature Review workflow — the part that actually screens thousands of papers unattended — is capped even on Free and Pro; the screening ceiling only lifts meaningfully on Scale and Enterprise.
Browser-based. The free tier is genuinely usable for a one-off question; paid tiers are for repeated, higher-volume review work.
First entry in this reference. There is no previous check to compare it against.
Elicit does the part of a literature review that eats the most calendar time: reading a stack of papers to find the handful that actually answer your question, then pulling the relevant numbers out of each one into a table you can compare side by side.
You ask a question, it searches across more than 138 million papers, and its Research Agent goes and reads the candidates unattended — you come back to a report and a table, not a running commentary. That is the meaningful difference from a chat tool that summarises one PDF at a time: Elicit is built to work across hundreds of them and hand you a synthesis, not a transcript.
What you’re actually paying for
The free tier is not a trial gate — unlimited search and summarisation work indefinitely. What the paid tiers buy is scale of unattended work: how many papers the Research Agent will screen in one run, how many columns your comparison table can hold, and whether you can extract data from figures and charts, not just text. Scale adds real-time collaboration, which matters once more than one person is building the same review.
Where this fits next to a general chat tool
NotebookLM and ChatPDF are built for reading documents you already have. Elicit is built to go find the documents first, at a scale neither of those is designed for — this is the tool for “what does the literature say,” not “summarise this PDF I uploaded.”
Get Elicit
Buying the tool is not the hard part.
The ebook is about what to hand over, in what order, and how you find out when it goes wrong. One payment, no subscription.