Compare Elicit vs Lateral

Both tools in AI Research

Elicit

AI ResearchFreemium

AI research assistant that searches 138M+ academic papers and automates literature reviews with sentence-level citations.

0 upvotesintermediate

Lateral

AI ResearchFreemium

AI research workspace for literature reviews that organized PDFs, auto-generated findings tables, and ran semantic search across documents. Sunset June 2025.

0 upvotesintermediate
Pricing

Pricing Comparison

ElicitElicit
Basic$0

Unlimited search, unlimited paper summaries, 20 data extractions/month

Plus$12/mo

600 extractions/year, CSV export, high-accuracy mode

Pro$49/mo

2,400 extractions/year, systematic reviews, 20 custom columns

Team$79/seat/mo

Collaborative reviews, pooled quotas, admin panel

LateralLateral
Free$0

Basic access, limited documents

Pro$Custom

Unlimited documents, collaboration, advanced features (no longer available - product sunset June 2025)

Features

Feature Comparison

ElicitElicit
138M+ Paper DatabaseSentence-Level CitationsAutomated Data ExtractionCustom Column BuilderSystematic Review WorkflowsPRISMA 2020 SupportResearch AlertsCSV and RIS ExportChat with PapersAI Research BriefsTopic FinderAbstract Screening AutomationFull-Text ScreeningAuthor SearchZotero IntegrationResearch Question BrainstormingCollaborative Sharing
LateralLateral
Super Search Across All DocumentsAI-Powered Concept RecommendationsAuto-Generated Findings TableSmart PDF Reader30M+ Open Access Paper DatabaseOCR for Scanned DocumentsHighlight and Annotation ToolsCross-Document Note CaptureFlag and Categorize FindingsExport to Word and ExcelCollaborate and Share WorkspacesPublic Project SharingLiterature Review WorkflowKeyword and Semantic SearchMulti-Tab Document SwitchingSingle Unified WorkflowBrowser-Based No Install
Fit

Best For & Not For

ElicitElicit
✅ Best For
PhD students and academic researchers conducting systematic literature reviews who need auditable, reproducible workflows that satisfy journal and institutional standards.
Clinical researchers and biotech teams running evidence synthesis at scale, needing to screen thousands of abstracts in hours rather than weeks.
Policy analysts and consultants who must back recommendations with peer-reviewed evidence and need structured data extracted across dozens of studies.
❌ Not For
Users who need a writing assistant or manuscript editor alongside their research tool, as Elicit focuses entirely on literature discovery and extraction.
Researchers working primarily with grey literature, news sources, or non-academic content, since Elicit indexes only peer-reviewed academic papers.
LateralLateral
✅ Best For
Academic researchers and PhD students who needed a fast, visual way to organize and cross-reference large collections of PDFs for systematic literature reviews without switching between multiple tools.
Market research analysts and consultants who worked through large document sets and needed semantic search and auto-organized findings tables to synthesize evidence quickly for client reports.
❌ Not For
New users looking for an active, supported tool, since Lateral was sunset in June 2025 and is no longer available for new sign-ups or existing access.
Researchers requiring PRISMA-compliant systematic review workflows, citation manager integration, or AI-generated writing assistance beyond document organization.
Availability

Platform & Accessibility

ElicitElicit
web-basedapi
LateralLateral
web-based
Use & Audience

Tasks & Who It's For

Use Cases

Real-world Use Cases

ElicitElicit
1
A PhD candidate in public health uses Elicit to screen 800 abstracts for her systematic review on urban heat islands, finishing in one afternoon instead of three weeks, with every inclusion decision logged for her thesis committee.
2
A clinical research team at a biotech firm uses Elicit's extraction tables to pull efficacy data and sample sizes from 200 RCTs on a novel drug compound, building a structured evidence map in under a day.
3
A policy researcher uses Elicit Alerts to automatically receive new papers on plastic pollution legislation every week, staying current without spending hours on manual database searches.
LateralLateral
1
A public health researcher uploaded 60 papers on vaccine hesitancy to Lateral and used Super Search to find every instance of the phrase social trust across all documents in seconds, building a thematic analysis table in one afternoon that would have taken a week manually.
2
A market research consultant used Lateral's auto-generated findings table to organize 25 industry reports for a client presentation, keeping all key statistics attributed to their source papers without manually copying and pasting each one.
3
A master's student used Lateral's Smart PDF Reader to spot connections between papers she was reading, discovering that two papers shared a common methodological limitation that became a key argument in her dissertation literature review critique.
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