Elicit
AI ResearchFreemium
AI research assistant that searches 138M+ academic papers and automates literature reviews with sentence-level citations.
0 upvotesintermediate
Compare Elicit vs Lateral
Both tools in AI Research
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
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Pricing
Pricing Comparison
Elicit
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
Lateral
Free$0
Basic access, limited documents
Pro$Custom
Unlimited documents, collaboration, advanced features (no longer available - product sunset June 2025)
Features
Feature Comparison
Elicit
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
Lateral
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
Elicit
✅ 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.
Lateral
✅ 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
Elicit
web-basedapi
Lateral
web-based
Use & Audience
Tasks & Who It's For
Use Cases
Real-world Use Cases
Elicit
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.Lateral
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.Keep Exploring