Consensus vs Scite.ai

C

Consensus

AI search engine that answers questions from scholarly papers, with a citation on each sentence. Free plan; Pro is $144 a year (about $12 a month) or $20 monthly.

Who it is for

Researchers at any level, from people starting a first project to experienced publishers, according to the Consensus docs. Team and Enterprise plans cover organizations and universities.

Strengths

• Consensus says paper search is unlimited on every plan, including Free
• Consensus says retracted papers are flagged and not used in answers
• Deep review is an agent that plans sub-questions and runs up to 20 searches, typically analyzing up to 50 papers and up to 100 when a larger set helps
• It can also be reached from ChatGPT, Claude and Copilot, and through an API

Limitations

• The Free plan lists 10 Pro messages, 3 Deep reviews, 10 Study Snapshots and 30 API or MCP calls a month
• Pro allows 15 Deep reviews a month, and Pro Analysis summarizes up to 20 papers per search
• Each Deep review uses one Deep credit, and each Skill such as Literature Review or Verify Citations also uses one
• The plan with 200 Deep reviews a month is the separate Deep tier at a higher price
• Consensus's own pages disagree on some figures, such as coverage (400 million versus 220 million papers) and the Free message count (10 versus 15), so we leave coverage out

S

Scite.ai

AI research platform with an Assistant, full-text citation search and Smart Citations. Basic is $12 a month billed annually ($20 monthly); no free plan, 7-day trial.

Strengths

• Scite says it reads across 323M+ full-text scholarly articles and has indexed 1.6B+ citations; its Assistant page gives a different figure (250M+ in page metadata), so treat the totals as Reported.
• Scite says Smart Citations show how later research has supported, challenged or discussed a paper, with classification as supporting or contrasting evidence.
• Scite lists unlimited Assistant queries, full-text literature search, Smart Citation reports and citation alerts on Basic, plus collections of up to 1,000 papers.
• Scite lists a browser extension that shows citation badges, a Zotero plugin, library Holdings access for full text, an MCP server and an API.
• Pro adds patents, clinical trials and grants, collections of up to 10,000 papers, 2,500 MCP credits a month (Basic has 250) and self-service API access.
• Enterprise lists unlimited users with pooled usage, access by SSO, IP, domain or email, collections of up to 50,000 papers and regulatory and safety datasets such as FAERS, MAUDE and 510(k).

Limitations

• MCP credits are capped (250 a month on Basic, 2,500 on Pro); the pages do not explain how credits are used per call or whether they roll over, and REST API limits are enforced separately.
• Scite's API docs say a Pro self-service key is for evaluation (Search snippets are redacted), commercial or research use of Search needs a separate license, and the terms say API and connector access is licensed to you personally.
• The terms say fees are non-refundable and subscriptions renew monthly, with cancellation needed at least 30 days before the month you want to avoid; the pricing page says you can cancel from the Subscription section and avoid trial charges by canceling before the trial ends. The pages differ, so confirm before buying.
• The terms prohibit scraping and bulk or systematic retrieval, bar using retrieved content to train AI models, and provide the service as is, leaving it to users to verify sources. Scite says it does not use Customer Data to train AI systems.